They were crowded around the TV monitor and most of them were laughing. There were eight of them, maybe 10, all of them waiting for flights out of Colorado. All of them stopping to have a good laugh at the epic fall of an erstwhile icon.
“The good guys win!” one of them crowed.
“I don’t know if I call Bud Selig the good guy,” said another, “but I’ll say this: the bad guy lost.”
On the screen was stock footage of Alex Rodriguez, all of it so familiar: him in a suit, striding into baseball’s Park Avenue offices. Him in a uniform, clobbering a baseball off Ryan Dempster in what may well be his final defining moment as a baseball player — if not his final moment, period.
Underneath, the scrawl: “ALEX RODRIGUEZ SUSPENDED FOR 162 GAMES …”
“How do you feel sorry for a guy with so much money?” somebody asked.
“Serves him right,” said another. “Cheaters deserve what they get, all of them. Especially him.”
Maybe this is the way it is everywhere this morning, at least in those precincts that admire neither A-Rod nor the Yankees, who take delight in seeing the crash and burn of the rich and the powerful and the egocentric and the bellicose.
But as the news began to sink in, as the reality of what Frederic Horowitz had done became real, as the enormity of it — 162 games, a whole season, plus postseason, barring a federal judge issuing an injunction, something that almost never happens after binding arbitration — this is what I felt:
Sad.
Not for A-Rod, not really. He already lied once about taking steroids, already admitted once that he knew he and cousin Yuri weren’t taking Tic-Tacs back in the day. His credibility isn’t exactly scratch-proof. Not for baseball, not necessarily. Even if you believe every word of the case against Rodriguez, it is impossible not to gag on the backed-up stench of the way certain aspects of MLB’s investigation was conducted (even if, as Rudy Giuliani once said, you want to catch a mobster, you don’t only look for them in church).
Certainly not for the Yankees; not at all, not with a year loosened from A-Rod’s salary and also from his daily dramas, not with enough money now liberated to either safely tuck themselves under the $189 million threshold or free themselves to throw buckets of cash at Masahiro Tanaka.
But together, the whole story, the whole thing?
Not exactly the feel-good story of the year. Not if you saw Alex Rodriguez play baseball for the bulk of his career, when it seemed he was capable of doing anything on the field, reaching any height, shattering any record, when you wondered if you were watching the best who ever was.
Think of what it is now to watch LeBron James perform: a driven athlete with a sense of history and a greater sense of theater, the perfect storm of work and energy and talent and physical, freakishly physical gifts. Think of what it was like to watch Wayne Gretzky in the ’80s. Think of Tiger Woods circa 2001 or so.
Now imagine being told none of it was real, all of it a figment of artifice, a parlor trick of pharmacology. Wouldn’t you feel robbed of something?
Maybe this satisfies our sense of sporting justice, but even that is hard to believe. Remember, A-Rod winds up a non-person based not on a failed drug test but on a strange, muddled conspiracy that wouldn’t even have seen the light of day except for a free community newspaper in Miami and some terrific reporting.
MLB wants us to believe this is an example of their new get-tough policy working. But it really is an example of serendipity. Baseball got lucky. If you consider suspending someone who was once considered among the finest to ever play the game “lucky.”
People are entitled to cheer this if they want, they can feel good about a posse getting its man, about the humbling of an arrogant star. That’s fine.
But some are also entitled to feel lousy about how this turned out, to be saddened what we saw all those years wasn’t what we thought we were seeing, and baseball forever seems to be played in the shadow of the ancillary. This isn’t how it was supposed to go for this player.
Or, more tellingly, for this game.