Alex Rodriguez suspended for 2014 season

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It's official. The arbitrator has decided, and Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez will miss the entire 2014 baseball season with a suspension of 162 games, plus any playoff games the Yankees might qualify for.

Technically this is a reduction in the original punishment, as Major League Baseball had initially suspended Rodriguez for 211 games. Either way this could mean the end of his career, as he'll be forty years old before he's allowed to take the field again, and who's to say the Yankees will want their lineup anchored by a middle-aged scandal-ridden pariah.

For anyone who isn't a Yankees fan, this is a boon, as the Yankees still have to find a third baseman for the upcoming season, and the market is thin this late in the offseason.

Of course, Rodriguez and his legal team aren't ready to accept this decision - they have released a statement saying they will be taking the case to a federal court.

The Complicity of Bud Selig

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However you feel about the Alex Rodriguez debacle, you have to agree that it makes for excellent baseball television. Personally, I'm quite enjoying the circus - schadenfreude has always been one of my strong suits.

When A*Rod takes the field in Chicago, he'll doubtless face a loud chorus of boos and jeers. After talking to a few Yankees fans, I don't think his reception would be much better at home in the Bronx; Rodriguez has a seriously dwindling list of supporters.

But to focus on Alex Rodriguez at the expense of all the other storylines surrounding the suspensions would be a mistake. Sure, A*Rod's return is somehow both arrogant and brave, and certainly makes for great drama - but there's so much more to talk about.

In light of Bud Selig's singleminded prosecution of Rodriguez and his fellow PED users (which, of course, is warranted given their alleged indiscretions), we should not lose sight of the fact that it was Selig and his power structure who let the steroid era go unchecked for so long.

Selig took the reins at MLB in 1998, when the game was still trying to recover from the strike and cancelled World Series in 1994. So when the home runs started flying out of (publicly funded) stadiums and fans started flocking back in, he looked the other way.

In his defense, Selig was dealing with an at-times uncooperative Player's Union, but he didn't manage to get steroid testing into the game for six years. Selig ignored the problem for more than half a decade. Six years of rampant PED use across the game created a culture of steroids in cities everywhere - and people like Alex Rodriguez realized that the benefits outweighed the risk.

The wide use of performance enhancing drugs is a black eye to the game of baseball, but the sport will recover - just like it has recovered from scandals in gambling, amphetamines, and greed. The reputations of Alex Rodriguez and Bud Selig, however, may be beyond recovery.

The Indefinite Steroid Era?

The Miami New Times has dropped a bomb on professional sports with an exposé by Tim Elfrink entitled, "A Miami Clinic Supplies Drugs to Sports' Biggest Names." Among many, many others, Alex Rodriguez's name appears multiple times in the article, and in the records of alleged steroid distributor Tony Bosch.

In addition to some fantastic investigative journalism, I want to give kudos to the New Times graphic design department for the hilarious cover art displayed with the online article:

I can't decide whether the syringes are meant to resemble literal missiles being dropped at the quaint community depicted, or if they're meant to look like a telltale rainbow? Either way, it's almost enough to distract from the incredible substance of the article.

Lending credence to the evidence of A*Rod's continued drug use are certain names of the Yankee superstar's MLB peers, who have been caught and punished for using a banned substance - like Melky Cabrera, who was suspended for 50 games this past season for testing positive for some illicit drug. Old friend Bartolo Colon is also among those listed in Bosch's records - and was also suspended last season when MLB drug tests revealed his use of synthetic testosterone.

A*Rod, of course, denies the allegations, and the Yankees have released a statement saying that they'll leave the investigation to the Commissioner's Office (which has obviously never bungled a steroid problem before, so THAT'S A RELIEF).  However, Peter Abraham of the Boston Globe speculates that the Yankees might sue to have A*Rod's gargantuan contract finished early if the allegations can be proven - which is a shame for me on a personal level because I was really enjoying the buckets of money that the Yankees were paying Rodriguez as we all watched his health deteriorate before out very eyes.

Sadly for Rodriguez, he's out for an extended period of time due to his perpetually bad hip (surely another coincidence, and not a side-effect of many years of steroid use), and as such won't have the chance to be tested by MLB and then get on the field in an attempt to prove he can play clean.  

