Sammy Sosa Tested Positive for Steroids

[Fella]

Yep the rule was added in 1991 by Fay Vincent, it said all players were forbidden by rule to take any illgeal substance and specifically mentioned steroids, so anyone that claims steroids were "well within the rules" during the steroid era is wrong.

[savant]

<!--quoteo(post=44642:date=Jun 17 2009, 07:08 AM:name=Andy)-->QUOTE (Andy @ Jun 17 2009, 07:08 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}><!--quotec-->Since nearly every big named player from the late 1990's through the early 2000's was using steriods, and we're still all fans of baseball, how can we sit back and bitch about it now? We've all known that the big hitters from the past 15 years have been on roids. So why is it we need this renewed angst every time they bring up a new member on the list? Considering that these lawyers probably already have the full list, it's amusing they choose to only release a name or 2 at a crack. Why not just release the entire list and be done with it?

Who cares? It's not as though anyone thought Sammy was clean anyway.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
This sums up my opinion exactly. If you are truly surprised by this you were living under a rock. I was so tired of Sosa by the time he left, I could hardly stand to even look at him, but I always had a pretty good idea he was cheating along with everyone else in MLB. I also think the NBA, the NFL, the Tour de France, the NHL, Boxing, and cage fighting sports are all riddled with performance enhancing drugs. If there is not olympic style anti-doping standards, and money involved I am betting a majority of involved athletes are cheating. Accept it and continue watching, or turn it off.

[leonardsipes]

I have a real problem calling someone a cheater, when their actions were encouraged by MLB. It is not uncommon for companies to be happy with questionable behavior, until they are caught, and blame it on a few bad apples. Look at the internet or reality TV and see the shit people will do with a little encouragement. Morally, I think the person the released Sosa's name is worse.

[ColoradoCub]

<!--quoteo(post=44802:date=Jun 17 2009, 03:20 PM:name=leonardsipes)-->QUOTE (leonardsipes @ Jun 17 2009, 03:20 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}><!--quotec-->I have a real problem calling someone a cheater, when their actions were encouraged by MLB. It is not uncommon for companies to be happy with questionable behavior, until they are caught, and blame it on a few bad apples. Look at the internet or reality TV and see the shit people will do with a little encouragement. Morally, I think the person the released Sosa's name is worse.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

How exactly were his actions encouraged? By MLB not having a testing policy? [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/rolleyes.gif[/img]
Nobody forced Sammy to inject himself.

[Runnys]

<!--quoteo(post=44809:date=Jun 17 2009, 05:13 PM:name=ColoradoCub)-->QUOTE (ColoradoCub @ Jun 17 2009, 05:13 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}><!--quotec--><!--quoteo(post=44802:date=Jun 17 2009, 03:20 PM:name=leonardsipes)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (leonardsipes @ Jun 17 2009, 03:20 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}><!--quotec-->I have a real problem calling someone a cheater, when their actions were encouraged by MLB. It is not uncommon for companies to be happy with questionable behavior, until they are caught, and blame it on a few bad apples. Look at the internet or reality TV and see the shit people will do with a little encouragement. Morally, I think the person the released Sosa's name is worse.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

How exactly were his actions encouraged? By MLB not having a testing policy? [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/rolleyes.gif[/img]
Nobody forced Sammy to inject himself.
<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->

True, but the owners did start giving huge contracts to guys that were producing prodigious numbers. Guys wanted to get paid, so they started taking steroids and the more homeruns these guys hit the more fans showed up to the park thus making MLB more money. NO ONE and I mean no one is innocent in this. MLB, the owners, the players, and even the agents are all guilty in this.

That being said, guys like McGwire, Palmeiro, Sosa, Bonds, etc. should be measured against their peers because they were ALL juicing....and whether or not you want to believe it, Sosa and Bonds were some of the best players of the 90's and early 2000's.

[Kid]

<!--quoteo(post=44812:date=Jun 17 2009, 07:21 PM:name=Runnys)-->QUOTE (Runnys @ Jun 17 2009, 07:21 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}><!--quotec--><!--quoteo(post=44809:date=Jun 17 2009, 05:13 PM:name=ColoradoCub)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (ColoradoCub @ Jun 17 2009, 05:13 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}><!--quotec--><!--quoteo(post=44802:date=Jun 17 2009, 03:20 PM:name=leonardsipes)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (leonardsipes @ Jun 17 2009, 03:20 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}><!--quotec-->I have a real problem calling someone a cheater, when their actions were encouraged by MLB. It is not uncommon for companies to be happy with questionable behavior, until they are caught, and blame it on a few bad apples. Look at the internet or reality TV and see the shit people will do with a little encouragement. Morally, I think the person the released Sosa's name is worse.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

How exactly were his actions encouraged? By MLB not having a testing policy? [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/rolleyes.gif[/img]
Nobody forced Sammy to inject himself.
<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->

True, but the owners did start giving huge contracts to guys that were producing prodigious numbers. Guys wanted to get paid, so they started taking steroids and the more homeruns these guys hit the more fans showed up to the park thus making MLB more money. NO ONE and I mean no one is innocent in this. MLB, the owners, the players, and even the agents are all guilty in this.

