JoePo On A-Rod's "Apology"

Having a full-time job and writing for this blog doesn't leave a whole lot of time to tend to my Google Reader. When I was waiting at my dentist's office today, I had a chance to catch up on Joe Posnanski's blog (from my iPhone), which typically gets put off extra long because the posts are always so deep and involved. He had an interesting take on A-Rod, and really shredded his apology. The post compares what he did to taking drugs and speeding, as I did yesterday, so I guess you'll just have to take my word when I say I only got to it today. Here is an excerpt:

I thought Alex Rodriguez’s "apology" was one of the most absurd shams of recent memory. I thought it was so pathetic that, for the first time, that ”A-Fraud“ moniker finally made some sense to me. As a baseball fan, I wasn’t mad at A-Rod when the steroid story broke. As a baseball fan, I was furious at A-Rod when he and his handlers put together this infomercial apology. I hope the children weren’t watching THAT.

Okay, it was incomplete. But remember Roger Clemens? How about Barry Bonds? Sammy Sosa? Mark McGwire? Rafael Palmero? Switching sports, Marion Jones? The "deny, deny, deny" precedent had already been set, so isn't it at least a step in the right direction that he didn't take the routes of any of those athletes?

When you get caught doing something, you are only going to admit to what what you have to. If you get pulled over on the highway, and the cop asks you how fast you were going, aren't you going to lowball it and see if he corrects you? If you get arrested with some drugs in your car and they find the bag in your glove box, are you going to direct them to the stash under your spare tire?

Yes, the apology was a little too tidy, and conveniently restricted his drug usage to Texas, the team is his least remembered for being a part of. But he was responding to a positive test in 2003, likely the only hard evidence that will ever emerge about his PED use. There is no reason for him to come out with anything else until it's absolutely necessary, although it could come back to bite him in a big way. As Joe implies above, it's a calculated risk.

When Selena Robert's book (Hit and Run: The Many Lives Of Alex Rodriguez) comes out, her publisher has already said it will contain more revelations about A-Rod's steroid use. Joe now works for SI and had this to say about A-Rod ad hominem attack on his colleague:

It was shameful. Pathetic. I’ll add this: I know that Selena has a history with A-Rod. And I know that she has a book coming out that, based on the cheery title (Hit and Run: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez) does not sound especially uplifting. But I’m not trying to defend Selena: She’ll defend herself fine. No, I’m talking about what this says to me about Alex Rodriguez.

It says that A-Rod, despite sticking to the script for most of the interview, lost his cool because someone is in the process of digging through his past for her profit, and it has probably impinged on his life. She has every right to do write that book, and if I had the access to some real deal dirt on a high profile celebrity and someone willing to pay me to write about it, I'd do the same thing.

A-Rod made an obvious misstep, but I don't think it really "says" any more about him than the fact the he used steroids, dated Madonna when he was still with his wife, frosts his tips, likes muscled strippers, is referred to as "A-Fraud" by his teammates or seemingly can't preform in the clutch.