When a player who puts up obscene numbers due to performance-enhancing drugs comes out and says he took the drugs “for medicinal purposes only,” he is being a fraud.

Just like he was on the field.

Crisis-communications company?

People actually pay for this kind of stuff?

This proves a long-held theory of mine: Take the simplest concept, put a fancy name on it, charge a ton of money for it — and people will run to soak it up.

The ruling also makes clear that baseball never had a “list” of players who tested positive, but coded results from positive drug tests. The list had to come from somewhere, and speculation now states it was created – and perhaps leaked – by the U.S. investigators.

Yahoo writes: “The decision means that leaking the names of steroid-tainted players to Sports Illustrated and The New York Times likely constituted crimes, and that an investigation could be launched to identify the leakers. It also means that the blockbuster revelations about steroid cheating by Alex Rodrigues, Sammy Sosa, Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz were based on evidence gathered in an illegal search by lead BALCO investigating agent Jeff Novitzky.”

Wrote The Associated Press: “Barring a last-ditch appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, the test results and samples will be destroyed, and prosecutors cannot use the information. Union lawyers said the government returned the evidence shortly after earlier trial court rulings.”

This is all well and good in a court of law. And the strength of the ruling – and simple logic — indicates the government probably did over-reach.

Players have been damaged. But let's not kid oursevles. Ultimately they’ve been damaged by their own actions, not by government over-reaching. Put it another way … a crime investigation pleaded down to a lower crime because of a legal technicality does not mean a crime was not committed. The government over-reached, but the players took the drugs and tested positive. No government over-reaching changes that fact.

One hundred and four players tested positive in MLB’s drug-testing program. A large number of baseball’s “stars” were cheating, meaning said era deserves the most gargantuan asterisk known to baseball record keeping.

That is the plain and simple truth.

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.