The Mad Leaker Strikes Again: Manny And Big Papi Were Juicing in 2003
July 31, 2009 – 9:30 am by Lance Zimmerman
When will baseball get this right? Why not release the whole 104 player list created in 2003 for players who tested positive for steroids? The big names continue to trickle out of the list as Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz both have been linked to this steroid abuser list.
While Manny is just coming off a 50 game suspension for a positive steroid test from earlier this season, Big Papi Ortiz has always taken a hard stance against players caught with banned substances in their bodies. Ortiz was in his first season with the Red Sox in 2003, and was previously a platoon first baseman with average pop, but a low batting average. Ortiz from 2003-2005 hit 173 of his 303 career home runs. He was a major reason the Red Sox won the Pennant in 2004. You can draw your own conclusions as to if Big Papi cleaned up after making the list.
Baseball’s best bet is just to release the entire list at once, instead of people digging and outing players on what seems to be a bi-monthly basis. The steroid era will continue on forever at this rate.
Michael Schmidt of the New York Times, who also linked Sammy Sosa to the list a few months back, joined Fox Sports Radio to dish on the Ramirez and Ortiz failed drug tests.
On how confident he is in his source who divulged the positive Ramirez and Ortiz tests:
“I can’t say anything about the sources, but what I can say is that we publish things that we believe are true and that have authenticated and that we feel comfortable with, and we’ll continue to do that.”
Schmidt was asked if he targets certain players to find out if they’re on the list, or how else he goes about finding which players have failed previous steroid tests:
“What we did was we tried to talk to as many people that have seen the list as possible and to see what they knew about it. If I showed you a list of a hundred players and it had star and middling players and guys you’ve never heard of you would probably remember the stars. So people that have seen the list tend to remember the most high profile people on the list.”
On if there is an effort to publicize the entire 104 player list:
“Well, if I could put every name out there I would but it’s very, very difficult to get it (the list), and the Federal Government isn’t going to release them and the Players Association isn’t going to release them. The Commissioner’s Office doesn’t want them out there so it’s pretty tough.”
Schmidt was asked if he was worried about forever tainting players’ careers by releasing this information:
“I think that whenever you publish information like this there are a lot of things you have to consider. I think that we thoroughly considered all of it.”
On why he feels it’s important now to have these players named publicly:
“I think there’s a lot of curiosity. What happened was after A Rod (Alex Rodriguez) was caught people who knew everything that I knew kept on asking me ‘what’s going to happen with this list? When does it come out?’ I started to realize that there was an interest out there, that people really wanted to know what was on this list. There was a certain amount of intrigue about it. And that’s when I decided to go after the world.”
Listen to Michael Schmidt on Fox Sports Radio
Tags: Big Papi, David Ortiz, Major League Baseball, Manny Ramirez, Michael Schmidt, MLB, New York Times
