THIS shouldn’t surprise us, be cause after all we have learned about baseball and the steroid era, nothing should surprise us. The rule of thumb, if you are smart, if you have been duly hardened by the revelations that keep smacking us in the face like an out-of-control speed bag, is this:
You take the years 1990-2004, 15 years for easy, digestible purposes.
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And you put them on a shelf, separate and apart from all that came before, and all that has come after, and will come after. It doesn’t matter that logic tells us that a lot of honest, honorable baseball players still decided to play it clean, even as their clubhouses started to look more and more like pharmacies, even as their teammates started to look more and more like cartoon freaks.
The fact is, what we already knew was that the whole 15-year era deserves its own asterisk. And what we keep finding out only stamps that asterisk bolder and darker and deeper. Alex Rodriguez? If Sports Illustrated’s story is true – and Rodriguez himself sure doesn’t sound like an aggrieved, innocent victim in it, with his first reaction being, quote, “You’ll have to talk to the union” – all that does is wrap the whole era into a neat bow.
Because if we can all agree that Rodriguez belongs in the conversation as one of the greatest players who ever lived, then it is only right that he take his place at the dais alongside Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire and Roger Clemens as the featured speakers at the banquet honoring The Era.
In truth, maybe this is precisely what baseball deserves. All along the joyless trail with Bonds a few years ago, there was a prevailing sense that the men who run baseball would close their eyes, hold their noses, swallow hard, and accept the notion that Bonds would have to be in possession of the sport’s most sacred record for a while, but there was a savior on a white steed waiting stage left to rescue the day.
That would be Rodriguez. And whenever he was finished hitting home runs – how many before he’s done? 800? 825? – he would serve as baseball’s paragon of a return to virtue. Eight hundred homers, all of them honestly earned. Forget the fact that our eyes told us that A-Rod had been awfully skinny as a kid, and he wasn’t awfully skinny anymore. Forget the better angels of our nature that wanted to believe, just once, in just one superstar player and his talent.
Now what?
There are two especially troubling things to ponder after reading the SI report. First: A-Rod is allegedly one of the 104 players who tested positive in 2003. This means he would be one of the unspeakably arrogant wave of cheats who kept using even after they knew they would be tested, knowing that if enough of them flunked the anonymous exam mandatory testing would be next. It’s almost impossible to calculate the hubris at work there.
Most important, if you remember that skinny rookie in 1995, and you remember what A-Rod looked like by the time of those allegedly positive tests in 2003, it doesn’t take long to conclude he got that way by using something other than a bowl of Wheaties and a pile of Flintstone chewable vitamins every morning.
So what does that say about the 345 home runs he collected from 1995-2003 (14 more than Hank Greenberg, 13 less than Yogi Berra, 14 less than Johnny Mize, all of them Hall of Famers thanks to their slugging)? What does it say about the 990 RBIs he amassed (exactly as many as Ernie Lombardi, 20 more than Larry Doby)? And what does that mean about whatever final totals he accrues in both, the numbers he holds so dear, the numbers that were going to guarantee him a permanent place in baseball’s firmament?
To the end, we have wanted to believe in A-Rod, partly because we had to believe in him, because everyone wants The Era to go away. But it will not dissolve that easily. It is like grape juice on a white dress. It may fade incrementally. It will never disappear.