A-ROID

:On Saturday morning I had gotten up a little early, so I spent the time finishing up The Yankee Years, the "tell-all" book by Joe Torre and Tom Verducci that supposedly tore A-Rod a new one. I went online to check my email, and the first thing that popped out to me was the subject line "msnbc.com - BREAKING NEWS: Report: Baseball's A-Rod tested positive..." I didn't even have to click the link to read the full headline, but I did anyway. The only surprise at that point was that Alex Rodriguez tested positive for steroids...in 2003.

The ironic thing was that The Yankee Years actually wasn't that controversial when it comes to A-Rod. Sure, he talks about how he was obsessed with what people thought of him, and that he had an uncomfortable relationship with Derek Jeter. But it also talked about how he was the hardest working player that Torre had ever been around. I should have seen the foreshadowing right there, after all, they said the same thing about Mark McGwire or Roger Clemens or Barry Bonds. The thing we've learned about the still-unfolding Steroid Era, that the people who supposedly worked the hardest were probably the most obvious juicers in the game.

Does the steroid scandal manage to surprise? A lot of people are saying on message boards and articles are being written that it shouldn't be. But A-Rod getting busted blew me away, and not just because he's a Yankee. It was only a matter of time, but the biggest sports scandal of our age finally took down a superstar in his prime. It took down a guy that was going to be the savior of baseball, the guy who would break all the records that we could point to and say "See, you can do it cleanly". It took down a guy that was so good for so long, no one (except for Jose Canseco, who's strangely turning into the Bob Woodward of this era) ever brought up his name when it came to performance enhancing drugs. None of the red flags were there, it's not like he sucked for years, and then suddenly came out of nowhere to become a superstar. It's not like he dramatically got bigger from one season to the next. If any megastar was legit, it was A-Rod.

Now, more than ever, it's naive to think that anyone from that era is clean. Red Sox fans are already saying "Oh no, I doubt that Manny, Papi, or Pedro was on that list of 104 players that tested positive in 2003, because that would have leaked" Mets fans think the same thing about Reyes and Piazza. And I'm saying the same thing about Bernie, Jeter, and Mariano. The truth is, it's not ridiculous to assume that anyone who made an All-Star team from 1989 to even now was on some type of performance enhancer at one point. It's absolutely naive to think that "Hey, the media hasn't reported that my favorite player took steroids, so that means he didn't take steroids" That's like saying "My congressman hasn't been reported in any scandals, so I'm sure that he's never taken any shady deals" or "I've never been to Africa, so I'm not sure it really exists" More names are going to be leaked eventually, names that will continue to surprise when it shouldn't. It'll be decades before this whole mess gets sorted out, if that ever happens.

This really sucks, I was really looking forward to baseball season.


"I know there are 650 or 700 other players who are sleeping this morning. Either that, or they're taking their kids to school. But there's no way they're going to be up running the stairs or doing what I'm doing."
-- Alex Rodriguez