BRUINSVILLE, NY – A WWF wrestling script couldn’t have been penned any better than what was revealed recently regarding Alex Rodriguez. The villainous A-Rod returns from his 2014 season-long ban for steroid use when the Yankees open their Tampa training camp on February 20th fresh off a training session led by the reviled Barry Bonds. Are you serious? You really can’t make stuff like this up for it to be believed.
If A-Rod pays a publicist, he’s wasting his money. There isn’t any more cause to hate the Yankees permanent Designated Hitter. I can’t stand the way this guy smugly chews his gum, or wears his uniform pants, or pleaded innocent to steroid allegations to anybody who’d listen and even thought to sue MLB. There was the sissy slap tag in the 2004 playoffs against the Red Sox and the infield pop up against Toronto, where A-Roid distracted the Blue Jays infielder into dropping the ball as he ran the bases. So now we are naively led to believe #13, with enough money to seek out the best trainer in the athletic world, sought out Ba-roid Bonds to discuss training concepts?
During their time spent, Rodriguez
let Bonds know he was gunning for the Cheat-king’s home runs record to which the Yankees are on the hook for a potential $30M in performance bonuses. The numbers and names we stood to admire 660 (Mays), 714 (Ruth), and 755 (Aaron) will each be met with a $6M payday for the Sultan of Syringe and the tying and breaking of the currently tainted 762 and 763 (Bonds). Oh yeah, A-Rod is on the books for $21M/per until 2017. Jeez, I hate this guy but love that the Yankees are married to him.
4,256 is another one of those familiar baseball numbers. Peter Edward Rose is responsible for hitting a baseball safely that many times and was in the news this past week for saying he’d like a meeting with the gap-toothed baseball commissioner to talk, of course, about the all-time hit king’s reinstatement to the game and subsequently on the HOF ballot. Charlie Hustle carried on a hustle of his own for many years before finally coming clean about his gambling on baseball. I was always somewhat sympathetic to his cause for the HOF but as the steroid era has produced a number of cheaters and accused, my opinion is now one where all of these players should be lumped together in a new exhibit at Cooperstown. Going back to Shoeless Joe Jackson to Rose to Rafael Palmeiro and the lot who have ever failed a drug test or bet on baseball, acknowledge these careers far from the players who did things right. This new wing at the museum might serve as an underhanded way of getting players under suspicion to admit their transgression and then a chance at immortality, tainted as it may be, as a result of the baseball writer’s balloting.
There are many opinions out there on bums like Rodriguez, Bonds, and Rose. What’s yours? We’d like to know in the comments section below. And don’t forget to come back for clean-as-a-whistle, DJ Eberle, tomorrow.
