This past weekend was a relatively quieest one. I wait tables on Saturdays, so I went into work a bit early, and went through my Saturday routine of eating my breakfast while watching SportsCenter. First few minutes, nothing big. There were a few basketball highlights that I could’ve cared less about, the same Michael Phelps’ photo re-played about half a dozen times. Then the bottom line came up with breaking news, Alex Rodriguez, the heir apparent to restore legitimacy to baseball’s hallowed records, had tested positive for steroids in 2003.
The gut reaction was joy. I went through all the signs I could make when I go to see the Sox and Yankees at Fenway in April. “A-Roid” was my favorite, “Material Roid” and “Like A Syringe, Hitting for the Very First Time” were another couple of my timely classics. I high fived some friends and texted my fellow Sox fans, but then the truth settled in, if Rodriguez was guilty, then everyone was guilty.The truth came out that the leaked report of his name came from a list of 104. Roughly that meant that one out of every six baseball players in 2003 were using, and those are just the ones that got caught. What Rodriguez’ admission though means that if the best pure talent to be in the modern game was roiding, what was stopping everyone else to try and reach the A-Rod status? Let that settle in, and know that at least one player on every major league team tested positive.
I don’t hand out free passes, especially not to Yankees, and ESPECIALLY not to Yankees who further disgraced the game by impurifing it. I started to soften on the whole being angry at him yesterday when I found out he was doing an interview to confirm the report that he had knowingly used steroids from 2001-2003. I’ll give him credit for being smarter than Barry Bonds and Roger “Have Another Donut” Clemens, and coming “clean” and admitting the use of steroids. But when I started to see people half forgive the guy less than 48 hours after it was confirmed that he is the new face of a terrible era in baseball, just made me sick.
So what if you admit to something that you did? That does not make you a better person, or absolve you for what you have done, if what you have done is wrong. Listening to the Jim Rome Show today put everything perfectly into perspective. None of us get “credit” for not cheating on people, paying taxes or doing our jobs. So why is A-Rod getting off the hook so easily by so many people for doing an interview? And a poor interview on his behalf.
Peter Gammons is a brilliant journalist. In my years of following him, no one has been better at objectively covering baseball and getting to the core of a story than him. But he let Rodriguez go on one key issue: what he used.
Athletes’ bodies are their jobs. They have nutritionists and personal trainers that determine everything that goes into an athlete’s body. So it would make perfect sense that a player who will make over a half a billion dollars over his professional career would have the best of the best when it comes to a training staff. Rodriguez claims that he has no idea what he took during a period of two years. These are the same people that won’t eat stuff with egg products unless it is egg-white only. So when it comes to something as big as steroids and HGH, is anyone really buying that Rodriguez had no idea what on earth he was taking? I’m not, but people are focusing on the admission and giving him credit for what he answered, and not what he didn’t.
So as we move forward to the 2009 season, this is the year of A-Rod. The man will be booed in every stadium from the Bronx to Oakland. He will have to go through perhaps an even tougher scrutiny than his close pal, Barry Bonds, had to go through in 2007. Will I feel sorry for him? Never. I will let him have it worse than any player I’ve ever screamed at, believe me when I say the entire bleacher section of Fenway will be screaming louder at him than he ever though he could be vilified. But as angry as I am, the anger will give way to the saddening truth that the face of the restoration of baseball will forever put a dark cloud over an entire era where no one, from top to bottom, is innocent.