Here’s a quick glance at just a few of the writers who have already declared that A-Rod’s apology doesn’t measure up:
George Vescey: …. Minus the tissue box, but with visible emotion, Alex Rodriguez admitted Monday to taking an illegal drug from 2001 through 2003. But was he upset about his image being sullied once again, or was he chastened by being caught cheating? It was hard to tell.
Mike Lupica: …. Rodriguez says he was only dirty when he played in Texas but cleaner than corners on a hospital bed when he was in Seattle before that, and later when he got to New York. We are supposed to accept all that as gospel because he has made this kind of television confession now. Or maybe he just expects us to believe him because he has always been such a good scout.
John Harper: …. Two days after Sports Illustrated reported that A-Rod tested positive in 2003, this came off as a calculated attempt to limit the shame. He kept saying how good it felt to finally come clean and be honest, yet A-Rod was so intentionally vague on specifics of his steroid use that he often sounded disingenuous.
Teri Thompson and Michael O’Keefe: …. Alex Rodriguez suggested in his interview with ESPN’s Peter Gammons that he tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs in 2003 because of tainted dietary supplements, but the Yankee third baseman’s explanation is a tough pill to swallow.
Tom Verducci: …. Unreal. So lies the career, however neatly parsed for us, and the image of Alex Rodriguez. Even when he took a proper step forward, admitting on Monday that he was a drug cheat, the mirror he looked into was a fun-house mirror. Believe me now, he told us, while making belief difficult for people such as Tom Hicks.
Lee Jenkins: …. Alex Rodriguez made clear Monday that one thing still separates him from Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, from Rafael Palmeiro and Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire: he’s smarter. He saw Bonds and Clemens hide behind denials, daring the federal government to come and get them. He saw Palmeiro wave his finger at congressmen. He saw Sosa practically forget how to speak English in the Rayburn building. He saw McGwire turn into a parrot who was “not here to talk about the past.” Like any good hitter, Rodriguez studied the men who came before him, learning from their mistakes and adjusting accordingly for his turn at the plate.
Again, we see the blatant, shameless hypocrisy in action. Demand contrition, backed with threats, very real ones, by the way, like; we’ll make your life a living hell, we’ll badger you to the gates of Hades, we’ll invade your privacy, we’ll hound your family, we’ll make sure your career accomplishments are devalued to the point of running you into complete obscurity. We’ll forget every time you gave us a quote, or a funny anecdote, or a quick interview to help us get ahead in the business, we’ll forget all of the charity work you’ve done, we’ll remind everyone of the time you were rude to somebody, and the biggie, of course….. We’ll keep you out of the Hall of Fame. In short…. We. Will. Ruin. You.
A-Rod’s too smart for that. So he caved. (Forgetting Pete Rose, by the way. Smart as he and Boras are, they forgot about Rose) Because, after you apologize, after you come clean; we will parse every note sounded, every word you say, every blink, movement and tear, and decide whether you have come clean enough. Whether you have apologized enough. Whether you are honest enough. Whether you have faced us and answered all of our questions, exactly as we expect you to.
It’s called moving the cheese, people. An elusive, ever changing demand that can, in actuality, never be met, because meeting the demand is never the real goal. The real goal is that you, the person in the spotlight, do what we require you to do. Public humiliation, mea culpa’s, and all of the requisite hand-wringing, declarations of children saving, honor of the game being defended, be wrought large, on the main stage.
Because in the end, these are just sportswriters, you see. They write about games. Let’s not forget that. These aren’t important writers, writing important things. These are mostly men who weren’t good enough to play a game now believing that it is up to them to protect that game from the guys who were good enough to play it. And only in times like these, when superstars show human, do they get to seem important.
I am important, says Mike Lupica. You must apologize to me, or I will spend my days ruining your life. I am important, says Tom Verducci. I broke the Steroids in Baseball scandal, and my life’s work is now to “clean up THE GAME” as opposed to writing about a game. That’s why these players have to do it in front of the microphone, in front of the camera. That’s why they have to cry, grovel, “stay for every single question,” play it BIG!
I am important, says George Vescey. You have to do it this way.
I’d be laughing if it wasn’t so damn depressing.
I have found a place where sports writers are seen for what they truly are…Im in heaven right now. Thank you.
Good Work.
I sent this article to George Vecsey. Here was his response:
From: George Vecsey (vecsey@nytimes.com)
Sent: Wed 2/11/09 12:41 PM
so A-Rod didn’t do it?
didn’t lie to Couric?
Didn’t refuse to get specific with Gammons?
Didn’t have higher HR totals in those years?
We made it up, right?
There is no right and wrong, presumably.
Good luck,
GV
Vecsey doesn’t understand that right and wrong do not change for
Arod and Vecsey, for Selig and team trainers. Wrong is wrong. Why
can’t he confess that the New York Times failed to report the real news –
The Steroids Era, which passed them by without a comment.