But even with MLB testing for HGH fr the first time (in season) in 2013, can the results be trusted? Even players making just the major league minimum salary have the money to pay for the newest undetectable drugs, and to hire someone to monitor their regimen.  Even a clean testing record is relatively meaningless in an era where the newest designer PEDs are all but undetectable for the right price, and baseball is full of multi-millionaires.  The article fromthe New Times just reminds us that we're really nowhere different from a decade ago: anyone could be using, and there may never be a way for fans to know for sure who's clean.

But there is one thing we can all be pretty sure of: A*Rod - like Cabrera, and Colon, and Manny Ramirez before him - is not.

[I highly recommend heading over to the Miami New Times website and reading the whole article if you have ten minutes to spare - it's really a good piece of journalism.]

BBWAA: get off your high horse

I don't know about you guys, but I find it pretty rich that so many BBWAA members with votes for the Hall of Fame refused to vote for anyone with the "stain" of steroid use - especially when it was their silence for so many years that allowed a few users to turn into a full-blown "Steroid Era."

Do I agree with the widespread use of performance enhancing drugs? Of course not, but to say they made a mockery of the games and its records is laughable. You know what else made a mockery of longstanding records? The expansions of the regular seasons and postseason: more games results in more chances to break records, while more teams in the playoff field somewhat dilutes the dominance required to set a postseason homerun record.

Baseball is a game of nostalgia. I get it. If you pulled a player out of a 1903 baseball game and put him in a present-day baseball game, it would be nearly the only thing about the present day he would understand, and that's really special. But that's just on the surface of things; there are plenty of things about the game he would NOT understand. Designated hitters, pitch counts, airplane travel, Tommy John surgery, and beerless clubhouses are just a few of the things that would be endlessly confusing for our proverbial baseball original.

Modern players have all kinds of advantages over their predecessors, including but not limited to: full time training staff, laser eye surgery, innovative doctors on the team payroll (I'm looking at you, Curt Schilling - that bloody sock game doesn't happen in 1912), cortisone shots, and more. Even the huge salaries now commonplace in baseball play a role: not being required to work as a ditch digger in the offseason could certainly stave off retirement a few years and strengthen your HoF numbers.

Somehow we came to the conclusion that there are some scientific advantages that baseball players are allowed to utilize, like the aforementioned conditioning programs, cortisone shots, and even surgeries -but PEDs are off limits. And that's an acceptable distinction, since unlike most of the other methods here, steroids destroy your body in the long run.

But it definitely rubs me the wrong way when HoF voters, the very men (and a few women) who were in clubhouses in the nineties, watching as players ballooned up to comic book proportions, who looked the other way, get up on their pedestal and claim they're voting to preserve the sanctity of the Hall. Where were they when players were taking pills and injections and ruining the sanctity of the game? Most were pretending not to see, in order to preserve their clubhouse access and their jobs, which is understandable. But you don't get to do that, and then act like you're somehow baseball's magical savior when you vote to keep the very players you protected with your silence out of the Hall.

It's impossible to prove that anyone who played in that era was clean; Clemens and Bonds had the misfortune of being caught, but there's no saying who was clean and who wasn't. It's unfair to award Hall of Fame votes only to those who somehow escaped public suspicion. After all, perhaps they were just sneakier than those who were caught. I want to see players in the Hall of Fame who were the best of the era, and some of those who were caught were among the best. Anyone interested in baseball enough to visit Cooperstown will understand the Steroid Era numbers must be taken with a grain of salt, just as they understand that it's difficult to compare the Deadball Era to those that came after it.

No matter what the voters decide, there will be players who are unfairly penalized for playing when they did. Some of them will be the rare players that stayed completely clean, and thus unable to compete with the superhuman strength surrounding them. But mostly it's the fans who were cheated: we'll never know who of our favorites was clean and who was using, but the BBWAA has the gall to be all sanctimonious in keeping them out? When it was them looking the other way that sustained the drug abuse in the first place? The whole thing makes me ill.

Innocence Lost

The award for least surprising news of the decade (thus far), goes to one Mark David McGwire, for finally admitting that he used steroids during his career, including during his record-breaking 1998 season.

This home run brought to you by the wonderful world of chemistry!

McGwire released a statement earlier today, and it included all of the usual components: apologies, contriteness, and the qualificaton that "I thought they would help me heal and prevent injuries, too."

