Huffington Post Contributor Chris Kyle wrote a piece that actually didn't do anything more than highlight the reactions in the press to Selena Robert's book, A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez. concerning steroid and other alleged performance enhancing drugs use by Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez.
One of the highlighted passages was a rant by the redoubtable Jason Whitlock, a Kansas City Star columnist, who is generally not known as a friend of jocks who get out of line. He has even attacked the behavior of what he called "today's hip hop athlete" for being the reason for major league baseball and other sports leagues not signing more black players.
Unfortunately, Whitlock compared Roberts book to the idiotic unjust prosecutions of the Duke lacrosse players by grandstanding DA Mike Nifong. Swing and a miss Jason.
Aside from the fact that Rodriguez is unlikely to ever face jail time for his juicing, the $250 million man has indeed been found out to be doing something underhanded and in violation of MLB rules. This isn't Snow White we're talking about. This is the phoniest pro athlete in America.
That Kyle allows Whitlock's hysterical exegesis to be used as some kind of credible condemnation of Roberts admittedly gratuitous and lurid tome brings no light to this issue. You also have to take into account that while people around A-Rod, guys like Shane Spencer, a dubious character himself, and former Yankees first sacker Doug Mientkiewics deny that they saw any evidence that A-Rod was building better muscles through chemistry or tipping pitches, Rodriguez himself has denied nothing, only using, to quote Chrissy Hynde in "Brass in Pocket," his sidestep when reporters attempt to query him on the allegations at hand.
If you are a juror and a man is innocent, you generally want to hear him profess his purity from the witness stand. A-Rod, who would be in no legal jeopardy for issuing a denial, continues to stand silent, which makes jurors, that is, the sporting public, look at him even further askance.
As for Roberts herself, well, the NY Times already had Jason Blair and Judith Miller (who is now working for Fox News) fall down on the journalistic job and her still to be proven allegations of high school steroid use and pitch tipping (which, if true, should earn him banishment from the game) are indeed, as Deadspin writer AJ Daulerio noted, the kind of thing Roberts used to bitch at bloggers about. And the book ends up thus looking like not a product of America's leading newspaper, but something out of the keyboard of the discredited NY Post Page Six writer Richard Johnson as a result. Heckuva job there, Selena.
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