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The Dartmouth
July 11, 2025 | Latest Issue
The Dartmouth

YOU DON'T KNOW BEANS: New York Hypocrites

After reading Tim Dolan's article from earlier this week ("Rollin' with Dolan: Boston Juice Party," Aug. 4) I felt compelled to respond. For those of you who didn't read it here's a summation: Ortiz is Judas, the Red Sox championships are tainted and everything in life can be compared to Space Jam. While I have to agree with him on that last point, Dolan is sorely mistaken on the first two. He presents the case as the New Yorker he is, a New Yorker with a self-confidence issue due to his team's failures despite having the largest pay roll in all of sports for the entire decade. Dolan also fails to address the handling of this 2003 list that was supposed to be anonymous. I will touch on that, but first let's paint the real picture of Ortiz and the Red Sox.

I cannot defend Ortiz if he took steroids. The day of the announcement that he was on the 2003 list of positive tests was one of the saddest in the history of Boston, on par with the day after the 2008 Super Bowl and the day after the 2003 ALCS. In fact, I have been unable to talk about it until now.

As a Bostonian I now have no credibility with New Yorkers I am willing to give Ortiz the benefit of the doubt. There are still many questions that remain to be answered and I won't be convinced he took steroids until we know the full story. What we do know is that Ortiz has always been a huge man and his power surge could certainly have been a product of leaving a slap-hitting Minnesota coaching staff and moving to Fenway Park with its Green Monster only 310 feet from home plate. However, I'm not going to argue he didn't take steroids there just isn't the evidence to support me.

What I will argue is that these revelations do nothing to taint the Red Sox championships in 2004 and 2007. The Red Sox beat the Angels, Yankees and Cardinals on their 2004 run to the World Series. The 2004 Angels had at least three players on performance enhancing drugs Jose Guillen, Derrick Turnbow and Troy Glaus not to mention the 16 former and current Angels players who were linked to performance enhancing drugs in the Mitchell Report. The Sox clearly didn't rob a team playing by the books. The 2004 Cardinals had Rick Ankiel, who received a shipment of Human Growth Hormone, and a number of other players who are suspected of using performance enhancing drugs. No innocents harmed there.

Then there are the Yankees, the team with the most famous players who have tested positive for and admitted to using steroids. Their 2004 roster, which achieved the greatest choke job in the history of sports, had Gary Sheffield, Jason Giambi, Kevin Brown and, of course, Alex Rodriguez. Clearly the Sox didn't have an unfair advantage against them.

The point is that every team has had players using performance enhancing drugs. It's impossible to say that the Red Sox had an unfair advantage, because every other team had players gaining the same illegal advantage. The Sox championships lose nothing because of this new information. The euphoria that all Red Sox fans felt in 2004 was not meaningless.

What is more important than David Ortiz and the validity of the Red Sox's championships is the 2003 list of performance enhancing drug users. The list was supposed to be anonymous and destroyed after Major League Baseball obtained the information it wanted. However, this didn't happen and the names on the list have been leaking out for the last few years.

These leaks do nothing good for baseball. They steal the spotlight from the beauty and greatness of the game, and aim it at specific players and an era that is not one of baseball's prouder moments. It is time for the MLB to release all of the names on the list, or they will continue to leak out and taint the game. Major League Baseball needs to get all the names out there so we can begin to move on from this horrible time. They should release the names this off season so they do not distract from this season. Until the MLB releases all the names, the steroid era will continue to hang over Major League Baseball.