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According to Sports Illustrated online today:

“In 2003, when he won the American League home run title and the AL Most Valuable Player award as a shortstop for the Texas Rangers, Alex Rodriguez tested positive for two anabolic steroids, four sources have independently told Sports Illustrated.

Rodriguez’s name appears on a list of 104 players who tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs in Major League Baseball’s ’03 survey testing, SI’s sources say. As part of a joint agreement with the MLB Players Association, the testing was conducted to determine if it was necessary to impose mandatory random drug testing across the major leagues in 2004.”

Those tests were supposed to be anonymous, but that list of 104 names was seized by federal agents in 2004 as part of the BALCO investigation that has focused on, among other people, Barry Bonds.

There were no penalties for steroid use in baseball back in 2003 and it is unlikely that there will be any disciplinary action against Rodriguez.

But it’s noteworthy that from the moment Barry Bonds broke Hank Aaron’s all-time homerun record in the summer of 2007, much of the baseball public has been eagerly anticipating the day when a “clean” ballplayer would wrest baseball’s most cherished record away from the tainted Bonds. That player would surely have been Arod. Only 33 years old, Arod has already hit 553 career homeruns, good for twelfth all time. Assuming he stays healthy, he is very likely to shatter Bonds’ career record of 762 in the next five or six seasons.

Now, however, Arod is likely tainted too. Though he’s not well-liked, Arod will not be vilified to the degree that Bonds has. But he can no longer “save” baseball’s Mount Olympus from the man that baseball fans and media have always loved to hate.