Well, this is what you wanted all along, right? You wanted Defiant A-Rod. You wanted snarling A-Rod. You wanted to see Alex Rodriguez stand up, grit his teeth, shake loose the shackles of legal advice and political decorum, and say — no, you wanted him to shout! Scream! Thunder! — four words.
I didn’t do this.
Wednesday, you got this, and in some wonderfully dramatic, theatrical stages.
Stage One: A-Rod making like Frank Galvin in “The Verdict,” shaking his hand at an unjust system, cursing at the purveyors of said injustice, and including a smattering of George Carlin’s seven forbidden words while calling the whole arbitration process of MLB a sham.
Stage Two: The carefully worded statement, bubbling with barely controlled rage, in which he declared himself “disgusted” with a process “designed to ensure that the player fails” (the same disgusting process, it should be noted, that allowed guilty-as-sin Ryan Braun to skate two years ago, by the way).
Stage Three: Finally letting loose, via WFAN’s 50,000 watts, the denial the world has been waiting for. I didn’t do this, he said.
“I shouldn’t serve one inning,” of his 211-game suspension, he said.
And on Bud Selig: “This is 100 percent personal.”
This is what we have been looking for since August, when Rodriguez first came back to baseball at Chicago’s U.S. Cellular Field, the same day his 211-game suspension was announced. Then — and every other time he was asked directly to refute the charges of his alleged steroid use, his alleged PED abuse, the various and sundry other allegations contained in this Biogenesis case — he bobbed and weaved like Apollo Creed. His lawyers would say what the world wanted to hear. Not A-Rod.
Wednesday, he did.
I didn’t do this, he said.
Forcefully. Furiously. Fabulously, if you can’t get enough of sideshow kerfuffles. Sounding aggrieved. Sounding victimized. Sounding exactly like the persecuted soul he and his lawyers have insisted he is from the start.
And also sounding a lot like Lance Armstrong, truth be told.
That’s the rub in all of this. If Rodriguez has truth on his side, then this will be the turning-point day for him, his Silkwood moment, his Norma Rae solo, his Erin Brockovich turn. If Rodriguez really was unfairly targeted by Major League Baseball, if Bud Selig really did decide to order a Code Red on the man he once believed would cleanse baseball’s soul from Barry Bonds, then these will be the first of many hard-earned huzzahs.
There are a lot of people, after all, who want that to be the case. Selig, after all, attracts just as much scorn from baseball fans as Rodriguez does. And everyone silently roots against the boss, even bosses who themselves have bigger bosses. There’s a small part of all of us — a bigger part on some days — that would like nothing better than for vindication, for a win against The Man.
“He hates my guts,” Rodriguez said of Selig.
It made for wonderful theater. And as much as that was the delight of the day, it is also part of the problem, because just because Rodriguez and his lawyers decided to turn the volume up to 11 this time, it was just a more entertaining version of what has been their strategy from the start: divert, divert, divert. Digress, digress, digress. The truth isn’t determined by who shouts the loudest.
A-Rod’s team will tell you baseball’s arbitration process is the worst legal system since the England’s 15th-century Star Chamber, but the fact is it has helped baseball players far more often than the sport’s brass through the years, reducing suspensions, trimming fines, re-ordering justice.
Please do not confuse Rodriguez for Curt Flood in this fight. And understand the Players Association, while disagreeing with the decision to allow Selig to skip testifying, did not exactly agree to lock arms with A-Rod, either. Beyond the shouting, beyond A-Rod’s fury that played so well on high-def video and clear-channel sound, this inconvenient fact remains:
We still have only heard fragments of the case. From either side. And the truth, whatever it is, remains elusive, hidden in evidence we have yet to see. Maybe we finally got the visceral moment from A-Rod that we’ve been waiting for since August, and maybe that will be a turning point for him. Maybe this is one small step for him to get his good name back. That had better be the case.
For his sake, if he’s channeling an Armstrong, better it be Neil than Lance.