Rafael Palmeiro Still Denies Knowingly Taking Steroids

There have been plenty of moments in baseball involving steroids that stand out in our memories, but one that's always stuck in the back of my mind was Rafael Palmeiro sitting in front of Congress back in March 2005. There he was wagging his finger at Congress and saying "I have never used steroids. Period. I don't know how to say it any more clearly than that."

Then five months later Palmeiro was being suspended 10 games by Major League Baseball for failing a steroid test. Of course Palmeiro then began backtracking and saying that he'd never "knowingly" taken any steroids in his life, and he wasn't changing his story on Friday as he was inducted into the College Baseball Hall of Fame.

"I made a mistake," Palmeiro told ESPN's Pedro Gomez on Friday. "I didn't really understand what I was taking and I paid for it. I paid for it very dearly. Life goes on.

"I've heard a lot of things out there that are wrong. People saying I took drugs all my life, I've never touched anything. I worked my butt off my whole career, as a kid, in college, the big leagues, I didn't need anything, I didn't have to cheat at the end of my career, for what? What was I going to gain from it? Whatever I took was tainted, had to have been. There's no other reason unless I got set up.

"What I took was a B-12 [vitamin] that was given to me by a teammate. That's it. That was it."

Palmeiro also said that he hopes the list of 104 players who tested positive in 2003 does become public because "I'm not on the list."

Now FanHouse is not a courtroom so I can't say for sure whether Palmeiro knowingly took steroids during his career or not, but I do know that, from everything I've read about the steroid culture in baseball, everybody knew that a B-12 shot wasn't B-12.

There's also Palmeiro's question about why he would even be taking steroids at the end of his career because he'd have nothing to gain from it. He had plenty to gain from steroids at the end of his career if he did choose to take them. A few weeks before his positive test came out, Palmeiro got his 3,000th career hit to put him in an exclusive club with Hank Aaron, Willie Mays and Eddie Murray as the only players in MLB history to reach 3,000 hits and have 500 homers.