FanHouse Sammy Sosa

Sammy Sosa's skin has not been digitally altered in the recent photo you see on the left. And despite the theories flying, this also isn't Michael Jackson Part II -- his skin hasn't been stripped of any pigment by a disorder such as Vitiligo.

It turns out Sosa has just been undergoing a "rejuvenation process," according to Cubs employee Rebecca Polihronis, who speaks frequently with the baseball legend.

Welcome to The Dugout Generation 3: FanHouse Back Porch edition. I'm happy to be working with the people in this section now, because it gives the strip a more obviously comedic, less newsbite-oriented environment within to prosper. It also gets me away from psychotic Yankees fans who think that every sentence they read is a serious, literal truth, and that one guy who googles "Mark McGwire" or whatever every three months and gets defensive. Also, I run an exponentially smaller chance of being called an idiot for my opinions when my comic is sandwiched between women's soccer updates and live-blogging of the World Checkers Championships.

Today's Dugout is after the jump. Warning: it will give you nightmares.

Reggie Jackson is right. So is Jim Rice, along with Rick Telander, a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, who joins me as a baseball Hall of Fame voter and as a hardliner who agrees with Jackson and Rice:

No steroids guys in Cooperstown.

No Roger Clemens. No Barry Bonds. No Mark McGwire. No Sammy Sosa. No Rafael Palmeiro. No Alex Rodriguez. Nobody within a syringe of evidence showing they were artificially enhanced during any portion of their playing career.

I don't care that Ty Cobb was a racist (and possibly worse), that Mickey Mantle joined others as prolific drunks, and that Gaylord Perry spit his way into Cooperstown. They're already in the Hall of Fame. I can't do anything about their entries, but I can do something about Clemens, Bonds and the rest.

While everyone's been following the on-again, off-again, on-again twists and turns surrounding the attempt to make Moneyball into a motion picture, another baseball movie based on a book has quietly been filling out it's lineup card.

Three Nights in August, the book about noted Twitter-hater Tony La Russa by noted blog-hater and author Buzz Bissinger is moving toward the silver screen with the help of a veteran of another big-screen baseball picutre. Billy Bob Thornton, from the wholly unneccesary remake of The Bad News Bears, has signed on to produce the big-screen version of Bissinger's tome about a 2003 series between La Russa's Cardinals and the Cubs.

When the news broke that Sammy Sosa had tested positive for steroid use back in 2003 last week it was kind of like when American Idol runner-up Adam Lambert came out of the closet. You didn't really need to be told anything because you could just see it. When Sosa morphed from a beanpole at the start his career to the behemoth he was at the end of it, it was pretty obvious.

I mean, you didn't need to look past those bulging biceps peeping out of Sosa's jersey to become suspicious of where he got them. Of course, as it turns out, Sosa didn't really care because he wanted you to see those guns of his. He even had his jerseys altered to do just that.

A few weeks ago there was quite a bit of controversy surrounding Phillies outfielder Raul Ibanez, steroids and a blog. More specifically, a media firestorm started when a blogger named JRod wrote a post on MidwestSportsFans.com that looked at the possibility of Ibanez using steroids because of the way he'd been playing in the 2009 season.

The Philadelphia Inquirer then picked up on the story, brought it to Ibanez, Raul responded and then the next thing we knew Jerod Morris, JRod, was showing up on ESPN's Outside the Lines and was berated by Ken Rosenthal and John Gonzalez. Morris was shown off as the latest example of all things wrong with blogging and had to be reprimanded for his seemingly innocuous deed.

This morning, things just seemed different. I could tell. I had a little more spring in my step. The air tasted just a little more sweet. Little did I know that we'd be finding out Sammy Sosa had tested positive for banned substances in 2003! It was closure. Like figuring out the ending to a movie in the first five minutes, then having it last for 15 years.

Stories this obvious need an esoteric approach, and until the Roto Rush starts contemplating Heaven as a series of interlocking plane terminals and hotel suites, that's our job.

This morning's Dugout is after the jump.

At least three times, maybe more, I've asked Sammy Sosa if he ever has used steroids. Each time, he testily answered no, once stating that the only performance-enhancing substance he took was a "Flintstone vitamin." He had this goofy, cartoonish way about him that made you want to believe him, even though deep down, as someone who noticed that his head and upper body were swelled disproportionately to human reality, I knew he was as stone-cold guilty as any of them.

Now, at last, the other syringe seems to have fallen. In a development that will shock no one but the lying, denial-ridden Sosa himself, baseball's sixth-leading home run slugger of all-time reportedly is on the list of 104 players who tested positive for a performance-enhancing drug in 2003. Assuming the New York Times report is correct, it means Sosa becomes the latest in a staggeringly prominent line of fallen, cheating, juiced-up heroes who have turned the game's steroids debacle into pro sports' biggest scandal ever.

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After you got over the "utter shock" of learning that Sammy Sosa had reportedly tested positive for peformance-enhancing drugs, you might have been tempted to think: "Well, there goes his Hall of Fame chances."

This Hall of Fame voter is here to say: Not so fast.

Without getting into all of the details of my well-chronicled position that I'm going to vote based on performance, regardless of alleged or proven steroid use, I'd simply like to remind people that a lot of things can change with time.

The first time the name Sammy Sosa will appear on a Hall of Fame ballot will be December 2012. Provided he gets at least 5 percent of the vote each year, his name will stay on there until 2027. That's a long time.

Long suspected of using steroids, it appears there is finally a smoking gun linking former Cubs, White Sox, Orioles and Rangers slugger Sammy Sosa to performance-enhancing drugs.

Sosa, who is sixth on baseball's all-time home run list, was, along with Alex Rodriguez, one of the 104 players who tested positive for a banned substance in 2003, according to a report in the New York Times.

Sosa rose to national prominence in 1998 when he and Mark McGwire chased Roger Maris' single-season home run record. That chase is often credited with saving baseball after the 1994 player strike that resulted in the cancellation of the World Series, but in recent years Sosa, like most of the other cartoonish sluggers of the late 1990s and early 2000s, has fallen under suspicion of steroid use.

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