That being said, guys like McGwire, Palmeiro, Sosa, Bonds, etc. should be measured against their peers because they were ALL juicing....and whether or not you want to believe it, Sosa and Bonds were some of the best players of the 90's and early 2000's.
<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
By all you mean the less than 10% that tested positive in 2003 when there was still no punishment for testing positive?

[Kid]

Howard Bryant's article on ESPN is right on the money:

<!--quoteo-->QUOTE <!--quotec-->A saying exists in baseball that the smartest person in any clubhouse is the guy with either the highest batting average or the most consecutive zeroes on his paycheck.

In other words, the superstars -- smart or dumb; black, white, Latino or Asian; old or young -- run the show. They control clubhouse thought through the intimidation of their talent. Everyone without their ability either falls in line or risks the kind of peer-pressurized alienation most of us escaped moments after graduating from high school.

Keep that in mind as you consider the New York Times report that Sammy Sosa is one of the 104 players who tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs in baseball's 2003 survey testing because the news should not be met with an indifferent yawn, as if Sosa is just another in a long line of Hall of Fame-caliber talent biting the dust: Alex Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez and now Sosa, all in the first half of the 2009 season alone. Instead, this news should be greeted with the kind of outrage reserved for the worst breaches of trust because you, Mr. and Mrs. Fan, have been taken for a very special kind of ride.

For years, the discussion about performance-enhancing drugs has existed within a structure that always has benefited the players. In the late 1990s, there was the argument that steroids did not exist in large measure, that players were the victims of a "witch hunt." Then, as high-profile players began to get caught using steroids and a league-administered drug policy was implemented, the new paradigm was that Player X could not be suspected because he had never failed a drug test.

By now, that con game has been exposed completely and a new argument -- let's call it the "Alex Rodriguez Defense," used by players, fans and, unfortunately, some Hall of Fame voters -- has surfaced. This one suggests that these steroid-using superstar players were merely "caught up in a culture."

This latest orthodoxy is particularly insulting, for it suggests that the steroids era appeared one day out of thin air -- blamelessly and tragically, like, say cholera -- and that the players were unfortunate victims.

The truth is quite the opposite, for it was the star players who used their power, their influence and their good standing to create a steroid culture.

It is one thing to lie, which is bad enough, but what these players have done is infinitely worse. They have lied, convinced that their good will and celebrity -- and batting averages -- would allow them just enough dispensation to get away with it, to drown out anyone not taken in by their false charms.

They knew that the fans would be more than forgiving, that the fans, in fact, would be determined soldiers against any negativity, even if that negativity happened to be the truth.

Never mind Barry Bonds' actual transgressions; some fans in San Francisco even feel vindicated by the spectacular fall of Roger Clemens and Ramirez and, now, Sosa, as if it is proof that their man was disproportionately targeted by the government, media and public.

Even as the card house collapsed, the players knew the fans were just red-blooded capitalists who would forgive lying and cheating because there was big money at stake. How many times have we all heard the old saw? "Well, what would you have done for $10 million? You would've done the same thing."

Think about the times you've been brazenly lied to, right to your face, by people who used their "integrity" to fool you. Bill Clinton said, "I never had sexual relations with that woman." Even for a relatively common transgression, a country felt betrayed, never mind how it felt being misled into a disastrous war by straight-faced untruths from his successor.

The Alex Rodriguez-Katie Couric, Roger Clemens-Mike Wallace, Sammy Sosa-Dan Patrick moments hold -- at least in the baseball universe -- the same standard of the powerful using their position to fool the public.

When this attitude was coupled with an era when powerful entities ranging from the White House to the military to the blogosphere have skillfully turned the mainstream media into the ubiquitous enemy, the players knew the strategy all too well: They used the fans' loyalty against them.

They smiled.

You fell for it.

That was all it took.

Ironically, it is the Phillies' Raul Ibanez, burned by a blogosphere that does not have to adhere to traditional journalistic standards, who now turns back to the mainstream media -- with all of their supposed "agendas" -- to defend his name.

Far from the sports page, in the book section of the Times, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Michiko Kakutani reviews two books about the roots of the nation's financial crisis that mimic the attitude of baseball players. Under the headline, "Greed, Layered on Greed, Frosted with Recklessness," Kakutani writes, "To put it another way, the crisis was, in the words of the Newsweek business columnist Daniel Gross, 'a man-made product that turned out to be immensely toxic and damaging' -- not, as so many in the 'Smart Money crowd' insisted, 'a random, once-in-a-lifetime thing that fell out of the sky.'"

The fan has been the greatest enabler of the steroids era. Face it: Had the paying customer revolted, the institutional reaction would have been decidedly different. The superstars knew the paying customers were either too forgiving of their golden heroes or too selfish to have their fun and games interrupted (or both) to hold them accountable.

But fans aren't the only suckers walking around today.

The writers did the same, and continue to do so. Some have decided to use their Hall of Fame votes in the affirmative for the game's great but disgraced players -- Sosa, Bonds, Clemens, Ramirez -- because the players were part of a larger culture.

