A-Fraud

Wow. Big news in the world of sports over the weekend, huge news here in New York, is of course word that Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez tested positive in 2003 for two anabolic steroids, as part of the Major League's "survey" drug test where they performed an anonymous, random screening across 1198 players in the league in an attempt to determine if the steroid problem were prominent and widespread enough to merit further intervention by the league. The names of the players whose samples were being tested were not kept with the results, and the only way the union would ever acquiesce to allow this survey test was with explicit agreement from the league that there would be no penalties or punishments as a result of this purely "diagnostic" test, and the names or individual results could never become public. The actual samples of the 1198 players tested were kept in the testing lab in Las Vegas of all places, with the samples tied to numerical codes without the player names included. The list of the names of all the tested players and their corresponding codes was in an office nearly 300 miles away in Long Beach, California. The two were never supposed to be united, and never would have until BALCO got raided in 2004 and then suddenly the federal government found itself seizing all sorts of information and documents, among which included the list of names and the corresponding results. And as the folks on ESPN have been putting it all weekend long, it was only a matter of time until this stuff came out, once the two lists had been put together.

This is a huge story for a couple of reasons. First, of course, is that A-Rod is the premier offensive player of the past whatever many years in the Major Leagues. Having this guy now tainted as badly as Barry Bonds, Jose Canseco, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Rafael Palmeiro along with most of the other offensive stars of the Steroid Era is probably the very worst thing that could have happened right now for the sport, or something close to it. But I think there's a larger reason why this story is hitting so many of us so hard at the moment, and that has to do with bullshit. See, I recently heard this theory that I really subscribe to that given what has transpired in this country over the past several months, the American people at this exact point in time have, in historical terms, seriously low tolerance for bullshit. Not from our presidents, not from our legislators, not from CEOs, not from investment advisors, brokers, bankers, lawyers or anyone. Right now, bullshit is trading at an all-time low compared to mostly all of our lives. And in a nutshell what we just learned is that Alex Rodriguez is a Class A bullshitter.

Seriously. It turns out, A-Rod really is A-Fraud. Not just because he did steroids, but because, like Bonds and Palmeiro and Sosa and so many others before him, he openly and brazenly lied about it. Here is A-Fraud with Katie Couric on December 7, 2007, talking about the steroid controversy:



In a scoop that has every network and media outlet scrambling for all the random video they can find of A-Rod chatting it up with Rafael Palmeiro there in the Rangers' dugout in 2003, it turns out that I guess A-Fraud actually did feel overmatched on the baseball field, enough in his MVP year of 2003 to take both testosterone and Primobolan, an illegal anabolic steroid that can be injected or taken orally to improve strength without significant side effects. So A-Rod is a liar, and as I said above, liars are never a great thing, but ten years ago when our president was the king of all liars the whole dishonesty thing was much more accepted. Nowadays, after a year of everyone in government, everyone on Wall Street and basically anybody in any position of authority lying through their effing teeth to us and costing millions of jobs and literally trillions of dollars in the process, A-Fraud is gonna get as little slack as you can imagine for this stuff.

Perhaps surprisingly, I am really of two minds about this whole thing. I mean, clearly this changes the way I view A-Rod, and the entire game of baseball, forever. I have made no bones here for years about my lack of respect for anything even remotely related to cheating, and to have to add a guy to the list who I've always held out in my own head at least as the best example there is of a clean superstar in this sport is devastating for my view of the game as a whole. But you know what? I don't think I'm going to have much more to say about this. Because A-Rod got effed with this whole thing. Hard. Those test results were required to be private and confidential forever. Originally, even the players who were tested were not given the results of their own screenings (though ESPN has since confirmed that A-Rod was in fact aware of his positive tests), and as I mentioned, the results and the player list were kept a long distance apart, very much by design. I understand that the government seized what they could related to the BALCO case and of course I defend their right to do that, but I have to wonder, why on earth were those test results and that list of names and testing ID numbers even retained in the first place so that they would be seizable by the government a year later? More than anything else, Alex Rodriguez's union threw his ass under the bus in a huge, huge way, by allowing those test results to exist for long enough that they could be discovered as part of an investigation, matched up with the right identities of the test subjects and then released to the public.

The bottom line is, this information was supposed to never be disclosed, to anyone, for any purpose whatsoever, and then through a series of events that were completely and totally unknown and pretty much unforeseeable to everyone involved at the time, the fact that A-Rod used steroids ended up being leaked anyways. I simply don't feel like using my blog to crush a guy based on information, though credibly true, that was never supposed to be made public. The players' union would never in two trillion (i.e., one bank bailout's worth) years have sanctioned these "diagnostic" tests if they thought there was even the slightest possible chance of the results coming public six years in the future. Not a chance. So I'm going to at least give that the slightest modicum of respect and not kill A-Fraud any more than I already have here, even though I could say a lot more about him under different circumstances.

Suffice it to say, it seems that over the past eight years or so, the world really has become an increasingly worse place to try to explain to my kids. And I find that to be very, very sad.