When a weekly newspaper in Miami reported last week that star players had received performance enhancers from a South Florida anti-aging clinic, baseball’s investigators were already on the ground trying to develop the same evidence that the newspaper had.

But instead of relying on the investigators to ask the editor of the paper to share the documents, as the investigators had previously with other news organizations, Selig sent two of his top deputies — Rob Manfred and Pat Courtney — to persuade the newspaper’s editor to share the documents.
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The paper’s editor, Chuck Strouse — who described Manfred in an online posting as “a charming bulldog with an upstate New York accent” — said the meeting was “very cordial,” and said each side left with a “lay of the land in the sense of what the other was thinking.”

“They were here to tell us why they thought the right thing to do in this situation was to give them the records,” Strouse said. “You could call it a sales pitch, but they made an honest presentation about why this was the right thing to do.”

The baseball officials tried to tap into the newspaper’s thirst for justice. “Their pitch was, this was the way to get justice,” Strouse said.

The predicament facing Strouse is one that newspaper editors have faced for years: whether to help an outside entity like the government or a company by providing it with documents they have obtained.