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We have not seen the last of the names from the notorious 2003 list of players who tested positive for performance-enhancing substances. In fact, the judicial decision the other day that government agents violated the rights of baseball players and others by seizing results of their tests will very likely only trigger the release of more names.

How’s that, you ask.

Although the 9-2 decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit says the government cannot retain or use the names to question players who tested positive for steroids in a survey that was supposed to remain anonymous and confidential, the person or persons who have leaked names from the list may very well feel the need to leak even more names because that will be the only way to make the players look bad.

That is the purpose of the leaks. One or more lawyers and/or government agents have an agenda they believe to be more important than the law of the land. It doesn’t matter to that person or those people that three federal district courts and an appellate court that is one rung below the United States Supreme Court have ruled that the government didn’t have the right to seize the test results. The leakers know better.

If the only way to teach those players a thing or two is to leak their names and disclose that they used steroids in 2003, they are going to do it, the courts be damned. It matters not at all to them that the players agreed to be tested that year because they were promised confidentiality and anonymity.  It didn’t matter to the government. Why should it matter to them?

Who are the leakers? Only the reporters to whom they leaked – Selena Roberts of Sports Illustrated and Michael Schmidt of The New York Times – know for sure.

The most common suspicion has been that it was one or more government lawyers or agents who became disgruntled because they wouldn’t be able to use the names. More recently, however, a rumor spread that it was a junior attorney at a law firm used by the baseball players union. I suppose that’s possible – leakers feel proud when they see secret information out in public and know they are responsible – but that’s a dangerous and career-threatening game for a junior attorney to play, or anyone for that matter.

But if the reporters who have reported the names are to be believed, they received their information from more than one leaker. In her report on SI.com, Roberts said she and a colleague had four sources. I find that difficult to believe because given the nature of the business that’s an awful lot of people whispering the name Alex Rodriguez in a reporter’s ear.

In the two articles that have appeared in the Times Schmidt has cited lawyers plural. Again I have trouble with the plural because how likely is it that after a name has never been mentioned suddenly more than one person is giving a reporter a player’s name. It’s possible that a reporter gets a name from one person and goes to another person who confirms it, but the way the Times articles were written it seemed that more than one source disclosed the name rather than one disclosing it and others confirming it.

I spent most of my working life as a reporter, and I relied on people telling me things they weren’t supposed to tell me. But all of those many reports that I developed for the Times were different from the steroids revelations. I don’t recall ever being involved in an illegal act, but the reporters who have had the most sensational steroids stories were part of illegal acts, whether or not they themselves were guilty of anything.

Consider the Balco case. Two San Francisco Chronicle reporters were shown transcripts of grand jury testimony and reported that Jason Giambi, among others, told the grand jury that he had used steroids. All of the Balco defendants pleaded guilty, and no trial was held.

If the defense lawyer, who later went to prison for the crime of leaking grand jury transcripts, had not leaked the transcripts, Giambi would never have been revealed as a steroids user. Life would have been a lot easier for him.

If the leakers of the 2003 names had respected the court seal on the names, as well as the confidentiality and anonymity of the tests, and not leaked names, Rodriguez, Sammy Sosa, Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz would not have been singled out and, in some eyes, disgraced.

Now some people will say cheaters deserve to be disgraced and they may be right, but not in the manner in which it happened, especially the 2003 guys, who were betrayed by the federal government.

“All three judges below expressed grave dissatisfaction with the government’s handling of the investigation, some going so far as to accuse the government of manipulation and misrepresentation,” Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the Ninth Circuit, wrote in his opinion seizing the 2003 results from the government’s grasp.

All three district judges found that the government “callously disregarded” the Fourth Amendment rights against illegal search and seizure of hundreds of players and civilians whose test results the government had not initially sought.

Rather than follow proscribed guidelines for such searches, Judge Kozinski wrote, “the case agent immediately rooted out information pertaining to all professional baseball players and used it to generate additional warrants and subpoenas to advance the investigation.”

“The risk to the players associated with disclosure,” he wrote, “and with that the ability of the Players Association to obtain voluntary compliance with drug testing from its members in the future, is very high. Indeed, some players appear to have already suffered this very harm as a result of the government’s seizure.”

