Red Sox: David Ortiz blames Yankees for leaked 2003 PED test
Retired Boston Red Sox legend David Ortiz continues to defend his reputation against PED allegations that he blames the New York Yankees for.
David Ortiz may be retired from baseball but the Boston Red Sox icon’s crusade to defend his legacy will never rest.
The shadow of the steroid era lingers over every power hitter who thrived during that tainted period, casting doubt on certain players even in the absence of any hard evidence to warrant those suspicions. Ortiz is no exception, while scrutiny only intensified when his name was among those leaked to the New York Times in 2009, identifying him as one of 104 players who tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs during a preliminary test in 2003.
Ortiz has remained steadfast in his insistence that he has never used PEDs and vowed to get to the bottom of this misinformed report. While Ortiz has yet to prove his innocence to a society that instinctively assumes every home run hitter from that era should be viewed with skepticism, he has come to a conclusion as to why his name was dragged into the mud.
It was those damn Yankees!
During an interview on the Dale & Holley show on WEEI, Ortiz accused the New York Yankees of leaking his name to the press.
“What was the reason for them to come out with something like that?” he asked. “The only thing that I can think of, to be honest with you, a lot of big guys from the Yankees were being caught. And no one from Boston. This was just something that leaked out of New York, and they had zero explanation about it.”
The Yankees have had more than their fair share of high profile names linked to steroids. Alex Rodriguez was also named in the Times report. While his inclusion indicated he allegedly failed a test in 2003 while playing for the Texas Rangers, A-Rod was with the Yankees at the time of the report and later served a suspension during his time in the Bronx. Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte, Gary Sheffield and Jason Giambi are among the other former Yankees with strong ties to the PED scandal.
Is it conceivable that the Evil Empire tossed one of the stars from their arch-rival under the bus out of jealousy? We can’t put it past them given the bad blood between the franchises, although there are some holes in this theory.
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For one thing, former MLB Players Associating Chief Operating Officer Gene Orza told the New York Daily News last week that teams were never given access to the list of players who tested positive in 2003, so the Yankees therefore couldn’t have been responsible for the leak. Sure, someone could have leaked the list to the Yankees, who then passed along some names to the New York Times, although if that were the case then why were Yankees players included in the report? Maybe there were multiple leaks? It’s possible, but any involvement from the Yankees makes the conspiracy theory far more complex and therefore less plausible.
The Times report also named Manny Ramirez, who had moved on to the Los Angeles Dodgers by that point but was a member of the Red Sox in 2003. By the time the report revealed these names in 2009, Ramirez had already served the first of two PED suspensions. Perhaps we can’t be 100 percent certain that Ramirez was guilty of the initial allegations during his time in Boston, yet he has lost the benefit of the doubt after multiple positive tests.
If the intent by the Yankees was to shift the narrative away from them by allowing public perception to believe their rivals were also guilty, wouldn’t including Manny be enough?
Blaming the Yankees may be a stretch, although assuming Ortiz is guilty to begin with is as well. We’ll probably never have any definitive proof confirming if Ortiz used PEDs, but here’s what we do know:
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- Ortiz never tested positive after Major League Baseball implemented drug testing, passing more than 80 tests since 2004. Skeptics will say that Ortiz simply found a way to fool the tests to avoid getting caught, but if it’s that easy then why are players still getting caught today? How did his friend Manny get caught twice?
- MLB commissioner Rob Manfred is on record stating that Ortiz’ denial may be valid because there were at least 10 questionable positives included in the results that wouldn’t hold up under today’s strict policy. The list of 104 players almost certainly included some false positives and it’s impossible to determine if Ortiz was among them.
- We have no idea what substance Ortiz allegedly took. He claims he’s never been told what caused the positive test and he was never made aware of the results until his name was leaked years later. How can you judge how much of Ortiz’ performance was fueled by PEDs – or if it had any effect on his body at all – if you don’t know what he allegedly took?
- The 2003 testing was supposed to remain anonymous, with no repercussions for players who tested positive. The intent was for MLB to determine if drug testing was necessary, which it clearly was given the results of this survey. Even if Ortiz did test positive during this trial, can it really be considered cheating if there were no rules being enforced against it at the time? There’s no witch hunt to tarnish the image of decades worth of players who boosted their performance through the use of amphetamines. Getting caught using “greenies” will earn you a suspension these days, but nobody cares about the fact that there was rampant use of these performance enhancers up until about a dozen years ago when they were outlawed.
Here’s something else that we know – Ortiz may fit the profile of a hulking slugger, but he’s always been a big dude. This isn’t someone who suddenly packed on a ton of muscle over a short period and his head didn’t inflate to twice the size. We have physical evidence that Barry Bonds transformed his body significantly over the course of his career in unnatural ways. That’s not the case for Big Papi.
Scouts saw his raw power when he was a young prospect, so there’s no point we can trace back to when Ortiz suddenly started to show he could hit home runs. He was always strong, but earlier in his career he simply wasn’t a very good hitter. After he came to Boston, Ortiz fixed some holes in his swing and learned a better approach at the plate from the Red Sox coaching staff. These adjustments aren’t something that any PED is going to improve.
Ortiz will continue to defend his legacy as long as there are critics who want to assume every player from that era is guilty until proven innocent. The truth is that we may never know who used what and when.
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Tarnishing the name of one of the greatest hitters in Red Sox history based on nothing more than circumstantial evidence is absurd. Almost as absurd as blaming the Yankees for it.