Ay Papi! Ortiz denies ever ‘knowingly’ taking steroids
RED SOX slugger David Ortiz declared Thursday that he never “knowingly” took steroids despite having reportedly tested positive in 2003 during Major League Baseball’s preliminary round of performance-enhancing drug testing.
Big Papi, 39, addressed the matter in a long and defiant post on The Players Tribune, a website founded last year by retired Yankee Derek Jeter.
“I never knowingly took any steroids,” Ortiz writes. “If I tested positive for anything, it was for something in pills I bought at the damn mall. If you think that ruins everything I have done in this game, there is nothing I can say to convince you different.”
Ortiz suggests, as he has in the past, that he may have tested positive because of contaminated nutritional supplements, although it has never been clear precisely what type of drug was found in his urine and if it was the kind of compound sometimes found in over-thecounter supplements.
“To this day, nobody has any answers for me,” Ortiz writes. “Nobody can tell me what I supposedly tested positive for. They say they legally can’t, because the tests were never supposed to be public.”
Citing unnamed lawyers, The New York Times reported in 2009 that Ortiz’s name was on a list of roughly 100 MLB players whose urine tested positive in 2003, when the league conducted a survey test to determine the magnitude of the game’s steroid problem. The results were intended to remain anonymous, but federal agents investigating the BALCO doping ring seized the labora-tory results, discovering the list upon which the Times report was based.
A week and a half after that report (Ortiz’s teammate, Manny Ramirez, was also identified), Ortiz said in a news conference that he was “a little bit careless back in those days” when buying over-the-counter supplements and vitamins — “but I never buy steroids or use steroids,” he said. On that day — Aug. 8, 2009 — Ortiz claimed to have passed about 15 drug tests since 2004, when MLB established a comprehensive drug-testing program. In his Players Tribune post Thursday, Ortiz claims that number is now closer to 80, and that he is the most tested player in MLB history. (A spokesman for the league declined to comment.)
“Ten times a season these guys come into the clubhouse or my home with their briefcases,” Ortiz
says, referring to doping control officers who collect testing samples. “I have never failed a single one of those tests and I never will.”
Ortiz begins his piece with an anecdote in which the doping control officers appear at his door in the Dominican Republic at 7:30 in the morning. He relates telling them to be more careful not to surprise him that way. But a universal claim of drug-testing experts is that the element of surprise is critical to effective anti-doping programs, since announced testing gives cheaters ample opportunity to mask their doping or schedule it around visits.
Although he is one of the most beloved baseball players in Boston history, Ortiz claims the media have been unfair to him regarding his failed drug test. On Jeter’s website, Ortiz belittles the baseball reporters who have questioned him about doping and whose votes may now determine his entry into Cooperstown.
“Hell yes I deserve to be in the Hall of Fame,” Ortiz writes. “I’ve won three World Series since MLB introduced comprehensive drug testing. I’ve performed year after year after year.”