So, thanks to The New York Times, we now know that Sammy Sosa is among the 104 professional baseball players who tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs in 2003. Not that it came as much of a surprise to anyone who watched as the once lean and lithe athlete grew into a muscled home-run machine in the late 1990s. We will dispense with our familiar lamentations about how Major League Baseball for too long looked the other way as juiced superstars, such as Sosa and the equally disgraced Mark McGwire, went on power binges that thrilled fans and helped erase their disgust over the midyear cancellation of the 1994 season because of a labor dispute.
When the sport's establishment did get serious about stopping the cheaters, the players union agreed to testing in 2003, without penalties for failure. The idea was to determine how widespread the problem was and allow for testing with penalties in 2004 and beyond if more than 5 percent tested dirty.
The 1,198 players tested were promised that the results would be confidential and those who failed would remain anonymous.
Astonishingly, the players union did not destroy the results when it could have. The records were subsequently seized by federal agents investigating the BALCO steroid distribution scandal. The names of two players on the list of 104 have since been leaked, first Alex Rodriguez and now Sosa. That has prompted columnists, bloggers and even former San Diego Padres and St. Louis Cardinals Hall of Famer Ozzie Smith to call for the release of the full list in order "to get this thing behind us" and stop the periodic distraction as more names inevitably leak out.
Nonsense. No doubt more names will leak, even though the list is sealed by court order, and that will be a distraction. But the players were promised confidentiality. That has to mean something. If not, future agreements on matters as important as steroid testing will be impossible to achieve.
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