Papi on Roids?

If you are a Red Sox fan, you got some pretty bad news this week. Maybe you even suspected it (I did), even if you didn’t want to admit it to yourself. David Ortiz, the energetic, lovable, wide-smilin’ slugger who led the Red Sox to a pair of World Series championships, tested positive for performance enhancing drugs in 2003.
Papi played the “Gasp! I can’t believe this! I’m totally shocked by this news,” card, which would have been believable if we didn’t find out the next day that all 103 people who tested positive in 2003 were notified about it by the Players Union in 2004. To me, David immediately lying was even more disappointing than him taking the P.E.D’s.
We don’t know if took a dietary supplement or HGH yet, but to me there isn’t a huge difference. If you are an athlete, your body is your tool. You better know what you are putting into it. A carpenter wouldn’t rub some random cream onto his hammer if he didn’t know what was in the cream and what it would do. I think the “I didn’t know what was in it!” excuse is at best lame, and at worst irresponsible. It would take five minutes to call the Union and ask if the dietary supplement was legal or not.
Be prepared for missiles to start pouring in from Yankee fans. I’m sure they will talk about how 2004 and 2007 are tainted. On this point, I don’t agree. Oh yes, we had known steroid users on the club. But everyone did. The fact that everyone was cheating doesn’t make it right, but it makes the playing field level. Yankee fans will say “Ortiz had a monster series and was on the juice! Same with Manny!” Those are facts. They will conveniently leave out that they got to a 3-0 lead in the Series with Andy Pettite, Alex Rodriguez, Jason Giambi and Gary Sheffield. They’ll also forget that Pettite and Roger Clemens pitched them to championships. The Bronx Bombers are just as guilty as the rest of the teams in MLB, so if they want to throw stones in their giant glass house, well then more power to them.
I could care less about barbs from arrogant Yankee brats who know have a giant inferiority complex with the Red Sox, in an interesting role reversal from say 6 years ago. What I do care about is a legitimate Boston sports hero has been exposed as a cheat. He certainly isn’t alone in what he did, but it’s irrelevant. He broke the rules to get where he is.
His career arc fits the profile of a steroid user, so maybe we should have seen this coming. He was a .260, 20 HR, 80 RBI guy in Minnesota, and they cut him loose. They are usually great at player evaluation, but they got criticized for ditching the Dominican slugger. Maybe it wasn’t a bad evaluation. They just hadn’t seen him on the juice.
Ortiz comes to Boston and hits 31 bombs in his first season in limited playing time, then becomes a 40 HR guy (and even 54, in 2006). Why the huge jump? We were told that in Minnesota they stunted his growth. They didn’t let him swing for the fences. They made him try to go the other way with the ball too much. Interesting. They now have Justin Morneau, who hits 30-40 jacks a year. They don’t seem to be telling him to hit singles to left field instead of homers. It looks like it was the lack of P.E.D’s that stopped Ortiz from going deep in Minneapolis, not the organizational beliefs of the Twins.
Those last two paragraphs can be proved semi-false if it comes out that Ortiz was taking some random diet pill with a obscure banned substance in them. Honestly, I hope that’s the case. If nothing else, it would make the Ortiz news easier to swallow. But I don’t think that’s what we will come to find out. I think it’s more serious than that.
Ortiz is human, and he made a major mistake here. Now that it’s on the table, we can let the healing begin. I’ll never stop rooting for the guy, because he was a big part of the biggest championship of my lifetime, and he still plays for my favorite team. But there is no denying there is a giant black eye on his legacy now. And that’s disappointing.