Baseball: A-Rod strikes out

Alex Rodriguez has achieved a dubious new record, said Tom Verducci in SportsIllustrated.com. Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig this week banned 12 players for 50 games for using performance-enhancing drugs, but he slammed A-Rod with the longest drug-related suspension in the game’s history—a 211-game ban through the end of the 2014 season. The New York Yankees’ star third baseman was alone in contesting the ban, filing an appeal that allows him to keep playing in the meantime. That’s just more proof that A-Rod has no shame, said Christine Brennan in USA Today. Selig reportedly has evidence that in addition to using illegal drugs, Rodriguez conspired to block baseball’s investigation of the Florida clinic that supplied them. And this isn’t his first offense: He previously admitted doping from 2001 to 2003. A-Rod’s stubborn fight against banishment guarantees that more details about his alleged drug use will come out. But that’s a risk this “test-tube slugger” seems willing to take in order to keep collecting his $275 million salary, the highest in baseball.

This feels like a setup, said William Rhoden in The New York Times. “There are no eyewitnesses to Rodriguez’s alleged performance-enhancing drug use.” The only incriminating evidence investigators have is the testimony of two questionable characters who worked at the Florida clinic, one of whom impersonated a doctor. A-Rod’s flaws make him the perfect target for a show trial, said Sally Jenkins in The Washington Post. He is an “incurably self-conscious phony” and a “tone-deaf egoist” who loves making money more than playing the game. Widely loathed, A-Rod is a “convenient whipping boy for a commissioner eager to punish a star player” but reluctant to sanction the club owners who profited handsomely from his supposedly drug-powered home runs.

Rodriguez’s suspension, once finalized, won’t clean up the game, said former baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent in The Wall Street Journal. When a doped-up player can earn hundreds of millions for a multiyear contract, going a few months without pay “may just seem like the cost of doing business.” Clearly, major-league baseball needs a simpler drug policy: One violation and you’re out, forever. That worked with gambling, and it will work with drugs. It had better, because the game can’t survive unless everyone plays fair. When rules are ignored, we get “professional wrestling or theater—but not sport.”

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