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A-Rod, baseball's great hope, now tainted himself

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Mark Kriegel

Mark Kriegel is the national columnist for FOXSports.com. He is the author of two New York Times best sellers, Namath: A Biography and Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich, which Sports Illustrated called "the best sports biography of the year."

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Updated Feb 9, 2009 5:27 PM ET
     
 
Even by the standards of this tawdry, tabloid culture, a man who seeks solace in kaballah, Madonna and methenolone has hit some sort of imaginary trifecta. I have taken pride and pleasure in my armchair analysis of Alex Rodriguez. He is all I could want in a subject: insecure, impressionable, narcissistic, and give the guy his due, above all, talented. That talent is now tainted, of course. And you can all but hear a certain tattooed celebrity boxer saying, I told you so... Only A-Rod — lightning rod, it now occurs, would be a better nickname — could again elevate Jose Canseco to sage status. Still, the news that Rodriguez tested positive for steroids in 2003 — one of his several MVP seasons — is not to be greeted with a sense of hilarity. Rather, he has tampered with history. Whatever else A-Rod was, or is, he represented a chance to rescue American sports' most sacred individual record. No more, though. No one really cares if football players do steroids. They tend to die young, anyway. So what? But baseball is different. Baseball is a game of numbers, its history and its easily quantifiable records are inextricably intertwined, coming together as consecrated numerology. Legends are identifiable by their digits: 714 is Babe Ruth; 755, Hank Aaron; 61* is another way of saying Roger Maris; .406 is shorthand for Ted Williams. 56, Joe DiMaggio. And so on. When you mess with those numbers, you mess with The Game. And that's exactly what Rodriguez has done. There's no reason to doubt a Sports Illustrated report by Selena Roberts and David Epstein, saying that Rodriguez tested positive for testosterone and methenolone, a difficult to detect oral steroid. They have four sources. Rodriguez had company, of course. There were 103 other players who tested positive in 2003, when the commissioner's office was finally trying to ascertain, through supposedly confidential testing, just how polluted its product really was. But A-Rod's case — it's worth remembering that he led the league with 47 home runs that year — was different than every one of his juicing contemporaries. Back then, people took great glee in criticizing his $252 million contract. But there was an even more compelling counter-argument, that his wages were only commensurate with his talent. He was, according to the numbers, the greatest player of his generation, maybe the greatest player since Willie Mays. What's more, with Barry Bonds — already widely suspected as a juicer — mounting an assault on the career home run record, Alex Rodriguez was just coming into focus as a righteous successor. It all became clear after Bonds finally broke Aaron's record. That was August, 2007. By November, in a development that seemed just as inevitable, Bonds was indicted on charges of perjury and obstruction for lying to federal agents about his steroid use.
That same month, Rodriguez was negotiating a new contract with the Yankees. Even after his repeated failures in the playoffs, he would get a raise. The reason is the home run record. The new deal is worth up to $305 million over ten years. About $30 million of that is directly related to Rodriguez breaking the all-time home run record, the most well-publicized individual record in sports. Among the incentive clauses were $6 million bonuses whenever he passes one of the top four home run hitters: Mays at 660, Ruth, Aaron and Bonds at 762. Given the Yankees' unsurpassed ability to profiteer from hype, it's actually a pretty smart deal. Each milestone represents another pinstriped windfall at the gate and the memorabilia stands. Rodriguez would rescue the record from Bonds the juicer. What could be better than that? Only now it is learned that the guy supposed to remove the taint is tainted himself. And that taint is there forever. It doesn't go away. It's part of baseball history now, one of those questions that will always be asked.
Tainted stat?
Alex Rodriguez is close to becoming one of the top 10 home run hitters of all-time, but Saturday's report may shed doubt on the legitimacy of his spot on this list:
Rank
Player
HRs
10
Rafael Palmeiro
569
11
Reggie Jackson
563
12
Alex Rodriguez
553
13
Mike Schmidt
548
See the complete top 25 list
With 553 homers at the age of only 32, the Rodriguez storyline seemed such a solid investment. But the state of baseball is a lot like the state of the economy. The bills keep coming due for a decade of excess. The best move left for Rodriguez is to confess, apologize and try to place himself in context. Everybody was doing it, so why not me? It's too late for Barry Bonds. It's too late for Roger Clemens. And Mark McGwire. But there's still a little hope for Rodriguez. He can embrace his shame, not the least of which will be hearing Jose Canseco's ignominious proclamation: "I told you so."

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