Release the Names of Everyone Who Tested Positive in 2003?

In an interview yesterday, former homerun king Hank Aaron stated his opinion that all 104 players who tested positive for performance enhancing drugs in 2003 should be named so that it’s all out in the open and Baseball can move on.

Aaron has a good argument.  As we are seeing with the recent revelation of David Ortiz as a positive tester, we are likely to keep getting names dripped and dropped out one at a time, one after the other, so that the scandal and the news stories continue on indefinitely.  It’s not good for Baseball, and it’s time that this story-line was over and done with.

I’m in favor of full disclosure so that the truth is out in the open for everyone to see, and we can have a clearer idea about who likely used and who likely didn’t, so we can stop this charade of mythologizing players like ARod, Ortiz and now Puhols as “clean” players in a “dirty” era, when we don’t really have any way of knowing who was clean and who wasn’t.

To this day, I still don’t understand how it came to pass that the 2003 testing could be identified by each individual player.  Given the stakes and the purpose of the testing (solely to see if PED use was as widespread as some were suggesting, and whether something really needed to be done about the problem if it did, in fact, exist), it would have been so easy to have players give blood samples, check their names off the list, but not identify any of the samples provided.

Could the Players’ Association really have been so stupid as to agree to testing which resulted in individually identifiable samples when they had been shouting from the rooftops for some time about its members’ privacy rights as a reason not to have any testing performed at all?  If someone (MLB or the testing company) crossed the Players’ Assocation and made the testing individually identifiable, why hasn’t the Players Association brought suit or filed a grievance?

I suspect that the Players’ Association wanted to know who tested positive so that it could warn individual members who tested positive, which the Players’ Association did, in fact, do.  (As if most of the jerks who tested positive didn’t already know.)  If that is the case, then the Players’ Association and its members (the players) deserve what they are getting now.

Given the level of public interest in who did or did not test positive, information was going to leak out, no matter how “confidential” you tried to make it, not unlike when the federal government tries to keep its programs, policies or activities secret.  It usually comes out eventually, often at very embarrassing or inopportune moments, because that’s usually when the most public attention is directed to the matter and the leak makes the best news story.

I doubt the Players’ Association will agree to release all the names at once, even though it would be the best move for everyone in the long run, because the players who haven’t yet been named probably still want to keep it quiet, and the Players Association is probably unwilling to admit what a mess they made of the testing program.

Too bad.  Baseball won’t fully put PED’s behind it, until as much information as possible is out on the table for everyone to see.