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.

REVERSING THE RED SOX CURSE (or THOSE WHOM THE GODS WOULD DESTROY, THEY FIRST LET PICK UP STRIPPERS)

The revelation that stipper Candice Houlihan distracted A-Rod with the second of their two nights of brief sex and extended talking during the 2004 ALCS loss to the Red Sox doesn't really explain the Yanquis' monumental foldo, but it helps. It doesn't help explain why 32 year old A-Rod would be buzzing round the 133 year old Ayesha-clone Madonna either. Vanity Fair ran a picture of Madonna a couple of months ago, in their ecology issue, bizarre as that seems, with the caption 'Timeless Beauty'. I suppose in the sense that plastic and silicone never decay they were right! This isn't like Nuke LaLoosh desperately seeking Susan Sarandon (oh wait, she married Tim Robbins, so it IS!)

Meanwhile C-Rod, who saw rod and reeled in Lenny Kravitz in Paris (nous sommes seulement bonnes amies, he said), is back and filing for the big D. Michael Strahan is probably laughing all the way to the TV studio as he wonders what Cynthia Rodriquez is going to get out of this one.

It may not explain the Red Sox winning their first World Series since 1918, though with a name like Houlihan she's got the credentials to be a Sox fan. But it does reinforce Rodriquez's quest to become the highest salaried wuss in history. It's not so much that his wife was pregnant with their first child (she got pregnant with number two while they were repairing their marriage after ARod got caught with a different stripper). It's that they talked about the fact that this stripper was a former basketball player, and he found that 'weird'. That the conversation got THAT deep may be considered a surprise if this is any indication of the depths of the distaff side, explaining why she slept with the Yanqui even though she knew he was married:

“It was killing me and I felt bad after,” Houlihan said. “I’m not a bad person. I know how it feels to be cheated on, it sucks. But a couple of drinks later, I didn’t notice all that much, to tell you the truth.”

If they ever want to bury Rodriquez wrapped in a Big Papi jersey underneath the new Yanqui stadium, he can have an honour guard of stippers lining the way. Bring back Derek Jeter and Mariah Carey Yanqui fans probably regret Rodriquez's wife wasn't using him to order human growth hormone, like Debbie Clemens. But put it this way: if Madonna shows up outside Fenway looking for Manny Ramirez this September, someone tell Manny: just say no!