Oh, Mark. Well, at least it's all out in the open, now... even though we've all known as much for the last ten years. I don't know about the rest of you, but I was eight years old in 1998, and I was as aware of the home run race as anybody else: one of my teachers told us that Sammy Sosa was clean, and that McGwire was on steroids, so the consensus in my third-grade class was support for Sosa. Now, of course, we know that neither man was clean, and that the true single-season home run king is Roger Maris, despite the fact that his record of 61 has been "broken" six times, by Sosa (3), McGwire (2), and Barry Bonds (1).

The most stirring sentiment in McGwire's release was the following:

"I wish I had never touched steroids. It was foolish and it was a mistake. I truly apologize. Looking back, I wish I had never played during the steroid era."

I bet that's a wish that countless men share: how many current and former major leaguers live with the dread that they will be the next name published, their name forever tarnished because of one stupid mistake? In 1998, baseball was still struggling to regain its fanbase after the debacle in 1994 when the World Series was canceled, and along came this pair of sluggers in a race to reach one of baseball's most exciting records. Why on earth would the commissioner delve too deeply into such a boon for attendance and television ratings? Let's not pretend that most of us would have acted differently: perhaps we would have done something before things got so out of control; perhaps not.

McGwire then toes the official line in claiming that the game is totally clean now:

"Baseball is really different now - it's been cleaned up. The commissioner and the players' association implemented testing and they cracked down, and I'm glad they did."

Let's not fool ourselves: there are players out there beating the system right now, with the use of HGH (which has no accurate testing procedure). However, the days of rampant and open clubhouse drug use (Hello, late-90's Texas Rangers!) are over, and good riddance. Unfortunately, the game isn't out of the woods yet - that will only happen when the last user retires from the game completely, which isn't exactly in the cards for the next forty years or so. And until then? Well, I plan to be a fan of the game as always... but a little less innocent than I was way back in 1998.

Monster Disappointment

Am I surprised? No. Disappointed? Absolutely.

I heard the news yesterday morning at work: my boss, knowing what a fan I am, asked me what I would think if Papi turned out to be a juicer. I shrugged, and honestly told him it would upset me, but no one is safe from suspicion. Of course, I was immediately tested on this claim, as he informed me of the New York Times report (that he had first heard on ESPN).

I was a little bit blindsided, but the reaction I had predicted to my employer was impressively accurate. I am absolutely not surprised. I don't think there is a name in the game that would shock me anymore, and that, more than anything, speaks volumes about the integrity that baseball has lost. I'm a politics major, and the very basis of the American legal system is that you are innocent until proven guilty. This is no longer the case in America's pastime. If you played anytime in the last twenty years, you're a suspect, and that's just sad.

I realized today that I have never experienced the game of baseball free from juicers. I was born in January of 1990, and by the time I was an engaged and cognizant fan the Steroid Era was well underway. As much as Bud Selig and MLB would like us to believe that era is coming to a close, we know better. Until they have some sort of proven test for HGH, we'll always wonder who's using. Is the batter who hit that walk off doing it clean? What about the pitching prospect who's throwing 100mph? Or the veteran who has a bounce back season?

Mike Lowell said it best when he cited the pure numbers from the 2003 "anonymous" testing: 104 players are on that list, out of over 1000 who were tested. Less than 10% of players tested positive, this at the so-called "height" of the Steroid Era, and yet all we hear about are those who used. Part of this is due to the way the names keep coming out... As one or two names trickle out every three months or so, we have to wonder: "Is my guy next?" If the names are going to come out, let's see them all and be done with it; no more of this slow hemorrhaging of [former] heroes.

The Papi news hurts a lot, if only because he was such a great story: the poor boy from the Dominican, shut out of the Twins organization, then becomes a hero in the baseball mecca of Boston. Ortiz regularly lambasted steroid users, demanding a full-season suspension of those who are caught. There's nothing to say Papi didn't stop using after 2003, when the mandatory testing regimen was instated: I'm guessing a lot of guys did, whether from fear of suspension or humiliation. Until we know more, I can't say anything else about it... Papi seemed blindsided by the news, but that doesn't mean anything.

And to those who think this taints the '04 and '07 World Championships: do you honestly believe that even a single team was devoid of cheaters? We KNOW New York had a few of their own, and anyone who believes the other playoff participants were completely clean is either stupid or lying to themselves. I'm not excusing anyone - cheating is cheating - but the Series' wins mean as much to me now as they ever did, and NO ONE can take that away.