Former big league slugger Mo Vaughn has confirmed he used human growth hormone to recover from a nagging knee injury late in his career.
The 1995 American League MVP told The Athletic in a recent interview that he had HGH injected in his knee to extend his career.
“I was trying to do everything I could,” Vaughn told The Athletic. “I knew I had a bad, degenerative knee. I was shooting HGH in my knee. Whatever I could do to help the process.”
Vaughn was one of baseball’s most feared hitters during his prime while with the Boston Red Sox in the late 1990s, hitting 39 homers with 126 RBIs during his MVP season. He began having injury issues later in his career, including his left knee and a ruptured biceps tendon that cost him the entire 2001 season.
Vaughn was among the players named in 2007 in the Mitchell Report, which looked into the use of steroids and performance-enhancing drugs in baseball. The report offered evidence that Vaughn made three separate purchases of HGH in 2001. Major League Baseball didn’t ban HGH until 2005, nearly two years after Vaughn’s last game.
Vaughn played eight seasons with the Red Sox before two-year stints with both the Anaheim Angels and New York Mets.
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