Monday, February 9, 2009

Confessions of Yankee Drama Queen

Well A-Rod confirmed the Selena Roberts and Dave Epstein story to an extent in his interview with Peter Gammons on ESPN. Rodriguez claims that his only transgressions with steroids occurred in the highly localized time frame of 2001-2003.

I'll give A-Rod some credit for at least admitting that he used steroids but his storyline about trying to live up to his contract will only go so far. His story reads a bit too easy and is far to hazy during all of the important parts for it to be truly believable.

It was a easy choice for A-Rod to admit his use as he has several examples to draw from in the Steroid Era's recent history. I'm sure he and Scott Boras looked at the cases of Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens juxtaposed to the tales of Andy Pettitte and Jason Giambi. It was a no-brainer.

But what is ridiculous is that as A-Rod tries to jump out of the pot he may have just jumped into the fire. During his interview he attacked the co-author of the breaking story Selena Roberts. Now it isn't that surprising that A-Rod would go after Roberts given the fact that she helped break this story and is currently writing a book that supposedly will not paint A-Rod in a very good light.
But it is surprising that he made claims that are quite serious and easily proven or disproved. From the transcript at ESPN A-Rod made these claims:
I mean, what makes me upset is that Sports Illustrated pays this lady, Selena Roberts, to stalk me. This lady has been thrown out of my apartment in New York City. This lady has five days ago just been thrown out of the University of Miami police for trespassing. And four days ago she tried to break into my house where my girls are up there sleeping, and got cited by the Miami Beach police. I have the paper here. This lady is coming out with all these allegations, all these lies because she's writing an article for Sports Illustrated and she's coming out with a book in May.
That's some pretty heavy stuff to throw at someone. Now A-Rod claims to have some paperwork regarding the incident and for his sake I hope he does because right after he said that I'm guessing that the University of Miami and the Miami Beach police probably got a 1,000 phone calls.

I'm not sure why Peter Gammons failed to follow up on that juicy tidbit but I'm sure we will here plenty about it especially since Roberts has already adamantly denied the allegations.

Hopefully this admission of guilt expedites the process and baseball will move on. The more it gets talked about the worse it is for baseball. Hopefully some good things come out of this though. Maybe the MLBPA starts to lose some of its struggle-hold on baseball. Maybe Bud Selig gets fired (I wish but not likely). If anything perhaps baseball starts to really take a look at itself and decides that it doesn't like what it sees and changes are made because fans wont be able to endure much more of this steroid ridiculousness.

Update 9:02: Bad news for A-Rod. Pete Abraham, fresh off of a one week vacation, noted that Selena Roberts was not cited for any of the transgressions A-Rod claims she was. I hope A-Rod has his copies handy.

3 comments:

Dennis said...

Well, why he attacked her is obvious, woman sportswriters are easy targets. I am sure some dinosaur white guy at a Miami newspaper is submitting an article about women not being allowed in locker rooms as we speak.

But for me, as Dan said in an earlier post, it is all a big "Duh!" moment. Guys like Canseco and Caminitti put the percentage of players using steroids in the neighborhood of 80%. The sooner everyone comes to accept that, the sooner we can move on.

Peter said...

I think after this that will be the generally accepted. Hopefully this embarrasses the union and baseball enough to actually fix the problem.

Dan said...

I think the other 103 names need to be released. That will prove to people how rampant the PED usage was/is. My guess is there will be everyone from Joe Schmoe bench warmer to perhaps a present HOFer I keep mentioning on that list. Then we can really move on.