Don't believe it? I do

I refer to David Ortiz' statement regarding being on "the list".

Long ago, whilst earning big bucks as a freelance writer (pause for laughs) I took a part-time job at ...umm...a well-known health food and supplement store. One learned very early that the way to make a decent living there was to push certain commission items. None of the commissions were huge but they added up. It was possible to increase a minimum wage take four or fivefold.

Among the items were a number of bodybuilding supplements popular with the hard-core gym rats. To reduce the biochemistry to its fundamentals: supplement combinations go in; supplement combinations essentially become anabolic steroids in the body; bulky bod goes out. Add to this equation that minimum wage salespeople looking for commissions didn't trouble themselves with the long-term consequences. So yes, I was an enabler.

For every gym rat who knew what was going on, there were five or more eager but clueless people who bought these products because somebody told them they were good for bulking up. That was 25 years ago. Should athletes have got smarter about cause and effect? Sure. Were they smarter six years ago? I'm not so sure about that.

I wonder how many of the snarky reporters covering Ortiz would have done any better, in 2003, defining and explaining the biochemistry of bodily assimilation of supplements? Ortiz has tested negative for those six years. Nobody has claimed to find steroids in his locker, etc. etc. Conclusion: O-V-E-R. But its a Boston athlete/coach/team, and New York-based journalists feel obliged to buy into a lame, stale rivalry story.

And there's one of those annoying lacunae that bedevil journalism these days. It's easier to find out the vault combinations at Fort Knox than it is to get explicit information about whose name was on the 2003 steroid list and what he was alleged to have taken. Who then leaked Ortiz' name, and does he or she live in New York? Riddle me that and I'll move on.