Today's slate.
The Big Hurst: Sally Jenkins in The Washington Post wrote
this story yesterday called,
"Alex Rodriguez's phony personality makes him a perfect target for a flawed process". I won't reprint the whole thing, but there are some good quotes:
- "The ritualistic rage at Alex Rodriguez feels less like justice than a
public stoning, and it’s Exhibit A that the moral crusade against
performance enhancement is as unhealthy as the thing it purports to
correct. Whatever Rodriguez’s transgressions, is he really so much more
culpable than any number of the people he played with or for, including
baseball Commissioner Bud Selig, who makes his living off the sweat of
other men’s bodies and whose apparent idea of justice is to use the
threat of a lifetime ban as a publicity tactic?"
- "[W]hat we have here isn’t a genuine assessment of his offenses but rather a
squeeze play by Selig, an attempt to pressure A-Rod into forgoing his
due process. Whatever the evidence against Rodriguez in the Biogenesis
affair . . . the commissioner is unmistakably
less interested in a fitting penalty than he is in shutting up A-Rod —
and at the same time bolstering his own weak reputation on PEDs."
- "We can’t know what the evidence against A-Rod is because the commissioner hasn’t produced it."
- "MLB officials have told Biogenesis
founder Anthony Bosch they would cover his legal expenses, indemnify
him against litigation and put in a good word with any law-enforcement
agencies if he cooperated with the investigation. Before Bosch made his
deal with baseball, he tried to get money out of Rodriguez. All of that
puts the commissioner in bed with a steroids dealer and
semi-extortionist."
- "[T]the commissioner is as bent as A-Rod is accused of being. If Selig can
force A-Rod to make a deal, then we never have to see whether MLB’s
evidence would hold up in arbitration or a court room."
- "[Is A-Rod's] real offense failing to express the convenient meek acceptance
that will make Selig look authoritative and spare him more bad
publicity?"
- "Yes, A-Rod is lawyering up . . . and what’s wrong with that? Technicalities matter: They exist to keep
people from being railroaded, and they are the entire difference between
adjudication and show trials. Otherwise what we get feels uncomfortably
like judges writing confessions for defendants and forcing them to sign
under threats of the gulag. Insisting on due process is not the same
thing as protecting or coddling cheaters. Without it, the whole
anti-doping fight smacks of the worst hypocrisy. Among the things made
obvious by Biogenesis is that baseball’s drug testing is failing: It’s
not catching people or especially deterring them."
One of few complaints about the article, really, is that it the headline
buries the "flawed process" as second billing to A-Rod's "phony
personality". The article is about the wildly flawed process, but it's
guilty of the same disturbing tactic as MLB - attracting attention by piling on an unpopular
A-Rod. Another complaint is this line: "He is a tone-deaf egotist who never understood the deep resentment he
engendered by being baseball’s highest paid player and then not
producing astronomic numbers." Oh, I think he fully understands the resentment. The third complaint is this: "The
Web site Sabernomics once ran the math on the years he admitted
taking PEDs and estimated they were worth a little more than one home
run a season to him." I haven't read this research, but I'm pretty sure
these numbers would either be "inconclusive" or statistically insignificant. I'd say it supports the opposite conclusion: that so-called "PEDs" don't really help you play baseball.
RESULTS
