The prolonged agony of Alex Rodriguez vs. Major League Baseball has been exacerbated by the absence of a key human element: A rooting interest.
There’s absolutely none. It’s enough to make Giuseppe Franco tear his hair off.
When one considers performance-enhancing drug use, the kind that masses muscle, slugging stats, $150 million contracts and “Monsters Mash” TV and ticket profits for team owners, it’s hardly surprising Rodriguez would give PEDs a second shot, or how many times he has entered the realm if, in fact, he ever left.
After all, despite the sign-carrying support of the New York Hispanic Clergy Organization — rallying to a cause Rodriguez seems to have caused — Rodriguez is a longtime, fully certified liar on the issue of his PED use. “Yes, but he’s our liar!”
But religion and race have joined patriotism as last refuges of a scoundrel. We trust these same Hispanic clergy and politicians prayed for Sammy Sosa’s healing when he so suddenly forgot how to speak English.
As for Team A-Rod’s the-best-offense-is-to-offend plan, the actions and statements — in Rodriguez’s own words, flanked by quotation marks — seem over-rehearsed, as if prefabricated in both anticipation and indignation, and soaked in enough syrupy insincerity to cause air sickness in an astronaut.
My favorite remains Rodriguez’s statement-issued claim he has been driven to fight MLB, not just on behalf of himself, but for “the next 18-year-old coming into the league, to be sure he doesn’t step into the house of horrors that I’m being forced to walk through.”
“Hello, Emergency Poison Control? I think I swallowed something …”
That Rodriguez and his legal and public-relations team would not ask us to consider his battle is to preserve tens of millions of dollars remaining on his contract — an explanation we’d accept as honest — only emphasizes and satirizes Team A-Rod’s sense of our senses.
Team A-Rod, after all, is not a squad of volunteers. Everyone’s in it for the money.
Dug in on the other side are the forces of Bud Selig, thus the forces of the team owners who annually paid Selig as much as $18.4 million to feed their bottom lines and to ignore what everyone else — even “you kids, watching at home” — couldn’t miss.
How much of those millions gifted to Selig was drug money, profits from MLB’s annual, willful neglect while the juiced record-wreckers got a sustained green light? Was Selig not the point man of this organized crime against The Game?
Could he not see how his on-the-job neglect would lead to MLB’s days of reckoning, when even the credibility of the Hall of Fame would be compromised, imperiled, left to beg the benefits of the doubters?
Are Selig and his minions any more sincere than Rodriguez as they portray themselves as the vanguard of valor, relentlessly driven to clean up the drug mess? And to think that so many in the media have taken his dictation and run with this con!
The drug mess, the one Selig allowed, ignored, sustained. The drug mess from which Selig, MLB and team owners profited. The drug mess that grew, then exploded, on Selig’s watch. The Commissioner of Baseball, for crying out loud, didn’t utter a discouraging word.
Rooting interest? Can’t find any. But maybe it’s me. Shoot, I can’t figure out why Robinson Cano even bothers to wear spikes.
Team-ing up with Francesa
The mutual attraction between Alex Rodriguez and Mike Francesa, aside from their shared disregard for honesty, makes for a quick, easy study: Two self-delusional guys desperate to cling to their status as self-perceived big shots, willing to indulge and exploit each other as evidence of their celebrity and power.
Francesa doesn’t care if Rodriguez is telling him (or his lowly listeners) the truth, only that the mighty A-Rod chose him, the mighty Francesa, to be his on-air confidant. And Team A-Rod, having successfully played ego-footsie with Francesa in exchange for the media power only they and Francesa think Francesa possesses — knew Francesa would see it Rodriguez’s way.
From the start, Francesa’s support of Rodriguez was short on facts, but loaded with half-headed notions spoken as facts and his bogus claims of extensive legal knowledge — faux or selective intelligence Francesa has long relied upon to declare his deep convictions.
Francesa’s so vain, so egocentric, he’s as easy as he is transparent. He and Rodriguez are now co-dependent. But if Bud Selig had similarly and earlier made himself available to Francesa, and only Francesa …
All those heartwarming, family-first Thanksgiving Day NFL and NCAA features and promos, yet none of the networks mentioned the many tens of thousands of per-gig low-wagers who were pulled from their families to work the made-for-TV-money games.
And aside from Packers-Lions (Fox), there was Raiders-Cowboys (CBS), Steelers-Ravens (NBC), Texas Tech-Texas (Fox Sports 1) and Ole Miss-Mississippi State (ESPN).
And then they give you the “From our family, to yours — Happy Thanksgiving” bit.
Soundalikes: Gene Steratore, who reffed Thursday’s Packers-Lions game, and President Obama.
Keeping McMahon’s WWE legacy alive
Class Dismissed: After crushing Rutgers, a group of Cincinnati football players stood gesturing to their crotches in a “suck it” pose — learned when they were kids watching a weekly WWE TV skit presented by Vince and Linda McMahon.
CBS’s studio halftime during Texas A&M-LSU on Saturday was stuffed with “what ails us.” The nondescript “problem” (possible sexual assault charge) of Florida State star Jameis Winston was given a wink, first-half clips of players showboating appeared as game highlights and panelists’ forced laughter served as substance.
Stats of the Week: In North Carolina Central’s genuinely shocking win over North Carolina State in Raleigh, NCCU made 41-of-45 free throws, N.C. State 23-of-33. But according to ESPN, games are won with slams and bombs.
Wonder if New Mexico’s taxpayers are at all upset by New Mexico State’s 13-man basketball roster, with seven foreign players — a Croat, four Canadians, a Frenchman and South African — but only one from New Mexico. Student-athletics, what a con.
Five years later there still isn’t a producer in ESPN’s Monday night truck or an executive producer in Bristol, Conn. to insist Jon Gruden at least occasionally explain what he’s talking about.
Thus, “zone running scheme,” “the old Tampa-two” and “the spider two wide banana” are spoken as if we’re nodding in agreement.
Then again, ESPN’s capacity for sustaining bad ideas — from stupid graphics to hiring sports’ most dubious characters — remains exceptional.