MLB Mlb Peds

This can't end well. In fact, unless the city of St. Louis is just into the bizarre -- you know, such as plans to replace that large arch downtown with a Starbucks or something, this will end sooner than later.

Mark McGwire as Cardinals hitting coach?

I'm still waiting for the punch line.

In order for this to work, McGwire has to discuss what he hasn't wanted to discuss forever, and you know what that is. Instead, he spit at a bunch of congressmen during a hearing on steroids during the spring of 2005 on Capitol Hill by telling them, "I'm not here to talk about the past."

Yeah, well. The guy has no choice now. He will be hounded by his "past" on every Cardinals road trip. I'm guessing that more than a few folks in St. Louis also will have questions about his "past."

The New York Yankees and Alex Rodriguez have been playing pretty well this season and seem to be out from the dark clouds that hovered over their spring training facilities in Florida back in March when news broke that Rodriguez had tested positive for steroids back in 2003. As is usually the case in baseball, or any sport, winning cures all and the Yankees have certainly been doing plenty of that.

Still, Rodriguez knows that he does have to repair his image in light of the steroid news, and he's in the process of doing just that. A-Rod has talked to groups of high school athletes this season in New York and Texas this season about the dangers of steroids, and before the Yankees took on the Orioles in Baltimore on Tuesday night, he talked to a group of Baltimore students as well.

Jeff Kent, now retired and preparing to be immortalized on the Giants' Wall of Fame on Saturday, got a few things off his chest on Monday.

"I am embarrassed by the era that I participated in because of the steroids," Kent said.

Kent was outspoken throughout his career, which ran from 1992-2008, about steroid-use in baseball, mostly after he left San Francisco, which was arguably the epicenter of the steroid era. He continues to assert that the problem was widespread, more widespread than a list of 104 names.

"You'll never find all the cheaters in the game that used steroids," he said in a conference call with reporters. "This 100-player list, if you find out the list, which I imagine you guys will work hard to find, you will never find them all. To say that's the only list of the players who did steroids in the game is wrong."

It's a safe bet that there wasn't much of a race to bring Bud Selig a copy of Thursday's USA Today at the MLB offices on Thursday morning. After all, it's not exactly a strong career move to bring your boss an interview with a major league player making a mockery of everything you've said and done about performance-enhancing drugs in baseball.

That's just what Bronson Arroyo did in a wide-ranging interview that's required reading for anyone on any side of the debate of drug use in Major League Baseball. Arroyo starts by admitting he takes a slew of supplements that aren't on the league's approved list, and has never failed a drug test, and then goes on to lacerate just about every sacred cow of the baseball world.

NEW YORK -- Three hours before every Red Sox game, Nick Green takes an amphetamine.

It's legal.

It's within baseball's rules.

And he's not alone.

NEW YORK (AP) -- David Ortiz thinks legal supplements and vitamins likely caused him to land on a list of alleged drug users circulated by the federal government, and Major League Baseball and the players' association said some of the names on it never tested positive for steroids.

MLB said in a statement Saturday that at most 96 urine samples tested positive in the 2003 survey‚ and the players' association said 13 of those were in dispute.

The government seized the samples and records the following year from baseball's drug-testing companies as part of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative investigation into Barry Bonds and others. The list of 104 players said to have tested positive, attached to a grand jury subpoena, is part of a five-year legal fight, with the union trying to force the government to return what federal agents took during raids.

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David Ortiz is expected to address -- as much as he can, which isn't much -- his reported presence on "The List" later Saturday.

The players' union will participate in the news conference, and the MLBPA issued a statement Saturday morning making clear that it will make nothing clear regarding whether Ortiz is on the government-seized list of players who tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs in 2003.

The union argues that Ortiz: (a) may not have tested positive at all; (b) might have been the victim of faulty science; and (c) may have been using a legal supplement but still made the list.

The Boston Globe is reporting the Red Sox fired two security staffers last summer after an investigation into steroid use.

Jared Remy, the son of Red Sox television commentator Jerry Remy, and Nicholas Alex Cyr both told the newspaper they used steroids, but denied any knowledge of drug use by players. The investigation began when Cyr had been caught by State Police with a vial of steroids in his car last summer. He claimed he bought the drugs from Remy. Remy denied being the supplier, but did admit to being a steroid user.

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July was some kind of month. We saw, among other things, a perfect game, an All-Star Game, an exodus of players to competitive teams, our monthly ration of steroid drama, and a baseball executive who was fired for throwing down his shirt as though it were a gauntlet and challenging his players to a fight.

So once again, The Dugout calls upon the insights of Bobby Cox and Charlie Manuel to puree the month of July into a series of easily-digestible puns. Read it after the jump.

When it comes to the sham that is the Boston Red Sox's championship legacy during the 21st century, it's about the New York Yankees.

It's always been about the Yankees with the Red Sox.

More specifically, it's always been about Yogi Berra's quote for the ages regarding the Red Sox toward his Yankees: "They'll never beat us."

And they haven't. Not legitimately. Especially not given the latest news that David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez formed an artificially inflated duo to slug the Red Sox to those World Series titles in 2004 and 2007.