Shameful.
They knew. They all knew. And they know baseball players are mortals
who think they are immortal, they are insecure, greedy, ambitious young
men who have this one chance in their lives for money, fame, identity.
I have yet to hear one negative word about steroids during the Arod thing. What is he going to tell the children of America? His homeruns went up, his health is good, his bank account if full. What went wrong? Seems to me that steroids work great and if the best players in the world can improve, so can the high school football player in Iowa.
Speaking of football, does Vecsey interrogate or crucify Shawne Merriman? He lied, he cheated, he broke bones, he was suspended, he returned and won Defensive Player of the Year in some circles. The writers voted him third best defender of 2008 — and he missed four game because he tested positive for steroids.
Vecsey’s reply to you simply confirms everything about which John opined. Aside from his ill-worded, dismissive, snobbish and snaky retort, his comments are typical of the self-righteous and/or the agenda driven.
Vecsey ignores every single salient point, that John makes about MSM’s agenda and their pompous phony self-proclaimed guardianship of the false god of baseball morality
And Vecsey responds with irrelevancy and moral equivalency. As if denying ingestion of a non-prohibitive substance to two of the most overly ambitious self-important talking heads (Gammons and Couric) in the history of television was some sort of capital offense. Then use this false moral equivalency to justify the suborning the felonious disclosure of secret court testimony by so-called journalist Selena Roberts and the rest of the jackals at Sports Illustrated.
Insofar as Gammons is concerned? He is a gossip columnist. He is the Dear Abby of ESPN. A blatant, sonorous, Red Sox sycophant, and a shill for the owners. A laughingstock amongst players. He is a user and he is used. That simple.
Couric is Network television’s version of Barry Zito. A disastrous, massively overpaid, under performing, replacement for the disgraced Dan Rather. And like Zito, rather (pun intended) than raise her employer out of the ratings-basement, she has managed to hold them down even longer. And because her agent fucked management the way Boras fucked the Giants, CBS is stuck with a multi-million dollar fungus, and stupidly keeps running her out there in different formats, hoping against rational thinking, she can turn it around. But like the Giants will eventually do with Zito, they will cut their losses, and push her off the cliff just like they did with Connie Chung Povich.
George Vecsey, Peter Gammons and Katie Couric. Puhleeze. I would be surprised if those three could spell “right and wrong” three times in a row. Much less profess to deign that which is proper behavior for professional baseball players.
If right and wrong are concerns of Mr. Vecseys, perhaps he could have explained the justification for fellow scribblers Mark Fanny Wada, Lance Williams, and now the obsequious Selena Roberts to encourage federal criminal activity in the acquisition of material for their forthcoming book-deals.
There is no Deep Throat here. This is about ballplayers taking peds…an activity that has been going on since at least the 50s.
It is simply more yellow journalism…and not very good yellow journalism either. Its actually rather boring. It would be utterly sleep inducing if not for MSM’s heavy breathing. Its not even a figurative train wreck. Its more like watching two snails collide. It is so much gnashing over so much inconsequential behavior. Stupid. Arrogant. Small minded media personalities
What garbage they write, say and are. Rodriguez’ biggest transgression was wearing way too much orange pancake and thinking that the likes of Gammons and Couric were going to help him transform himself into something he is not.
His second biggest transgression is that he and most of the others do not understand that this is not about steroids. It is about penis envy and the large amount of money he makes, that can be waved around in front of forty year old virgins glued to sports talk radio, ESPN and the internet, by a subculture of small minded, runts who when they were 10, were told they threw like girls and never played beyond a couple of years of little league. They got to high school and found that all the kids who beat them out in little league got all the girls, all the special treatment and all the privileges that went with it…no matter how unfair. And until ballplayers figure this out and act and behave accordingly, the feeding frenzy will not abate.
so congress cant get the guys who bankrupt the country…but they can get a bunch of dumb ballplayers
and the sportwriters are only happy to help
this is why the country is going to shit
Add Phil Rogers in the Chicago Tribune to your list of those who have piled on:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/chi-10-rogers-onbaseball-chicagofeb10,0,2234280.column
I don’t read any of those guys or give any credibility to their opinions. Their newspapers will be out of business by the time ARod is up for the Hall of Fame.
But, his interview and the things he admitted were reviewed with a lawyer. It’s 6 years old. The other players involved in this fiasco haven’t had the advantage that the events were so distant in time when confronted. The way the feds and some local governments, particularly in New York, have gone crazy on this issue – you have to be vague and make sure anything you admit was in the distant past.
Now they’ve got Tejada. Honestly, the feds and the writers remind me of some kind of adolescent murderers who want to destroy Jocks because some Jock had made fun of them and because they had no athletic talent.
The drug laws on steroids need to become rational. And these feds need to be out of jobs. The writers will be out of jobs soon enough.