Ortiz, others knew they were on ‘the list’

The notifications came after federal investigators seized more than 100 names of ballplayers in an April 2004 raid of the two firms that handled the testing of more than 1,400 samples. After the raid, the commissioner’s office and the Major League Baseball Players Association agreed the union would inform those on the list that the government believed they had tested positive.

But that notification was delayed for months - so Ortiz and Ramirez would not have been informed that they were on the list until deep into that championship season.

According to the report by former Maine Senator George Mitchell, a 400-page assessment of baseball’s doping problem issued in December 2007, the players weren’t told until early September 2004 - just a few weeks before the end of the regular season - even though the list had been finalized in November 2003.

MLBPA executive director Donald Fehr told House committee chairman Henry Waxman in a letter last summer that the players were not explicitly informed that they had tested positive, but only that they were on a list of players the government had seized, as part of an investigation into an illegal steroids operation. Though Major League Baseball and the union worked together on the testing program, which was meant to be a survey gauging the extent of the doping problem that was damaging both the sport’s image and the integrity of the game, the commissioner’s office said it still is unaware of which players tested positive. “Our office never knew who was on the list,’’ spokesman Rich Levin said yesterday. “We haven’t seen it.’’

The list, which led to a mandatory steroid testing program in 2004, never was intended to be made public. But now that four of the 104 men who reportedly tested positive that year have been identified, including Yankees star Alex Rodriguez and former Cubs slugger Sammy Sosa - the players’ union is doing whatever it can to make sure that no other names seep out, while hoping that a US appeals court in California agrees that the list should remain private.

“The leaking of information under a court seal is a crime,’’ Fehr declared Thursday after lawyers involved in the case had told the Times that both Ortiz and Ramirez were on it.