When I was a young boy, I remember using the term “Chinese water torture” for any activity that seemed long, torturous and pointless. I have been reminded of this repeatedly over the last few years as slowly, almost one-by-one, the names of baseball players who tested positive for some sort of performance enhancing drugs have become public.

Anonymous and confidential drug testing, conducted for Major League baseball and the MLB Players Association in 2003 to determine the extent of the drug problem, has turned out to be not so confidential.

Obviously, some of the anonymity has been taken out of the process by various leaks from a sealed document of a grand jury. Some law abiding journalists have managed somehow to get this information and have it confirmed and published before anyone else beats them to it. Confidentiality be damned. Trust has become an unknown commodity in our tell-all world.

This week, the names of Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz leaked out a mere six years after the tests. In Manny’s case, there can be little surprise given the fact that he has just finished serving a 50-game suspension for failing a more recent test. In David Ortiz’s case, again the shock can’t be too big when one considers the circumstantial evidence drawn from changes in his career trajectory in the early part of this decade.

Despite all this, six-year-old news is being treated with the kind of sensation that a recent drug bust at your parish church might garner. Baseball writers have a special gift for defaming the game with old and tired news. They seem to have appointed themselves the special guardians of the purity of baseball across time, although given their limited vision, they are able to deal with only one set of drugs at a time.

They also can deal with only one sport at a time, or perhaps football has been too riddled with steroids from the start for anyone to care. And they insist on referring to the past 10-15 years as the Steroid Era. Perhaps it was.

However, if the “Steroid Era” becomes a specific designation for record keeping purposes, then shouldn’t there also be an “Amphetamine Era,” when players used greenies to make it through those difficult road trips, those day games after night games, and those first games after coming off coast-to-coast travel without a day off?

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