Another baseball juicer takes a fall

David Ortiz becomes the latest star and denier of wrongdoing to show up on the 2003 steroid list. He joins Manny Ramirez. What does this do to the Red Sox World Series championships? That's not hard to figure. It pretty much makes them laughable. The cornerstones of those teams were juicing.

There's a list of 103 from 2003 floating around the internet, and it's an interesting list. But I have no idea if it's accurate. Because of that I'm not touching it, and I hope nobody here touches it either. This is still a newspaper blog and newspapers have a standard of truth and accuracy and fairness. Rumors and the like are for those who don't care about standards. Until a list is proven to be truly the one, I'd rather it not appear in this crog.

But … once it is proven to be the right list … well we'll chew on it for days and weeks if we want. Perhaps we'll go down the names one by one and notice how their performances improved.

Big Papi denied things of course, said he was surprised to be on the list, said he'd find out why and clear his name. He'd always denied using anything in the past and he denied it again. What else did we expect him to say? And at this point, do we believe him? Dan Shaughnessy writes in the Boston Globe that Ortiz's entire career in Boston "is a lie." That is a direct shot to the solar plexus of a figure Boston fans like a great deal.

But now all those Boston types in that infernal Red Sox nation can chew on the fact that the two leading hitters on their team were cheating and they won their World Series titles in the heydey of the most tainted era in baseball. Hoist a cold one to that reality.