In this fight between the baseball union and the federal government, the judiciary clobbered the government. Three lower courts ruled against the government and the circuit court, sitting en banc, did the same after a three-judge panel had ruled in the government’s favor, two to one.

“It is not surprising, then, that all three of the district judges below were severely troubled by the government’s conduct in this case,” Judge Kozinski wrote. “Judge Mahan, for example, asked ‘what ever happened to the Fourth Amendment? Was it . . . repealed somehow?’

“Judge Cooper referred to ‘the image of quickly and skillfully moving the cup so no one can find the pea.’ And Judge Illston regarded the government’s tactics as ‘unreasonable’ and found that they constituted ‘harassment.”

Now it remains to be seen what will become of the list of names. The government could appeal the decision to the Supreme Court, but the chances of the court’s accepting the case would seem to be remote. Remember that the current administration is different from the one that was in power when the case began.

But it would be interesting if the case did go to the Supreme Court because one of the justices who would hear the case, Sonia Sotomayor, was the federal judge whose 1995 ruling in favor of the National Labor Relations Board and by extension the players union enabled the players to end their strike. How many Supreme Court Justices get a chance to go 2-for-2 in baseball cases?

The circuit court’s decision could have an impact on the Barry Bonds case. Bonds is awaiting trial on perjury charges, but the primary agent in his case, Jeff Novitzky, was the chief agent in the illegal search and seizure of the test results. His credibility is not too high right now.

In the meantime, watch for the leaks. Even though the names will remain under seal until the government makes its decision, the leakers still have their copies of the list. The voyeurs who have waited breathlessly for more names are hoping they won’t lose their nerve now that the names could disappear into oblivion.

The government’s loss may be the voyeurs’ gain.

This is a column about a column. Put another way, this is a eulogy for a column that is dying after 82 years. It is the Sports of the Times column of The New York Times. The Times seems intent on killing the column before the newspaper itself dies. It’s like parents, knowing they are going to die, killing their children because they won’t be able to live on without them.

The problem with this warped thinking in the case of the newspaper is the demise of the column and the thinking behind the act will help hasten the newspaper’s demise.

The New York Observer signaled the Times’ misbegotten plan in an article last week. The Times has said nothing about such a plan, but then the sports department of the Times rarely informs readers of developments with its section.

John Koblin of the Observer reported that a Sports of the Times columnist, Harvey Araton, had left the sports department and moved to a new features department, and “a once proud species ambled closer to extinction.”

The species had reason to be proud. It has produced three Pulitzer Prize winners – Arthur Daley, Red Smith (below) and Dave Anderson – and was considered a jewel of the Times. Newspapers are changing in the age of the Internet, but why would the Times want to hasten its demise by eliminating a staple that attracts readers and prompts them to buy the paper? You don’t see the Times killing off Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd.

Two years ago, the Observer noted, the Times had five sports columnists. “Six,” Araton corrected in a telephone interview, amending the number. “I always looked at it as six until Dave Anderson retired to emeritus status, Selena Roberts left and you left.”

For those who don’t know, I should acknowledge here that from January 2004 through May 2008 I was a baseball columnist for the Times, not a Sports of the Times columnist, which I never wanted to be, but Araton included me in his count because, he said, “You wrote more than any of us. Football technically may be the No. 1 sport, but baseball is the No. 1 writing sport.”

However the baseball columnist is counted, when Anderson retired after writing columns for 36 years (he writes 18 columns a year on a contract basis), Roberts went to Sports Illustrated and I accepted a buyout from the Times, three columnists remained – Araton, George Vecsey and Bill Rhoden. Now Araton reluctantly is out of sports, and Vecsey told the Observer that at age 70, “he’s about ready to retire.”

Which is why, at least for now, he is still writing sports columns and not working from a desk in the features or fashions department. But none of his departed colleagues have been replaced and none apparently will be.

“There will be no replacements,” the Observer reported.

The general sports columnist “is part of a bygone era,” the Observer quoted the Times sports editor, Tom Jolly, as saying. Jolly is big on using bygone eras as an excuse for his highly questionable changes.

