The feat was so mind-boggling I didn’t know if I should be awe struck or sad. Then I thought of a constructive way of using the dates, posting them in over-sized numbers in every baseball clubhouse right next to the anti-gambling poster with the words of Major League Rule 21(d):

4/11/15

7/28/15

2/12/16

Those numbers could serve as a warning to all players who see them. They could also serve as the epitaph to Jenrry Mejia’s baseball career. They are the dates on which the Dominican pitcher was declared to have tested positive for steroids use. They are the dates that made Mejia the first player banished from baseball for life for use of banned substances.

“I don’t think it’s a record he wanted to have,” said an acquaintance.

How is that possible? How can a player test positive three times in 10 months? He has to be trying, doesn’t he? It can’t happen accidentally, can it? In Mejia’s abbreviated pitching career, he had innings in which he struck out all three batters he faced. But he was trying to do that. Was he trying to test positive?

“I can honestly say I have no idea how a banned substance ended up in my system,” Mejia said after his first positive test, which resulted in an 80-game suspension.

A 162-game (full season) suspension followed three and a half months later when the exact same steroids were found to have invaded his body – accidentally and mysteriously, of course. He had 99 games left on that suspension when he tested positive a third time. By then his body must have triggered bells and whistles.

Mejia, however, stayed in character. ““It’s not like they say,” he told the news media in the Dominican Republic, where he lives and has been playing winter ball. “I’m sure I did not use anything.”

I suspect that in the dozen years MLB has been testing for performance-enhancing drugs a player or two have encountered accidental positives. But three positive tests in 10 months? Mejia would be hard pressed to make the case that they were faulty.

In an effort to find out why Mejia would relentlessly jeopardize himself and his career, I tried to talk to people involved with the pitcher or his case. However, Peter Greenberg, Mejia’s agent, did not return a telephone call, and David Prouty, the union’s general counsel, declined to comment, citing the confidentiality nature of the joint drug agreement.

I was able, however, to gain some insight by talking to others. It seems that in spite of his problems, Mejia stayed with the same trainer, who supplied him with the substances that cost him his career.

“It’s clear he’s been associated with old-style steroids,” said a baseball official who knows Mejia. “The guy he’s been associated with has a horrible track record.”

Why does Mejia keep hiring him? “Exactly,” the baseball man said. “He was pitching this winter. Is that why he did it? What was he thinking? He’s been suspended twice while being suspended.”

That someone told Mejia he wouldn’t be tested is foolish. For Mejia to believe that is even more foolish. Under the drug agreement in the collective bargaining agreement, a player who tests positive faces additional tests.

Wherever Mejia was getting advice, he was getting bad advice, and he will pay for it, not the person giving the advice. My sense is Latin players often get bad advice.

Without doing a complete statistical study of players who have incurred suspensions for violating the drug agreement, it seems that Latin players make the list in disproportion to their major league population.

In the last three years plus the first two months of this year, of the 26 suspensions incurred by players on 40-man major league rosters, 17 have been levied against players from Latin countries.

Part of the reason, I suspect, is that PEDs are legal in some Latin countries. I have also wondered whether the union does a good enough job educating its Latin members. I am told the union has an intensive educational program. In fact, Prouty, the chief lawyer, just happened to be in the Dominican Republic when I contacted him for this column.

“I am writing you from the Dominican Republic,” he said in an e-mail, “where I am attending the Rookie Career Development Program, the complement to the same MLBPA – MLB program in the US, and I can assure you that continued education on the Joint Drug Program continues to be a big part of the training at both.”

Despite the efforts of the union and MLB, I am told some Latin players have a more brazen attitude about PEDs, feeling they can beat the system.

Although Mejia is the only player to achieve the death penalty of suspensions, other players, mostly minor leaguers, have incurred two suspensions.

Most recent has been Zack Dodson, a 25-year-old pitcher, who until recently had been in the Pittsburgh organization. Dodson was suspended Jan. 19 for 100 games. He was suspended in 2012 for 50 games. The left-hander signed earlier this winter as a free agent with Baltimore.

Another pitcher, Troy Patton, who has played in the Orioles’ organization, has been suspended twice for use of amphetamines, for 25 games in December 2013 and for 80 games 11 months later. Patton actually tested positive three times, but there was no penalty at the time for a first-time use of amphetamines.

