SAY IT AINT SO, AROID

I've done another piece on baseball and steroids for the bbc's website, based on the latest revelations about Alex Rodriguez, though I didn't go into the full story of StrayRod, Cynthia, and Madonna, nor his relationship with his teammates as detailed in Joe Torre's recent memoir, as deeply as I would have liked. You can find it here. This one will run and run. It is interesting how ARod's reputation, even before the steroids, would be as a great accumulator of numbers, but a disappointment, if not liability in the clutch. I wonder if Madonna thought the same thing. For my earlier take on the adventures of the Rod family, see here.

The most interesting part of the story, however, was the allegation that ARod may have been warned about a 'random' test in September 2004 by an official of the players association. Although none of the sources are named, if true, it would put the long-term opposition of the union to testing of its members into a whole new light. Not that they would have been the only ones in baseball turning a blind eye. As I wrote on the same website when the Mitchell report was released, here, even when I worked for baseball, in the early 90s, it was pretty easy to see that there were guys on the juice.