“The Sports of the Times is a great brand, and I hate to see that brand disappear, but it clearly is changing,” Jolly told the Observer. But the change is only in Jolly’s mind.

His comment about columns being part of a bygone era was familiar to me because I had heard it before. Jolly tried that approach with me when he told me in March 2008 (along with the news that my assignment would be changing) that the Sunday baseball notebook I had written for 23 ½ years was being eliminated.

He explained in an e-mail that “it no longer makes sense to run a weekly notebook. the notebook concept was born at a time when the sunday paper was the place to catch people up on what was going on around the nation, especially on news and events people may have missed. but at a time when the paper is shrinking – literally – and the internet is growing, a weekly notebook has become an anachronism.”

Jolly (at right), however, did not know what he was talking about. He was not present when I began writing the notebook in August 1984 and had no idea why it began. The Olympics were on at the time, and the sports editor, Joe Vecchione, wanted something besides the Olympics in the Sunday paper and asked me to write a baseball notebook. It had nothing to do with readers catching up with anything. It never has in 25 years.

Jolly also said readers didn’t want to read 1,400-word notebooks anymore. But as soon as I left the Times, he replaced the live, original notebook with 1,400 used words that were regurgitated from Web site blogs. As for no one wanting to read the notebook, readers of this Web site have proved differently.

According to the Observer, Jolly’s idea to replace the Sports of the Times columns runs along similar lines.

The Times sports section will have fewer general sports writers writing columns, the Observer said, and instead will have beat writers “provide expertise.” And this: “He wants them to blog, he wants them to use Twitter and he wants them to write analysis pieces.”

One of those analysis pieces on the Yankees gave the Yankees beat writer, Tyler Kepner, license to use the word “I.” To see the word “I” in any kind of piece written by a reporter is about as shocking a development as a reader can read in the Times. Suddenly Times reporters are writing in the first person. The next thing you know Times beat writers will be cheering in the press box.

Jolly, the Observer said, has based his thinking on blogs, talk radio and cable programs, saying “there does seem to be a pretty good craving for expert analysis – the real insight of someone who is there.”

Is he saying that because the Sports of the Times columnists are not “there,” where beat writers are, that they can’t provide analysis? On the contrary, they are in a more advantageous position because they are not buried in the trenches and can see matters more objectively.

A good columnist does his homework. When Anderson (at left) was a columnist and I covered the Yankees, he would always talk to me before writing a column about the Yankees. If he needed to know something, I would fill him in.

The Times would be better off and their readers better served if the beat writers worked harder at developing news stories that other papers don’t have. The Times’ beat writers seldom, if ever, seem to unearth exclusive news, which newspapers strive for. The exclusives are usually found in the Daily News or the Post.

But Jolly, working for a newspaper desperately trying to stay alive, has heavily bought into gimmicks and is abandoning sound newspaper practices.

“Tom was the Sunday editor for maybe three years in the 90s,” said a person who worked for the Times in the ‘90s. “I never thought of him as a journalist.”

Araton said that Jolly has “made it clear that he would like writers of specific sports to write analysis pieces,” adding, “I think that would be a mistake to do away with general sports columns entirely. You need the wall between reporting and opinion. It’s clearly a quandary for reporters who have to maintain a relationship with the people they cover.”

Araton (at right), a Times columnist for 14 years, said Jolly approached him in May about a change in assignments.

“It was put to me that given the fluid nature of the industry and the newspaper that there were some opportunities and Tom asked me if I would consider doing anything different at the paper,” Araton related. “Initially I was taken aback, but when I met with one of the managing editors, they explained to me what it was. I wasn’t envisioning leaving sports at that point, but in the last couple years I did consider leaving sports. It was presented to me as a six-month posting and I thought it might actually be interesting.”

Araton, 57, said he didn’t know what would happen after his six-month stay with the feature group, either for him or for the columnists generally. “Tom has said however many times there are clearly going to be fewer than before,” Araton said.

The Times is not the only New York newspaper shedding columnists. Earlier this year Newsday, the Long Island paper, lopped off Johnette Howard and Shaun Powell.

The Times could have more sports changes coming. An employee in the sports department said there are rumblings that the newspaper in the future will not cover all of the Mets and Yankees games. That indeed would be a shocking and sad development.