Alex Rodriguez joined the list of cheaters this year, and Manny Ramirez and David "Big Papi" Ortiz are forever tainted now, too.

Five years after Major League Baseball added punishments to its testing program, questions about performance-enhancing drugs still swirl around America's favorite pastime. The sport's ongoing drug problem was chosen as the 2009 Story of the Year by members of The Associated Press, outmuscling even the shocking downfall of Tiger Woods.

"The impact that that story had made it the story of the year," said Lance Hanlin, sports editor of the Beaufort (S.C.) Gazette and The (Hilton Head) Island Packet. "It was a big, ongoing, overall story."

In fact, the Woods scandal finished fifth in the top story voting. Jimmie Johnson's unprecedented fourth straight NASCAR championship was second, followed by Roger Federer winning his 15th Grand Slam and Brett Favre ending his (second) retirement to lead the Minnesota Vikings to the division title.

This year's balloting was unusual in that a major story _ Woods' accident on Nov. 27 and the salacious revelations that followed _ happened after voting had started.

By then, 37 of 161 ballots had been submitted by editors at U.S. newspapers which are members of the AP. The voters were asked to rank the top 10 sports stories of the year, with the first-place story getting 10 points, the second-place story receiving nine points, and so on.

Given the extraordinary nature of the Woods story, the AP added it to the top stories ballot Nov. 30 and gave editors who had voted prior to that the chance to submit a new ballot, which about 10 did.

"I think it's transcended sports in general. It's become a national story," said Phil Kaplan, the deputy sports editor at the Knoxville (Tenn.) News Sentinel, who changed his vote to place the Woods' scandal ahead of baseball's drug woes.

"He's such a figure in sports that people are interested," Kaplan added. "People who don't follow sports are following this story."

Nonetheless, the final tally had the steroids story with 800 points to 617 points for Woods' travails. And even if only the votes cast after the Woods' scandal broke were counted, editors still picked the steroid scourge as the year's top story.

Voters who included the Woods saga on their list, however, were more likely to make it their top item: His downfall received 41 first-place votes compared with 27 for the steroids crisis.

Though only one major leaguer tested positive for a performance-enhancing drug in this, the first full year under toughened rules, baseball still finds itself trapped in the clutches of the Steroid Era.