There’s a lot of hypocrisy going around baseball these days. It all seems to be swirling around Alex Rodriguez … the biggest hypocrite of them all. That guy really does brings out the best in everyone.
On Sunday night, Red Sox pitcher Ryan Dempster decided he was going to teach A-Rod a lesson and throw at him. It took Dempster three tries, but finally he was able to plunk him near the elbow. He really showed A-Rod, too. So what if Rodriguez ended up scoring a run a couple of batters later? And so what if A-Rod took Dempster deep to lead off the sixth inning? Dempster owned up to teaching that steroid cheat a lesson when after the game he said, “I was trying to pitch inside on him.” Wait? It was an accident?!
Red Sox fans loved the whole thing, screaming, “You cheated” every time David Ortiz came up to the plate. Oh, that’s right, I forgot. Big Papi never did get to the bottom of why his name appeared on that 2003 list of performance-enhancing drug users. I’m sure he’s as clean as another stalwart of those two Red Sox championship teams: Manny Ramirez.
Then, of course, there is A-Rod himself. Did you know that the Yankees were trying to humiliate him last year during the playoffs? The Yankees brass apparently was out to get him and make him look like an invalid, according to Rodriguez’s team of lawyers for criminal justice. Poor A-Rod. His left hip was such a mess, and he tried to let us know about his pain. He said to the New York Post’s Joel Sherman, “I have never felt better.” He told Michael Kay during a radio interview on ESPN New York right before the 2012 playoffs, “I feel good. I feel healthy. I feel like my legs are under me now.” If only we had listened.
All this is just smoke and mirrors. It’s a distraction designed to make us to forget that Rodriguez is guilty of taking performance-enhancing drugs. It’s a distraction so fans can forget about how badly MLB has handled trying to police PEDs. Let’s make A-Rod the poster boy of all that’s wrong in baseball past and present, and then all will be right with America’s pastime.
If this is going to be how it plays out, if it’s going to be all Alex all the time, wake me up when the 2013 season ends. If that makes me a hypocrite, well, at least I’m not alone.
