Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Say it ain't so, Sosa (subtitle: Not Sosa-prised)

Yet another one bites the dust.

Sammy Sosa, who joined with Mark McGwire in 1998 in a celebrated pursuit of baseball’s single-season home run record, is among the players who tested positive for a performance-enhancing drug in 2003, according to lawyers with knowledge of the drug-testing results from that year.

The disclosure that Sosa tested positive makes him the latest baseball star of the last two decades to be linked to performance enhancers, a group that now includes McGwire, Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez and Rafael Palmeiro.

Sosa, who is sixth on Major League Baseball’s career home run list and last played in 2007, had long been suspected of using performance-enhancing drugs, but until now had never been publicly linked to a positive test.
What more can we say? Surprised? Of course not.

And now we're going to have to continue to bleed out the balance of the 104, 103 102 names not currently known. Which is equal parts dumb, sad and painful. I'm still torn on this. Should the 102 left in anonymity be kept there until someone outs them, or should MLB and the MLBPA agree to release the list and just get it over with? There's a poll to the upper left; please vote.


Sing it with me: One hundred and four dirty ballplayers on the wall, one hundred and four dirty players. Take one down, write a book about it...one hundred and three dirty ballplayers on the wall...


(shrugs)

4 comments:

Andrew Fletcher said...

You should start a "Vote Sosa for HOF" site.

Fred Trigger said...

Honestly, this is how I kinda feel about it.

Yes, steroids are illegal, but so is any kind of recreational drug. How would you feel if the company you work for said they were holding a confidential drug test to see how many employees were using, then years later as you work for another company, its leaked that you were a cocaine user. Your current company then fires you and you are looked upon with scorn even though your coke use was a onetime thing (might not be true with steroid users.)

I'm not good at articulating things (not even sure if I spelled that right) but, I would be pretty pissed off if i was on an anonymous list and it got released to the public just to make them satisfied. I wish they would just destroy the list, to be honest, because I dont care and I just want to enjoy watching the games.

Jason @ IIATMS said...

Fred, I am with you. I wish the list was destroyed. But it's out there. You can't put that toothpaste back in the tube.

It's out and not coming back. But we're going to have to live with the ramifications for years. YEARS from now.

Fred Trigger said...

(In overly dramatic fashion)

You can put it back in the tube if you try hard enough, JASON! If only we could try HARDER! (imagine me pumping both my fists as I say the capitilized parts. Not fast, just to excentuate the overdramitization, hell, might as well throw in a KHAAAAAAAANNNNNNNN!)

Yeah, I hear you. I'm just sick of it, though.