And the Jason Grimsley steroid saga just got slightly more interesting: The radioactive pitcher asked for his release from the Diamondbacks, and it was granted.

And yes, the Smoking Gun didn’t help his cause, but we love those guys anyway.

On to the good stuff.

While the blacking out of names to protect the guilty innocent begins on page 11, our attempt at decoding begins on page 12, where Grimsley squeals to the feds about two former players who used performance-enhancing drugs.

Now keep in mind we don’t have any inside information (yet), and this is pure speculation, but we believe one of the two former players named on Page 12 is very likely Sammy Sosa. Our guess is that the first name leaked from this testimony will be Sosa.

He fits Grimsley’s “Latin Players” finger-pointing, and if you look at the length of the name that is blacked out, it’s very short. Like 10 letters or less.

And a sentence later, the kicker: One of the former players (specifically, the one with a short last name) directed Grimsley to a Florida doctor last winter. Where was Grimsley last winter before he signed with Arizona? Baltimore. Which also happened to be the home of – wait for it – Sammy Sosa.

There don’t appear to be any clues for us to venture a guess at the rest of the players implicated on page 13, and because Grimsley played for the Phillies, Indians, Royals, Angels, Yankees, Orioles, and Diamondbacks, a quarter of the league could be under suspicion.

In the meantime, Buster Olney goes a little End of Days on us in his blog, but we found this little HGH information rather insightful:

Human growth hormone is on baseball’s banned substance list, and at the same time, there is no reliable test to detect HGH. But there are means of deterrence, and baseball has not taken those steps. It’s as if the Players Association and Major League Baseball told everybody not to speed down the HGH highway and then failed to deploy any radar guns to catch the would-be cheaters.

We read that thusly: Chances are good that players are still using.

Pitcher Spills Steroid, Speed Secrets (The Smoking Gun)