MLB

ORTIZ TO TALK ABOUT POSITIVE STEROID TEST

Today’s press conference at Yankee Stadium featuring David Ortiz could provide some answers or just lead to more questions.

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Ortiz will address the media at 12:30 p.m., hours before the Red Sox and Yankees play the third of a four-game series. He will be accompanied by Michael Weiner, the Major League Players Association general counsel and expected successor to executive director Donald Fehr, when he gets behind the microphone in the Yankees’ press conference room.

What Ortiz will say is unknown. He promised answers after a published report last week revealed his 2003 positive test.

“Based on the way I have lived my life, I am surprised to learn I tested positive,” Ortiz said last week. “I will find out what I tested positive for. And based on whatever I learn, I will share this information with my club and the public.”

Ortiz’s on-field struggles continued last night. He went 1-for-6 with a strikeout. The hit in the ninth inning broke a 19 at-bat hitless streak.

The Players Association has been in contact with Ortiz, including a meeting with the Red Sox slugger Thursday at Yankee Stadium. It is unusual for the union to hold a press conference. Weiner will issue a lengthy statement as well as answer questions at the press conference.

Weiner is likely to address the famed “list” of around 100 players who had positive tests in 2003, when testing was supposed to remain anonymous. There has been an outcry to release the entire list of players who came up positive. Reports have linked Ortiz, Manny Ramirez, Alex Rodriguez, Sammy Sosa, David Segui and Jason Grimsley with failed tests from that year.

The union also may go on the offensive toward lawyers leaking names to the media and the reporters who have written about them. The tests are under a court seal.

What Ortiz says will be far more intriguing. Some suspect he will offer up the defense of unknowingly taking steroids. Barry Bonds used this defense before the BALCO grand jury, and Ortiz’s statements after the report indicate he may blame a tainted supplement or some other legal substance that could have come up dirty.

Two years ago, Ortiz told the Boston Herald he used protein shakes in the Dominican Republic that could have contained steroids.

“I tell you, I don’t know too much about steroids, but I started listening about steroids when they started to bring that [expletive] up, and I started realizing and getting to know a little bit about it,” Ortiz said when the report was revealed. “You’ve got to be careful. I used to buy a protein shake in my country. I don’t do that anymore because they don’t have the approval for that here, so I know that, so I’m off buying things at the GNC back in the Dominican Republic. But it can happen any time, it can happen. I don’t know. I don’t know if I drank something in my youth, not knowing it.”

Like many things in this steroid story, today’s press conference could leave us with more questions than answers.

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brian.costello@nypost.com