Jason Giambi's steroids problems made him one of the big losers in public opinion among athletes in the last year.

Maria Sharapova's Wimbledon win wasn't enough to get more fans to have a positive rather than negative opinion of her.

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - It's not a big surprise that New York Yankees player Jason Giambi is less popular with both fans and advertisers than he once was.

It was widely reported last fall that Giambi admitted in federal grand jury testimony that he took illegal steroids to help his performance. By then his on-field performance had plunged, too.

A survey of sports fans in March by Marketing Evaluations Inc., the firm that creates "Q" scores that help advertisers determine the public appeal of celebrities, found that 40 percent had a negative view of Giambi, almost double the 23 who had a negative view of him a year ago. Advertisers such as Nike and Pepsi have stopped using him.

Steroids also took a huge bite out of the appeal of former star Mark McGwire. McGwire refused to answer questions about his possible use of the performance enhancing drugs at a congressional hearing in March, just as the survey was being conducted.

Those with negative views of him doubled to 28 percent, while those with positive views plunged to 20 percent from 33 percent a year earlier.

But Barry Bonds, the San Francisco slugger also tied to steroid use, didn't see the public view of him change radically. (Of course, it wasn't that good to begin with.)

Those with positive views of him dropped to 18 percent from 22 percent a year earlier, while those with negative views rose to 34 percent from 27 percent.

On the other side is Boston Red Sox star pitcher Curt Schilling. An outspoken critic of steroid use in baseball, Schilling was portrayed as one of those who pushed the union into accepting tougher steroid tests.

His performance on the field was also seen as heroic – pitching with a bleeding and badly injured ankle stitched together, he helped lead his team past the Yankees to a championship.

You'd think that Schilling's positives would have soared. But the public opinion of him also went from positive to negative, albeit only slightly.

Those with a negative view rose to 22 percent from 16 percent a year ago, while those with positive views fell to 18 percent from 20 percent a year earlier.

Schilling's outspoken support for President Bush – he campaigned with the president immediately after his World Series heroics -- may have hurt him in the blue states, at least the ones outside of Red Sox Nation.

Schilling's current positive and negatives actually are close to the average.

"The norm is 16 positive, 25 negative for typical sports personality," said Henry Schafer executive vice president of Marketing Evaluations Inc. "Those with overwhelming positive ratings are the exceptions, not the rule."

Non-partisan stars like Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan, who retired (again) in 2005, remain golden in the eyes of advertisers, even if their athletic accomplishments in the year leading up to the March 2005 survey was seen as a disappointment.

Jordan's positive rating stayed the same at 49 percent, his negative rating edged up only slightly to 13 percent.

Tiger saw his positive reading slip, but only to 40 percent, from 44 percent a year earlier. His negatives edged up, but again only to 17 percent from 14 percent in 2004. And those that know him actually managed to climb to 90 percent from 88 percent a year earlier.

By comparison, Phil Mickelson, who won the Masters in 2004, saw his recognition edge up to 54 percent, and those with a negative view of him fall to 19 percent from 23 percent a year earlier. But that was only slightly ahead of the 20 percent who had a positive view of him.

Some younger athletes achieved both advertising and athletic breakouts. But the numbers suggest that the advertisers who are signing them are betting on future public appeal rather than current popularity.

Maria Sharapova, the 18-year old who won the Wimbledon singles title in 2004, saw fans who knew who she was rise to 42 percent, up from 23 percent in a previous survey.

But while her positive-negative ratio is also better than it used to be, it's still a bit on the negative side, with 22 percent having a negative view and only 14 percent a positive view.

Even marketing and basketball superstar-in-the-making LeBron James, who bucked to the trend to have a more positive view in the eyes of the public, is only slightly positive.

The Cleveland Cavalier star who went directly from high school in 2003 to be named NBA Rookie of the Year in 2004 has a 26 percent positive rating, and a 22 percent negative view.