Yet it is an argument that could not be more offensive. It fails to take into account the willful levels of deceit that allow individual choices to become a collective culture. Some in the media are equally guilty by intellectual laziness, the bait-and-switch thinking of the apologists for whom there is no way out.

The nonbelievers of the steroids era first argued that they needed proof beyond innuendo. When the proof came, they wanted it both ways, saying, "Oh, steroids are old news. Everyone knew these guys were using."

If the writers have been guilty of lazy thinking, there is, too, the intellectual dishonesty of the players, whose excuses have transitioned from the silly ("There's nothing in a bottle to help you hit a home run" -- McGwire, Bonds) to the nuanced ("I was part of a culture" -- Rodriguez). Both are a cover for a central motivation: They got to keep the money.

It is one thing to be taken, quite another to make excuses for the very people who perpetrated this fraud. And it is even worse to reward them with induction into the Hall of Fame. The players got to keep their money. Why should they be rewarded for their deceit?

Is this baseball or Wall Street? The cultural intention to defraud is the same.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

Link

[kbwsb]

That article is fine if you have no conception whatsoever of what has gone on throughout baseball history, indeed in the history of <i>all</i> sports.

But I do enjoy the pulpit-pounding of would-be moralists saying that we're all sinners, and thus we get what we deserve; I think it's good for the culture to hear that every so often. Otherwise, humans tend to get too full of themselves. (and FWIW, Sammy was very full of himself).

[Kid]

<!--quoteo-->QUOTE <!--quotec-->Sammy Sosa, who reportedly tested positive for a performance-enhancing drug in 2003, worked out with the same controversy-stained trainer in the Dominican Republic as Alex Rodriguez and Juan Gonzalez, according to a source familiar with the workouts.

Sosa worked out during three offseasons with Angel (Nao) Presinal, a trainer who has been banned from ballparks and clubhouses by Major League Baseball and is still under investigation for his role in Rodriguez's admitted steroid use.

"He worked with him in 2001, 2002 and 2003 in the Dominican Republic," the source said.

Because Sosa is believed to have worked with Presinal in the D.R., where steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs are legal and easy to obtain, and thanks to an artfully crafted statement at the 2005 congressional steroid hearing, it is unclear whether he would be subject to a congressional perjury investigation.

Sosa, according to a report posted on The New York Times Web site yesterday, tested positive in 2003 during survey testing conducted by Major League Baseball and the Players Association to determine whether the sport needed to implement a permanent drug program. Two years later, Sosa, accompanied by a translator and a lawyer, appeared on a panel before the House Committee on Government Reform with Mark McGwire, Jose Canseco, Curt Schilling and Rafael Palmeiro and said he had "never taken illegal performance-enhancing drugs."

"I have never injected myself or had anyone inject me with anything," Sosa said during the 11-hour, March 17, 2005, hearing. "I've not broken the laws of the United States or the laws of the Dominican Republic."

Palmeiro, who famously pointed his finger at the committee and denied ever using steroids, was suspended later that year for 10 games after testing positive for the anabolic steroid stanozolol two months later. But Congress did not ask the Justice Department to investigate Palmeiro for perjury because there was no evidence that he lied at the time of the hearing. Sosa's parsed statement may lead congressional leaders to believe it would be difficult to pursue a perjury probe against Sosa.

A lawyer for Sosa, Jay Reisinger, who also represented the former slugger during the 2005 hearing, declined comment yesterday.

Sosa, who famously battled McGwire in the 1998 chase for the single-season home run record, is the second player to be publicly identified as having failed the 2003 test. Earlier this year, Rodriguez was also identified as having tested positive.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Link

[veryzer]

love me some sammy.

[ruby23]

You know what this 2009 team could use? A whole bunch of Sammy.

[veryzer]

<!--quoteo(post=44849:date=Jun 18 2009, 08:03 AM:name=ruby23)-->QUOTE (ruby23 @ Jun 18 2009, 08:03 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}><!--quotec-->You know what this 2009 team could use? A whole bunch of Sammy.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->


yep, a lot can be said for 160 "meaningless" rbi. unlike a lot of these jamokes, sammy never took a day off (well maybe one at the end of the year).

[rok]

GOD, I wish this team were playing decent ball right now, so that we could stop talking about all this. These memories make me both happy and sad all at the same time.

[Andy]

What's the most frustrating is how the NL Central is so open to be taken. It's going to require about 90 wins. You keep thinking in the back of your head the Cubs HAVE to snap out of the poor hitting eventually. It such a winnable division. Just start hitting or even doing basics and they could take this division.

[ruby23]

<!--quoteo(post=44861:date=Jun 18 2009, 11:19 AM:name=Andy)-->QUOTE (Andy @ Jun 18 2009, 11:19 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}><!--quotec-->What's the most frustrating is how the NL Central is so open to be taken. It's going to require about 90 wins. You keep thinking in the back of your head the Cubs HAVE to snap out of the poor hitting eventually. It such a winnable division. Just start hitting or even doing basics and they could take this division.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Firing Lou can't hurt either.