FanHouse Jeremy Jeffress

Over the last few years the Milwaukee Brewers have begun to develop into a threat in the National League. They're now a team that is a legitimate contender to win their division and possibly even the NL pennant, and a lot of the credit should go to the organization's ability to develop young talent. They've produced players like Prince Fielder, Ryan Braun and Yovani Gallardo as part of a solid young core for the organization, and they have more players waiting for their shot in the minors.

One of those players is pitcher Jeremy Jeffress, who some consider to be the best pitching prospect in the team's farm system. The 2006 first-round pick (18th overall) has run into some trouble in his career, however, particularly with marijuana. Jeffress has already been suspended once for testing positive for "a drug of abuse," which he later admitted was weed, and it looks like he just can't give the ganja up.

He's tested positive for "a drug of abuse" yet again, and now he's going to miss the next 100 games.

You think that things can't get worse for the Brewers given the way they've looked on the field of late (especially after last night when another Chris Capuano debacle saddled them with a loss and a 2.5 game deficit in the division). Then, things go and get worse. Last night word came down that Jeremy Jeffress, the Brewers top pick in the 2006 draft and one of their top minor league prospects, has been suspended for 50 games for "using a drug of abuse."

At BBTF a poster named Harveys Wallbangers is wondering if this is similar to the Angel Salome situation, in which another of the Brewers prospects was suspended earlier in the year, supposedly because ADD medicine was on the banned substances list (I can find no confirmation that that was the reason Salome was suspended, though the league tends to be tight-lipped about these things). I hope, for Jeffress' sake, that that's the case, but the wording in the suspensions is different. As mentioned above Jeffress has been suspended for using a drug of abuse and from what I can tell, the official reason for Salome's suspension was using performance enhancing drugs.

Really, there's nothing to do in a situation like this but wish Jeffress the best of luck getting through this. With all the publicity that everyone gave the Draft back in June, people tend to forget that lots of the people being drafted are really just high school kids that aren't going off to the controlled independence of college, but rather to the life of a minor league baseball player. That's a big, big adjustment.