SAN DIEGO — Major League Baseball’s penalties for a failed drug test aren’t stern enough to adequately deter players’ use of banned performance-enhancing drugs, said a former World Series champion known by many San Diegans.

Eric Hosmer, who retired last year and was with the Padres from 2018 through late 2022, said MLB ought to jack up the financial hit for a flunked PED test.

Hosmer suggested a sharp-toothed alternative: void all guaranteed money due a suspended player.

“The only way that this game gets cleaned up and these guys don’t risk 80-game suspensions for another couple years on the back end is to take away guaranteed money,” Hosmer said on his “Diggin’ Deep” podcast. He added: “You have to take it away.”

Hosmer’s idea seems unlikely to be adopted when MLB and the players’ union negotiate a replacement to the current labor pact, which expires Dec. 1, 2026.

Ideas like Hosmer’s get much more traction among former players than active players, said a person familiar with the union’s thinking on PED policy.

But even if MLB power brokers disagree with Hosmer’s proposal, they should take note when someone of Hosmer’s experience speaks out. A first baseman who spent most of 13 seasons in the majors and won a World Series with the 2015 Kansas City Royals, Hosmer failed no PED tests in his career. He made in excess of $174 million.

Hosmer isn’t impressed by the MLB policy of docking salary only across the player’s PED-test suspension.

“If you tell me that I have $110 million on the line for these next three years and I could possibly lose that, I’m not even thinking (about risking a suspension),” he said. “So for me, I think that’s the only way to clean up the game in this way.”

Hosmer’s comments came within a discussion last week about the 80-game PED-test suspension of his friend and former Padres teammate Jurickson Profar. MLB levied the punishment on Profar March 31, just after Profar’s Braves left Petco Park.

Hosmer said Profar’s setback broke his heart, owing to Profar’s support of him during Hosmer’s tough times late in his Padres tenure.

“I have so much love for Jurickson Profar,” he said. “As a friend, I would never turn my back on him.”

“Now,” he said, “it’s not saying what he did was excusable. I think he knows he made a mistake.”

Hosmer said he was with Profar in recent years, when Profar made swing changes that contributed to his career-best 2024 season with the Padres and the three-year, $42 million contract he got from the Braves in January.

“This is not saying what he did was OK,” Hosmer said, “(but) when you are an older player and you want something so bad and you feel that you are on to something, making swing changes. … Jurickson got to a point where he had a couple of injuries and he just felt like if he was healthy, he knows that he can take this into a full season and produce. That happened.

“He ended up getting popped. Now, I think he knows he made a mistake. I think he knows how much the mistake looks like now to the baseball world. And he has regret.”

Profar, 32, said he didn’t knowingly take a banned substance, nor was he trying to cheat.

Former MLB pitcher Peter Moylan noted that even after the suspension, Profar is guaranteed most of the money — about $37 million — the Braves pledged him. Similarly, Padres star Fernando Tatis Jr.’s salaries beyond his 80-game suspension in 2022-23 remained guaranteed. Tatis Jr. said his positive test owed to a chemical he didn’t knowingly take.

“The problem is,” Moylan said, “you can still get away with it and still get paid.”

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