David Ortiz is still flummoxed by his positive drug test from 2003
David Ortiz reportedly failed baseball's survey test back in 2003. (Elise Amendola/AP)
In the wake of Monday's biogenesis suspensions, David Ortiz was asked by radio station WEEI prior to Tuesday night's game if anyone had ever told him what he had reportedly tested positive for during Major League Baseball's supposedly anonymous 2003 survey testing, a result revealed by the New York Times in July 2009. Here's his response.
No. Nobody. Not MLB. Not the Players Association. Nobody. They just threw it out there that I tested positive on this one list and that was it. Nothing. So I have to deal with that, and your mind is all over the place. And I’ve lived with it.
I don’t think I’m going to have a worse year than ’09 and I came out of it. That’s the one thing I look at and the one thing I tell myself, "If you survive through that, you’re a warrior." A lot of things went down that year. Things I had nothing to do with. It was somebody was trying to hurt me.
It is something that is still in the dark because nobody ever had the [guts] to come to me and say, ‘This is what was happening.’ You damaged my image at the time, and it has always stayed like that. No explanation. No nothing.
A lot of things happen in your career that has to do with bad people trying to do stupid things.
February 2009 Sports Illustrated report
