The whole Alex Rodriguez affair brings a recent New Yorker cartoon to mind. The caption read: "I don't want your apology--I want you to be sorry." As the A-Rod world turns, however, we are getting neither. First were the lies to Katie Couric, then the pathetic interview by Peter Gammons, then the presser on Tuesday, another joke because no follow-up questions were allowed. So that was pretty much that. It went for a bit more than half an hour, during which Rodriguez read from some crumpled papers and paused melodramatically to thank his stoic teammates.
He also treated us to more dribbles of information, this time about his 'cousin' who procured the steroids, called 'boli' or 'bole' (nice touch that, like something from a flim-flam advertisement). Though he painted the two of them as dumb kids playing with needles--in what universe---, it turns out the cousin is 46 or something. Not that A-Rod was a kid at the time in question anyway. Hate to be a cynic but as soon as I heard there was a 'cousin' involved, I wondered how much money had changed hands.
Another disturbing aspect of Tuesday's 'event' was the way A-Rod handled the question about Sports Illustrated reporter Selena Roberts. After trashing her to Gammons, his accusations were revealed to have been baseless lies. Asked about it on Tuesday, Rodriguez said he had "reached out" to her. The guy couldn't even make a token public apology.
I would like this all to go away immediately. But think about the AL and NL MVP's for the past 10 or 15 years. It's a sobering list of names. And really, dubbing this the 'steroid era' is not fair to the players (Rollins and Howard are MVP's who come to mind) that did not juice. But Jimmy Rollins had, as usual, a cool quote about being a 'clean' player. As beat writer Scott Lauber wrote in his blog for the Delaware News Journal, Rollins said, "If you're clean, it doesn't matter....you brush it off your clean."
