With the New York Yankees, there's no such thing as a subdued season, and it isn't as though they've gone untouched by the long arm of actual or alleged performance-enhancing substances.
But they've barely let it sink in that their former, longtime manager collaborated on a revelatory book with a respected sportswriter, when the arguable biggest name in the game, who just so happens to wear a Yankee uniform, cops to using actual or alleged performance-enhancing substances for three years as a Texas Ranger.
The timing was particularly intriguing. Alex Rodriguez's exposure and then confessional poured forth within a month following the disclosure, in Joe Torre and Tom Verducci's The Yankee Years, that he was known as A-Fraud in portions of the Yankee clubhouse. Within a fortnight after that, there appeared stories and analyses enough portraying him not as the narcissist he is sometimes thought to be but, rather, the somewhat self-loathing boy whose most hungering need is that to be loved, cared for. Within two days after his exposure provoked the prospect that his primary regret would be that he was caught.
"When I arrived in Texas in 2001," he told ESPN's Peter Gammons, barely three days after the news broke (courtesy of Sports Illustrated's David Epstein and Selena Roberts) and he referred initial questions to a players' union that might have betrayed him, "I felt an enormous amount of pressure [over his $252 million deal, the highest in professional sports at the time he signed it]. I felt like I had all the weight of the world on top of me, and I needed to perform, and perform at a high level ... I was naive, and I wanted to prove to everyone that, you know, I was worth .[the contract] ... and being one of the greatest players of all-time.
"I did take a banned substance and, um, for that, I'm very sorry and deeply regretful." he continued, a clipped quiver in his customarily mellow voice, almost as though he were trying to choke the impulse to cry. "And although it was the culture back then, and, uh, and major league baseball ... was very ... I'm just, I just feel that, you know, I'm just sorry. I'm sorry for that time, I'm sorry to my fans, I'm sorry to my fans in Texas, it wasn't until then that I ever thought about substance of any kind, and since then I've proved, to myself and to everyone, that I don't need any of that."
And what becomes when our own self-righteousness evaporates, when we see him under coming pressure the like of which even Barry Bonds, who isn't and wasn't half as likable when all was said and too much done as Alex Rodriguez in even his lesser moments, with nine years to go on his incumbent Yankee contract and a weight upon him that might — might — make the one that stirred his naivete and stupidity resemble a gentle prod upon his shoulder?
Because when Bonds yanked himself past Hank Aaron it was a very brief moment before finger after finger pointed toward A-Rod as the man most likely to extend clean hands to rescue the career bomb record from the soiled hands that now possessed it. Jayson Stark, another ESPN analyst, isolates the point:
I do have some measure of sympathy for him, though. We can't forget that these test results were supposed to be confidential. So the leaking of the results of those tests — particularly his tests — is outrageous on one level, suspicious on another.I also know that he isn't alone. I know there are 103 other positive tests on that list, capable of being leaked any minute. And I know there are hundreds of other players who never failed a test, who never have had a finger pointed, who never have come up in this conversation, who are just as guilty of performance-enhancing-drug use as the names we spend all our time talking about.
So even now, it isn't particularly fair to single out A-Rod. I'll concede that.
But those are all just subplots to the big show, under A-Rod's big top. And that show isn't going to close for the rest of Alex Rodriguez's life.
He should resign himself to that before he takes another step or utters another word. The yolk is never going back inside the egg. So whatever he does next, however he explains himself this week and next week and for the rest of his career, all he can possibly accomplish is damage control.
But the damage itself already has been done. And it's never going to be undone.
That's the crime here. Oh, it may not just be his crime. It's a crime shared by everyone who allowed the steroid era to exist and persist. But that doesn't make our man A-Rod any more innocent, either. No, in some ways it makes him even more guilty.
He was a special player, with a special gift — and an even more special opportunity: He was the man with the opportunity to reconnect baseball's once-indelible dotted line between past and present, between great-grandsons and great-grandfathers, between his home plate and your hometown.
And now he's squandered that gift, squandered that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
So weep not for what A-Rod has done to himself.
Weep for what he's done to his sport.
We and they believed Alex Rodriguez would lead baseball beyond the era of actual or alleged performance-enhancing substances. And now we and they have to believe that we're certain we don't know what to believe, except perhaps how foolish it is to commit to temporal saviours.
Not even his best friend would have accused Barry Bonds of having been such a saviour in training approaching 2007. Not even his worst enemy would have accused Mark McGwire of having sought the assignment in 2008. And not even his least convinceable teammate would reject that Alex Rodriguez, who was suddenly supposed to be on such an assignment, turned out to be only too human, after all.
Forgiving him for testosterone and primobolan — or, translated to human terminology, replenishing a substance his own body produces while getting a little help in burning off a little extra fat — will be simpler than forgiving him for having been established as a temporal saviour but exposed as a human being. For ourselves, and perhaps for the Yankees, as well.
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