Cody Stanley is a catcher in the St. Louis system. He was suspended for 50 games in 2012 for PED use but persevered and reached the majors last season, playing in 9 games and batting 10 times. Two days after his Sept. 10 game, he was suspended for 80 games for an elevated testosterone level.

In 2007, Neifi Perez had an experience similar to Mejia’s. The Detroit infielder had three positive tests, incurring a 25-game penalty for the second and an 80-game suspension for the third, days before the second suspension ended. His 12-year career ended at the end of that season.

Despite Mejia’s lifetime ban, his career isn’t necessarily over. The 26-year-old reliever, who had been the Mets’ closer before steroids sent him to oblivion, can apply for reinstatement after a year off and if reinstated can return to the field a year after that.

He can spend the next year rethinking his claim of innocence. Pete Rose tried that excuse for 15 years and it didn’t work for him.

FROM SUPER BOWL L TO WORLD SERIES 50

In writing last week about brothers who played on winning World Series teams, an acknowledgement that Peyton Manning was trying to match brother Eli’s two Super Bowl triumphs, I was using that similarity as my annual Super Bowl-related baseball column.

In doing so, I overlooked a better idea, a better similarity, and I am invoking my prerogative to call a do-over.

The idea was staring me in the face all week preceding the game, but it didn’t register because I do the best I can to ignore the National Football League’s arrogant and pompous way of promoting its championship game as special and the way the news media gullibly accepts the NFL’s hype.

The Super Bowl has become a big-time social event, no doubt about that. But it remains a game that decides the league’s championship. For years before it became known as the Super Bowl, the game was simply the NFL championship game in which two teams played for the league’s title.

It became known as the Super Bowl after the NFL merged with the American Football League. Commissioner Pete Rozelle, a former public relations man, and two aides, Jim Kensil and Don Weiss, former colleagues of mine at the Associated Press, brilliantly developed it into the social spectacle it has become.

The New York Times last Sunday ran what is called a reefer (a reference to an article) on page 1 of the paper and a cover story in the Sunday magazine:  “How Roger Goodell and the N.F.L. owners created the most powerful sports league in American history.”

Contrary to that inflated claim, Goodell didn’t create anything. He was the beneficiary of what his predecessors did. If anything, he has created problems for the league with questionable rulings on player behavior.

In my view, the NFL offered one notable development for this year’s game. Had the league remained consistent, this year’s game would have been Super Bowl L. But surely that designation would have confused fans, even those few who can count in Latin.

Instead of using the Latin designation of L, the NFL switched languages in mid-stream and used the more familiar 50. But worry not, Latin lovers. Latin has made a quick comeback. The game was hardly over when this headline appeared on the NFL website: “Way too early Super Bowl LI predictions.”  I can’t wait for LIX.

The NFL originally adopted Latin because its championship game was played in a different year from its season. League officials felt it would be confusing to talk about the 2015 season and the 2016 Super Bowl.

Baseball has never had to use Latin because the World Series is played in the same calendar year as the season. If, however, numbered designations had been necessary, which World Series was World Series 50? The Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Yankees played it in 1953.

It went six games, and the Yankees won it. A star-studded Series, its teams had a combined nine players, five for the Yankees, four for the Dodgers, who were subsequently elected to the Hall of Fame: Yogi Berra, Mickey Mantle, Phil Rizzuto, Whitey Ford and Johnny Mize for the Yankees; Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Duke Snider and Pee Wee Reese for the Dodgers.

Two other future Hall of Famers were part of that World Series. Casey Stengel was the Yankees’ manager, and Dick Williams was a Dodgers’ pinch-hitter who would later become elected to the Hall of Fame as a manager.

Will football fans be able to look back at Super Bowl 50 and say they saw 9, 10 or 11 future Hall of Famers play or coach in that game?

And will they be able to recall a performance the equivalent of Billy Martin’s. The Yankees’ second baseman registered a Series-high .500 batting average with 8 runs batted in and 12 hits, including a double, two triples and two home runs. In Latin, that would be a .D batting average, VIII r.b.i. and XII hits, including I double, II triples and II home runs.