Joe Pos weighs in on Alex Rodriguez in this week’s SI:
A lot of people are tearing at Rodriguez now, raw meat in the lion’s cage, but I don’t feel anger toward him. I don’t feel sorry for him either. I just feel that he’s the emblem of his age. Players can give reasons, but I suspect that there is a two-word explanation for the steroid era: human nature. There was no testing. Authority figures winked. Money was flowing, home runs were flying. Many fans were enthralled; media, too.
More names will come out, of course. In a bizarre irony, the players’ union—Don Fehr and Gene Orza and the lot—which had fought ferociously against drug testing, failed to ensure that the results from a 2003 survey test remained anonymous. So now there are 103 more names from ’03 that, no doubt, will leak out over time. Those players might as well admit they used. Rodriguez has given them cover. There won’t be a bigger name on the list than A-Rod.
Now, there’s one guy I’d love to find: the clean player of the steroid era. I don’t just mean a player who didn’t use—I’m sure there were plenty of those. No, I’d love to find the player who was offered chances to use, the player who understood how much more money and playing time and fame he was giving up. And he still said no.
But Pos wasn’t buying Rodriguez’s taped apology a few days ago:
I thought Alex Rodriguez’s ”apology“ was one of the most absurd shams of recent memory. I thought it was so pathetic that, for the first time, that ”A-Fraud“ moniker finally made some sense to me. As a baseball fan, I wasn’t mad at A-Rod when the steroid story broke. As a baseball fan, I was furious at A-Rod when he and his handlers put together this infomercial apology.* I hope the children weren’t watching THAT.
*And I say this with all respect to interviewer Peter Gammons, who I actually thought handled the interview about as well as he could. Sure, like everyone, you want him to follow up here or question there, and I’m sure Peter has his regrets. But let’s not kid anybody: A-Rod came into this thing as prepped as a presidential candidate, and he was going to say precisely what he was going to say, and I don’t think follow ups would have made much of a difference.
…Look, I never blame anyone for doing what they have to do to minimize damage. But that doesn’t mean anyone should buy it. Do I think Alex Rodriguez is lying? You bet I do. The guy talks about being completely honest and he cannot remember what drugs he used? He doesn’t really know where he got them? He stopped because of some St. Paul like conversion he had with a neck injury in an Arizona bed? That story is so prepackaged it should come with your pack of Ho Hos. And look: I’m a sucker for prepackaged stories, melodramatic movies, sad songs and diamond commercials. I bought the TurboCooker. But I didn’t buy one word of it.
