He isn't worth the effort. If we just ignore him maybe it'll drive him crazy and hell leave?
I've must have missed something. Did ARod kill anyone? If he's guilty of taking PED's he will get suspended and serve his punishment. This wouldn't be such a big issue if MLB would have given him a suspension close to what Braun and the other players got. Had MLB done so this issue would have come and gone in a couple of days. Fans would be talking about what they should be talking about this time of year, the pennant races.
Yes sir, on the money!!! Max, if baseball would have done what they should have done regarding steroids years ago instead of turning their heads, we wouldn't be listening to all this crap today. This whole situation has been handled very poorly.
Max...you could not be more right. This whole thing got silly when it became a personal crusade instead of a disiplinary issue.
Sorry for this lengthy response to the above. Don't read it if it already bores you.
Am I hearing you correctly? You’re resorting to “The devil made me do it” argument? Or else the magician’s credo: distract others from what you're doing by leading them to look in some other direction--some other, more “major” ruse? Good enough for Flip Wilson once upon a time, maybe, or David Copperfield, but not for me re A-Rod.
No one’s defending MLB or for that matter the Union that looks the other way for any supposed “offender” of whatever code the Union has agreed to with MLB. As institutions, MLB and now the Players’ Union have nothing to be proud of. MLB practiced outright racism for the entire first half of the twentieth century. For that matter, the US as an institution has a lot not to be proud of: not just slavery, but the de facto propagation of it in the marketplace. For years, too, corporate institutions practiced (and still do) sexism galore. We should criticize them severely for what they did and do, but must we keep blaming those institutions primarily for their looking-the-other way practices? I think you first try to reform the institution if at all possible. Selig’s no saint, obviously--I’ve stated I’m against his de facto capitalist socialism by his anti-super-rich taxing of teams like the Yankees--but late or not, he wants steroids OUT of the MLB arena, and wants it out NOW, at least. Nowadays we don’t condone manhandling (pun intended) women in the workplace; nor should we condone a player’s fake or inflated performances of athletic activities.
The buck stops with A-Rod and the others who get caught doing body-falsifying drugs in the present. HE’S ethically responsible for doing so, and no magical, sophistic argument aimed at MLB can minimize that one existential fact. As soon as he signed a MLB baseball contract (not just with the Yankees but from the very beginning and before he extracted millions from the teams he left Seattle for--and in effect sold his baseball ability for a price), he tacitly agreed to abide by baseball’s rules of fair play. That was so EVEN IF steroids weren’t verbally stated as verboten in that contract, and EVEN IF MLB itself fomented the impression of looking the other way about taking those kinds of drugs. It’s the same with “privacy”: the right to it isn’t stated in the Constitution, but the Court’s argument justifying it said “the penumbra” of privacy was implicitly assumed in one of our Constitutional Amendments. Most violations of privacy for most of us also don’t register the same as murder, robbery and other felonies, but they still register AS violations in terms of the kind of social practice we assume and live by (at least I do) every moment of our American lives.
No, A-Rod didn’t commit a crime per se. But his “violation” of his contract constitutes a serious ethical misdeed. Baseball, year by year, day by day, is, finally, always in the present tense, the “now,” and, unlike WFWrestling, doesn’t depend on patent fictions--quite the contrary. I like it that Musial and Aaron and Maris and Jeter did what they did without body-altering stimulants. In the present, it’s an A-Rod, knowing full well--by his own admission--that MLB had banned steroids and/or their procurement, who violated his MLB “contract,” if not the one the Yankees are still saddled with, legally speaking, for as long as he marches to the tune of his narcissistic impulses. Why else does he continue to besmear the Yankee moniker--and will, again, tonight?
Go ahead A-Rod: Make fools of us fans as well as teammates (yes, they’ll defend him--rhetorically, i.e., in public, but most of them will not and shouldn’t feel they want to in private). But most players and fans will reject him anyway--the court of public opinion isn’t always right, even if the legal one sometimes gets innocent-before-proven-guilty wrong. Would any of us really be surprised if more than one of the players who’ve accepted Selig’s ban (say Montero, clearly a young baseball naïf at the time, or Cervelli, whose body clearly looked “pumped” this year and whose hand-eye-bat coordination improved measurably from last year--what did he bat at AAA last year?) was led by A-Rod to the Biogenesis door and what went on there? His taking steroids deserves one kind of ban; his tacit or covertly explicit encouragement of others to do so deserves more than what he’ll probably end up getting via arbitration: 100 games. He’ll go off then and enjoy his millions; fans will still seek his autograph; he’ll appear on “Sixty Minutes.” Go ahead, A-Rod. Of course, those other players will never admit to what he did unless they’re considered pariahs like Canseco. A-Rod belongs in the Clemens hall of fame where “all for unity” goes the theme. But we have more than enough reasons to be suspicious.
