for a long time sammy was one of my favorite players. so i will resign myself to not believing this hit piece leaked by anonymous sources on a test that was supposed to only be a survey. but still:

The New York Times is reporting that Sosa was among the group of 104 big-leaguers who tested positive in 2003, when the union agreed to supposedly anonymous, “survey testing” to determine if use was widespread enough to trigger a random testing policy. These were the same tests that Alex Rodriguez infamously tested positive for, according to his admission after a report from Sports Illustrated.

The New York Times cited unnamed lawyers with knowledge of the 2003 results as the source of its Tuesday report.

While Sosa has long been suspected of using steroids to fuel his historic binge of home runs in 1998-2002, he has avoided having his name linked to performance enhancing drugs, either directly in the Mitchell Report or through circumstantial evidence or government investigations. Mark McGwire, Barry Bonds, Rafael Palmeiro, Jason Giambi and Rodriguez are among the sluggers who wish they could say the same thin

the lesson here is always be careful when pissing into a cup.

Update: of course i was assigned the duty of posting about this on the Fab Forum blog