Shaughnessy is too good to have to invent anything. He neither invented anything in this instance nor accused Ortiz of using steroids and their cousins. What he did was take his skepticism and his curiosity, good traits for a newspaperman to have, and ask Ortiz about steroids. Ortiz’s responses did not indicate anger of being accused of wrong doing.

I would compare the Ortiz column to the columns I have written about Mike Piazza and my suspicions about his possible use of steroids. I ...

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If the players who compete in the WBC work out and play the way they do with their own teams, they are no more susceptible to injury than if they play for WBC teams. Injury developments from the first two Classics (2006, 2009) bear this out.

In fact, Major League Baseball statistics show that players participating in the WBC have been less likely to be injured than those who are in spring training with their own teams.

Of the 73 major leaguers ...

Having just lost a bidding battle to the New York Yankees for a Cuban defector, pitcher Jose Contreras, [Red Sox executive] Larry Lucchino expressed his frustration when I called him on Dec. 24, 2002.

”The evil empire extends its tentacles even into Latin America,” Lucchino said.

The comment instantly grabbed a hallowed spot in the lexicography of baseball lore, spreading rapidly throughout the sport and the news media.

It returned to prominence last week when it was disclosed that a ...

Chass forgets the Hall of Fame Molitor

With Raines’ vote total rising, the voting members of the Baseball Writers Association are either forgetting or ignoring that Raines admitted in 1982 and in subsequent years that he used cocaine.

At one of the drug trials in Pittsburgh in 1985, Raines testified that he kept cocaine in the back pocket of his uniform pants during games and that when he had to slide, he slid headfirst to make sure he didn’t break the glass vial in which he kept the ...

Frank Russo is a baseball collector who doesn’t collect bats, balls, uniforms or autographs.

A 53-year-old resident of East Brunswick, N.J., Russo collects obituaries and death certificates of major league baseball players. He keeps track of their causes of death, and when he can find them, he takes pictures of their gravesites.

And if all of that is not unusual enough, he is a member of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR for short) who does not consider himself a ...

What about bacne as a basis for suspicion, Murray?

What I think we know now, though, is there is no basis for the suspicion of Rodriguez critics – and he has plenty of critics in the news media as well as among fans – that Rodriguez’s hip injuries are the result of his admitted use of steroids. ...

[D]octors who discussed the hip injury were unanimous in the view that steroids could not be considered the culprit in Rodriguez’s hip problems, even though reporters tried hard to make ...