Padres' retroactive Jurickson Profar take adds bizarre layer to second PED suspension

Jurickson Profar’s second PED suspension isn’t just another “yikes” moment for the Braves. For Padres fans, it lands with a weird, retroactive thud — the kind that makes you replay a season you thought you understood. Not because San Diego is suddenly rewriting history out of spite, but because this is what happens when a second positive test shows up and drags old memories into the courtroom of public opinion.

Mark Bowman’s note hit a nerve: when Profar first got suspended, some folks around San Diego admitted they’d been suspicious during his 2024 breakout — the one that basically resurrected his career right after Colorado cut him loose late in 2023. Now, those whispers don’t feel like random message-board paranoia anymore. They feel plausible enough to make everyone uncomfortable.

Padres’ Profar roller coaster turns darker with one strange retrospective twist

2024 wasn’t a mild bounce-back for Profar. He was a full-on table-setting menace for the Padres — 158 games, a .280 average, a .380 OBP, 24 homers, 85 RBI, 94 runs, 76 walks. It was the exact kind of late-career surge that makes a front office look smart and a fanbase fall back in love with a player’s story. The All-Star nod made it feel official. 

Now, Profar has tested positive again — this time for exogenous testosterone and its metabolites — and he’s been hit with a 162-game suspension as a second offense. That’s the league grabbing the hammer and swinging without flinching. And it inevitably reframes the first suspension (80 games in 2025) as less of an isolated mistake and more like a pattern. 

None of this is proof that 2024 was dirty. Testing timelines and violations don’t work like fan theories. But Padres fans aren’t wrong to feel like the texture of that season just changed. When a guy’s career arc goes “released…career year…PED suspension…PED suspension again,” it doesn’t just stain the present — it casts a shadow backward.

The cruel part is that San Diego already did the clean breakup. The Padres didn’t extend the fairy tale; they moved on, and now they get to watch the aftermath from a distance like, “Welp. That explains the smoke.” It’s validating in the most joyless way, because the cost isn’t just money or roster construction. It’s that a genuinely fun 2024 chapter now comes with an asterisk-shaped question mark that won’t stop following it around.