Monday, February 9, 2009

A-Roid

OMG, has anyone thought of that yet?!?!!?!

I was going to post something about A-Rod, and as I bounced around the web (looking for something better than what I could write, apparently), I found this article on Baseball Prospectus. Read it.

Here's an especially stimulating excerpt:
Of course, the screaming is about the screamers. The loudest voices on the evils of steroids in baseball are in the media, and there’s probably a dissertation in that notion, because for all that we have to hear about how greedy, evil players have ruined baseball by taking these substances (and then playing well, according to this selective interpretation; no one’s ripping Chris Donnels these days), the reason we’re talking about this in 2009 is that so many “reporters”—scare quotes earned—went ostrich in 1999. We hear every year around awards time that the people closest to the game know the game better than anyone, because they’re in the clubhouse every day, and they talk to everyone, and they have a perspective that outsiders can’t possibly understand. For those same people to do a collective Captain Renault, which they’ve been doing since beating up players for this transgression became acceptable, is shameful. Take your pick: they missed the story, or they were too chicken-shit to report it. In either case, the piling-on now is disgusting."
Well, yeah. There's really not much to add to that. The media has been far too eager to jump on this as The Thing That Fucking Ruined Everything. Tagging Rodriguez as baseball's "last hope" is laughably short-sighted. Sure, he'll break Bonds' tainted record with a tainted achievement of his own. Still, baseball, I think, will persevere.

He's an asshole, though, and he deserves all the shit that will be coming his way.

3 comments:

Adam said...

I give A-Roid (yeah i said it) credit for manning up (this time) and saying he did it. He's the best player any of us d-bags will ever see play, excluding his october performance of course. Good for him..

PS The Reds signed Jacques Jones and D-Ward. Cincy = Chicago washout south

abomb

the maestro said...

Train, I love what ya say almost always...but the whole A Rod is the greatest player we are ever gonna see??? Really??? In the eighties that was Barry Bonds, in the early nineties it was Junior, and then along came Rodriguez. This has nothing to do with the greatest player, or being the greatest player. It stems from the fact that we are all told consistently that A Rod is the greatest we will see...until a new greatest flavor of the decade comes along in three more years.

Bick Rozich said...

Uhhhh, you guys are forgetting Ryno.