Report: Red Sox Ortiz Tested Positive for Performance Enhancing Drugs

If the report is true—and given the reliability of similar accounts in recent months, there’s no reason to believe it isn’t—then Red Sox fans will have nothing to do but sit back and take their lumps.

According to the New York Times, David Ortiz is among the 103 players who tested positive for performance enhancing drugs during a 2003 test that was to remain anonymous and carry with it no punishment.

So much for the buzz surrounding the trading deadline. This is the bombshell of all bombshells, one likely to reverberate through the walls of Fenway Park for months.

When Manny Ramirez—who also appears on the 2003 list, according to the report—tested positive earlier this year, it came as something of a shock, but those who follow the team learned long ago not to be surprised by anything Manny does. He is and always has been on his own planet.

Ortiz, however, occupied a different and entirely more pleasant planet. He was one of few players in all of professional sports who seemed to “get it.” He was genuinely concerned with the fans. He wanted to clean up baseball, he said. He even advocated for a one-year suspension for any positive steroid test.

He was the bigger-than-life superhero, the gentle giant who carried the Red Sox—largely on his shoulders and his shoulders alone – from 86 years of misery to a new decade in which suddenly they were the franchise to emulate.

I like to consider myself a levelheaded fan. I gave up a long time ago being surprised about most any revelation in regards to a professional athlete. What, you mean Brett Favre isn’t really retired for good? Jose Canseco’s physique wasn’t entirely natural? Wait, Kobe Bryant is kind of a jerk?

Say it ain’t so.

But I have to admit, the news about Ortiz absolutely floored me. Call me naïve if you must, but I never saw it coming.

It’s the repercussions that will sting the most, though. Between Ortiz and Ramirez, the heart of the batting order that brought not one but two world championships to Boston has now been forever tainted. Moments I thought I’d be telling my children and grandchildren about are now altered, eternally.

I was living across the street from Fenway Park in 2004. I remember running out of my building on back-to-back nights after Ortiz silenced the Yankees with walk-off swings, setting in motion the greatest two weeks as a sports fan in my lifetime. It was complete euphoria.

Now it’s possible that none of it was real.

What’s more, all the taunts that Red Sox fans gave to A-Rod and Jason Giambi and Gary Sheffield are now going to come back, twice as hard and twice as loud. And there’s nothing anyone in Boston can do about it but strap in and take it.

I’d like to hold out hope that the report will be proven false. But in the immediate aftermath, Ortiz offered only a sullen “no comment.” The man who has been so vocal against steroids was suddenly and eerily silent.

In my heart of hearts I know this doesn’t necessarily change the landscape of baseball history that much. You’d probably have to go back to 1950 at this point to find a championship team that was entirely and prove-ably clean.

If anything, it only reinforces the notion that everyone – and I mean everyone—in baseball was juicing at one point or another.

I don’t feel cheated. I just feel sad. If there was one athlete in all of New England I would have bet on in the war against steroids, it was David Ortiz.

No longer.

He was an icon. He was the example against which all prima donnas and arrogant athletes were held in my estimation. He was special. He was our hero. He was Big Papi.

Now he’s just one of 103 names on a list.

And the latest in a long line of superstars to let their fan bases down. Forgive me if I find this fall from the top a little more painful than the rest have been.