He will miss the final 45 games of the regular season and serve the remainder of the suspension at the start of next season or during the postseason, depending on whether the Giants make the playoffs and how far they advance.

"We were extremely disappointed," the Giants said. "We fully support Major League Baseball's policy and its efforts to eliminate performance enhancing drugs from our game."

If the Giants wanted him to become active in the middle of a playoff series, they would have to play a man short from the start of the series until the suspension ends because rosters can't be altered midseries.

"It happened, and now we move on," right fielder Hunter Pence said. "I know the program and I know they test us, and if we test positive, we get a suspension. That's what happened. And now we play with what we've got."

It was not immediately known whether Cabrera's positive test occurred before the All-Star Game. The union initially filed a grievance, which would have caused the case to go before an arbitrator, but then dropped it, a person familiar with the process said. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because that detail was not announced.

Manager Bruce Bochy broke the news to his team in a meeting about 90 minutes before the start of a 6-4 loss to the Washington Nationals.

"Melky, he was hurt by it," Bochy said. "It's obvious he was disappointed."

Cabrera told CSN Bay Area on July 27 that he had been tested for performance-enhancing drugs the previous week, although it's unknown whether the test he referenced resulted in the positive test.

Drug-testing labs check urine for its ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone, which usually is 1 to 1 in adult males. If the lab notices any abnormality, it conducts an isotope ratio mass spectrometry (IRMS) test to determine whether the testosterone is exogenous, or came from outside the body.