Showing posts with label Michael Jackson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Michael Jackson. Show all posts

Friday, May 1, 2009

Alex Rodriguez Is a Smooth Criminal

I love Alex Rodriguez. Except for what he does on the baseball field, everything about him is plastic, incompetent and weird. Most of which is hilarious. Rodriguez might now be an overrated baseball talent, but his deeply underrated career as a whacko public figure is just beginning.

The unraveling began February, when reporter Selena Roberts came forward with the revelation that A-Rod had taken steroids while with the Texas Rangers. Rodriguez admitted to taking them for a couple years because he felt burdened by his insane contract and obliged to put up offensive numbers commensurate with the numbers in his paycheck. This turned out to be a lie. Yesterday, the New York Daily News reprinted information from leaked copies of Roberts' book, A-Rod, which detailed how he had taken steroids in high school, had taken HGH after leaving the Texas Rangers for the New York Yankees and — allegedly, amazingly — even had a quid pro quo agreement with other teams' infielders to "tip" pitches to them in blowout games to help up their offensive stats and bust through slumps.

While the details are somewhat shocking, the fact that more iniquities were revealed shouldn't be. A-Rod's always been a disingenuous bastard; this, after all, was the guy who wanted to be traded to the Yankees to "play for a contender," when it was his ludicrous contract that absorbed his current team's revenue and precluded their fielding a contender's roster. (If contending was really that important to him, he wouldn't have entered high pressure negotiations that created the implosion of his team's ability to pay for good teammates.) But it was the way he handled the February revelations that told anyone paying attention that there was more going on.