Hi, this is Joe Erwin filling in for Sam:

I have no sympathy for Alex Rodriguez except for on thing. According to Sports Illustrated, 104 players tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs in 2003. As all the heat falls on A-Rod, the other 103 are anonymous.

Somebody out there — including, presumably, the person who leaked Rodriguez’s name — knows who the other 103 players are. So let hear the names.

The original agreement said the test results would be anonymous, but since A-Rod’s anonymity is blown, the other players shouldn’t be entitled to privacy. After all, they DID violate the rules. Let’s get the whole thing out in the open. Maybe with the names out there, the pressure will finally be on the players union to be more upfront, and allow blood-testing for human growth hormone.

Baseball’s dirty little secret has been coming out slowly for years. It’s time for full disclosure. What do you say, Carp?

 CARP SAYS:

Name names? That sounds like Hop Sing from Seinfeld, when Elaine got Ned Izakov black-listed.

Anyway, I don’t see how getting the other 103 names out there helps the situation at all … except that it quenches our thirst for more dirt on more cheaters. I’ve heard the argument the last few days that it might give us some closure, which is ridiculous. When those 104 positives turned up, representing more than the required five percent of all players, baseball was able to implement its still-feeble drug-testing program. And what that did, I believe, was to shove the cheaters toward more advances drugs, more difficult, if not impossible to detect. In my opinion, baseball is likely to employ more cheaters today than in ‘03.

I’m on record, for a long time and very vehemently, against the drug cheats.

But I’m going to go in another direction on this one. Not only do I think nobody has the right to release these names, given that they were obtained with a promise of anonymity with the hope of eventually resulting in a testing program. Players were PROMISED anonymity. And after the results were known, the players association didn’t destroy the tests because it wanted to try to challenge some of the results. It had every right to destroy them, and they should have been destroyed.

Further, a court ordered that those tests and their results be sealed, and never made public. But somebody outed A-Roid. If that snitch (there were four sources cited in the Sports Illustrated story) can be found, and if it is somebody official, I think he/she should be prosecuted for violating the promise of anonymity and the court order.

Much as I dislike Rodriguez and his cheating brethren, they have some rights, and this one was violated. And baseball, and the players union, and anybody involved with the 2003 tests has no right to violate any more.