NEW YORK — After wading through the muck of steroids cheats, drug dealer associations, lurid sexual harassment charges, and an alt-right extremist who once called for their lynching, the Baseball Writers Association Tuesday bid good riddance to Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa and Curt Schilling on their ballot, dealt a major body blow to Omar Vizquel, and elected only one player to the Hall of Fame.
Unfortunately, David Ortiz, who squeaked in with 77.9 %, just over the 75% needed for election in his first year on the ballot, may just be in a league of his own when it comes to the character/integrity clause in the Hall of Fame voting instructions — but he can nevertheless thank his election to Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred. The one public stain on Ortiz’s candidacy had been the revelation a few years ago that he had been one of 104 players who’d tested positive for steroids in the 2003 anonymous survey conducted by MLB and the Players Association to determine just how widespread steroid use was in baseball. However, Ortiz was exonerated in 2016 by Manfred, who said: “Even if your name was on that list (of 104) it’s entirely possible that you were not a positive,” adding that he felt it would be unfair for Hall of Fame voters to use that positive test against Ortiz.
But what has not been public knowledge was Ortiz’s compromising behavior off the field that went right to the heart of the integrity of the game — and for which he was also let off the hook by Manfred. In his 2018 book “Baseball Cop”, Eddie Dominguez, a high ranking Boston police detective and former FBI and DEA task member who was part of MLB’s since-abolished internal investigation unit, chronicled his three-year investigation of Big Papi and the Red Sox’s DH’s close association with an alleged Dominican drug dealer called “Monga,” who was in the U.S. illegally.
