“David Ortiz looks like one of the television evangelists who gets caught in a seedy motel with a hooker,” sneers the Boston Globe’s Dan Shaughnessy, adding, “the 2004 Red Sox really were Idiots. Just like the Yankees and everybody else.” Oakland’s Nomar Garciaparra — previously implicated by proto-sports blogger Bob Ryan — collected a ring for his half season + contribution to Boston’s 2004 title campaign, and unsurprisingly takes a different view than the C.H.B. To wit, Nomah would have us believe there are some players on the infamous List of 100 Offenders who intentionally flunked or failed the tests in order to usher in genuine penalties going forward.
It should be easy enough for a Real Reporter With Access to check with the players union and see if the charge he’s making is true — that a) opting out of the test meant you were marked positive, or b) that you could be marked positive without ever being physically tested. I think the union would have brought this up already since February, but who knows — I guess their credibility is on the line here, too. So far the assumption has been that the list of 104 comes from actual samples, that can be tested and retested, like the Bonds sample. If Nomar is right, there’s a large chunk of the Mitchell Report that needs a “delete” key.
I am of course happy to hear Nomar cite the South Siders as intentionally lying on the results, but I’m always biased that way.
Have to admit, Nomah’s gambit is pretty clever, for a ballplayer. I have yet to hear a good explanation of why players’ names were linked with their tests in the first place, since it was supposed to be a non-binding, non-punitive anonymous kind of thing. But as for Nomah’s fairy story, it defies my logic for the data not be labeled differently in the case of someone who just refused to take the test…there’d be no pee! And if a player who was on the juice could “intentionally flunk” the test by withholding their urine, why would anyone using willingly participate?