The Times said Sosa is one of 104 players who tested positive in baseball’s anonymous 2003 survey, which has been the subject of a protracted court fight. The paper did not identify the drug.
It cited lawyers with knowledge of the 2003 drug-testing results and reported they spoke on condition of anonymity because they did not want to publicly discuss material under court seal.
Sosa is sixth on baseball’s career home run list with 609, of which all but 64 came with the Chicago Cubs. He has not played in the majors since 2007 with Texas.
In 2003, baseball did not have penalties for the first-time use of performance-enhancing drugs.
Sosa’s agent, Adam Katz, told The he had no comment on the report. Commissioner’s office spokesman Rich Levin also had no comment, saying Major League Baseball didn’t have a copy of the test results.
Michael Weiner, the union general counsel, also declined comment. The union, while fighting to get the list back from the government, has mostly refused to discuss reports about the list because it does not want to confirm or deny who is on it.
Several of the game’s biggest stars, including home-run king Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco, have been implicated in steroids use.
Sosa sat alongside Canseco and McGwire at a 2005 hearing before Congress and testified: “To be clear, I have never taken illegal performance-enhancing drugs.”
“I have never injected myself or had anyone inject me with anything,” he told the House Government Reform Committee on March 17, 2005. “I have not broken the laws of the United States or the laws of the Dominican Republic. I have been tested as recently as 2004, and I am clean.”
Rep. Henry Waxman, who co-chaired the hearing, declined comment, spokeswoman Karen Lightfoot said.
“To just speculate from an era of how many years it was of who did and didn’t do what, it’s impossible,” Cubs general Jim Hendry said Tuesday night. “It’s just time to put that whole era behind us and move on.”
Sosa, now 40, and McGwire engaged in a race in 1998 to break Roger Maris’ season record of 61 home runs, a chase that captivated the country. McGwire set the mark while Sosa, with a big smile and a trademark hip-hop out of the batter’s box, finished with 66.
Sosa followed up by hitting 63, 50, 64, 49 homers in his next four years. He hit 40 more in 2003, a season in which he was caught using a corked bat in front of the home crowd at Wrigley Field.
Baseball management’s drug policy prohibited the use of steroids without a valid prescription since 1991, but the enforceability of those rules was repeatedly questioned by the union, which did not reach a drug agreement until August 2002. There were no penalties for a positive test in 2003. Those tests were conducted to determine if it was necessary to impose mandatory random drug testing across the major leagues in 2004.
As part of the drug agreement, the results of the testing of 1,198 players in 2003 were meant to be anonymous. Penalties began in 2004, and suspensions for a first positive test started in 2005.
