Author of the week: Selena Roberts

Sports Illustrated columnist Selena Roberts is getting plenty of practice at handling criticism, said Neal Justin in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Three months after she shocked the baseball world by revealing that Yankee star Alex Rodriguez once tested positive for steroids­, the former Star Tribune reporter has faced tough questioning about her methods almost everywhere that she appears to promote her new book, A-Rod. “It’s bizarre, because I’m used to being on the other side of it,” she says of the media criticism. “But you’ve got to put your big-girl pants on.” Roberts wasn’t always so tough-skinned. “I won’t lie to you,” she says of how she used to react to push back when she was breaking stories in Minneapolis years ago. “There were days I went back and had a little cry.”

Roberts was hardly surprised that some critics used the term “hit job” to describe the new book, said Will Leitch in New York. After all, she controversially decided not to identify the sources who allege that Rodriguez used steroids as far back as high school, or that he has tipped opposing batters to the pitches they were about to see. “Anytime you take on an icon,” she says, some members of the group that feels threatened will ask, ‘Is the messenger an outsider? Is she one of us?’” Roberts insists that when she started the book, she never dreamed that her findings would blacken baseball’s name. “I thought the guy was clean.”

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