Loathe as I am to get dirty with the A-Rod book, I feel I would be derelict in my “duty” to ignore it. So we’ll try to make this as painless as possible.
I’m still waiting for my copy, so I’m just passing along what I’ve read.
The news falls into three basic camps: those who rejoice in anything that causes A-Rod pain or embarrassment, those who have a problem with author Selena Roberts, and the rest who believe enough is enough.
The middle group includes this excerpt from blogger Joseph DelGrippo on NYbaseballdigest.com and BleacherReport.com, discussing the latest juicy tidbit to be released in advance of the book: That while a member of the Texas Rangers, Rodriguez tipped opposing hitters on pitches
[T]he book’s author talks about having multiple unnamed sources confirming the…allegations. It is very easy for authors to hide behind their unnamed sources, and in several interviews I have seen and heard, the A-Rod book author is very adept at doing that.
(At the risk of tarring myself with the same feather, I want to point out that not all bloggers are journalists and often do not have the same standards of investigative reporting. The mere fact that I have excerpted from the larger article — thereby potentially taking the section out of context to prove my own agenda — might be seen by some as a strike against me.)
The Gothamist, a New York-centric blog, offers this depiction of Roberts:
We picked up a copy this morning to get a feel for just how rough Roberts’s treatment of Rodriguez is. The book jacket of A-Rod: The Many Faces of Alex Rodriguez claims that “Roberts goes beyond the sensational headlines.” Going beyond the headlines here translates to the author playing pop psychologist of what she calls “the pull of his insatiable hedonism.”
The piece offers selected sections from the book to prove their point about the author.
Some commentators try to straddle the fence. About the pitch-tipping accusations, Mike Celizic, a contrubuting writer to NBCSports.com, offered, “This is one of those ‘if this is true’ statements that over-populate the book.”
Roberts, who did confirm that A-Rod tested positive for performance enhancers during supposedly anonymous testing while with the Rangers, doesn’t have any smoking guns on any of the other charges, just the suspicions of players and associates — many of them unnamed.
Like me, Celizic hasn’t read the book
I’m going on reviews and excerpts of the book, not the entire thing. I don’t like reading books that make me want to take a shower after finishing each chapter. But I’ve spent enough time around the Yankees and A-Rod to know that it all sounds like things A-Rod is capable of doing.
However Jason Whitlock of the Kansas City Star doesn’t mind calling out Roberts, something that many of her colleagues in the media seem reluctant to do for one reason or another. I’m sure there are others who would love to do the same but are fearful of being criticized themselves.
Whitlock reminds the reader that Roberts had written long and loud about the absolute guilt of the Duke lacrosse players in a sexual assualt case a few years back:
When since-disgraced district attorney Mike Nifong whipped up a media posse to rain justice on the drunken, male college students, Roberts jumped on the fastest, most influential horse, using her New York Times column to convict the players and the culture of privilege that created them.
Proven inaccurate, Roberts never wrote a retraction for the columns that contributed to the public lynching of Reade Seligmann, Colin Finnerty and David Evans.
Instead, she moved on to Sports Illustrated, a seat on ESPN’s “The Sports Reporters” and a new target, baseball slugger Alex Rodriguez.
Whitlock also wrote:
In its news story about her [A-Rod] book, The New York Times failed to allude to her position on the Duke lacrosse case. I’ll give the Times credit for including one sentence of clarification in its news story:
“Some of the accusations in the book are based on anonymous sources, and others are simply presented as knowledge the author has without an explanation of how the information was obtained.”
***
Roberts’ book is a long-winded blog. Why it’s being treated as an unimpeachable piece of journalism can only be explained by the cushy position she’s been handed by The New York Times, ESPN and Sports Illustrated and the unchallenged institutional bias found within the elite sports media institutions.
***
The allegations in Roberts’ book might very well be true. But I’m not going to trust her, not without some on-the-record reporting, not after what she wrote about the Duke lacrosse players.
As harsh as the column is, might Whitlock have his own ax to grind against Roberts? Don’t know.
The Associated Press published this straight-ahead piece by Ronald Blum.
Journalist Selena Roberts makes the case that Alex Rodriguez likely used steroids in high school and may have taken HGH while with the Yankees in her new biography of the MVP, a portrait of a deeply insecure man trying to cope with being abandoned by his father and obsessed with becoming a superstar (emphasis added).
More on the whole sorry mess:
From Squawking Baseball (“Wall Street analysis of Major League Baseball’s players market”):
So A-Rod is essentially a walking punching bag at this point, and Selena Roberts is taking advantage. She is pushing the idea that A-Rod must have been taking steroids in high school, because it’s “impossible” that he could have increased his bench press from 100 to 300 pounds in six months.
From Peter Schmuck’s blog on the Baltimore Sun website:
It has reached the point where I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if Alex Rodriguez was implicated in the JFK assassination…. Since it’s pretty obvious the guy has an integrity problem, I guess you can believe what you want. His response to author Selena Roberts’ original report of his positive steroid test was so incredible that it wouldn’t stretch the imagination to believe he dabbled in performance-enhancing drugs in high school, but I’m trying to figure out just how he would have concocted a scheme to get opposing players to communicate to him what their pitchers were going to throw….
If there was any prearrangement, that would be an on-field cheating scandal of epic proportion. It’ll be interesting to see if Major League Baseball undertakes an investigation and questions all the middle infielders who played against Rodriguez during the time he was with the Rangers.
That would seem to be the next logical step, or MLB could just wait for Jose Canseco’s next book.
Two things here: one, I am probably not the first to come up with this, but the title of Canseco’s next book may very well be I Told You So (But You Wouldn’t Believe Me). And 2) The Mets should sign Schmuck and make him a reliever. I can just hear the announcers now: “And there’s Schmuck and Putz warming up in the bullpen.”
I’m sure there will be many more reports like this in the days to come, but this is the last you’ll hear of them from me, save my eventual review of the book.
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I happened to be in a bookstore yesterday and it happened to be the release date for the A-Rod book. I happened to pick it up to thumb thru and happened not to put it back down til I was done with it.
Very well-written hack job. Ignoring the PED stuff, Roberts does a great job of character assassination here, but what I mean by that is she does a good job of exposing A-Rod’s latent character weaknesses, and I think that in these areas what she writes is well researched and reasonably fair (he’s an a**hole and it’s well documented, and she does a good job of pulling together the hows, whys, whens and wheres). Problem is, you can’t ignore the PED stuff, and in this area I have a sneaking suspicion that what she’s done is reprehensible. I was careful to look out for it: as far as I could tell, NOT ONE source would go on the record stating that they saw him with PEDs, saw him using it, or heard him talking about using it. Whenever she made claims like that it was always attributed to the usual ‘source close to the Yankees’, or ‘former Winchester high official’, or ‘source with access to the clubhouse’, etc. Yet in terms of commenting on his a**holiness, quite a lot of sources were on the record. I doubt anyone is afraid of A-Rod, so it makes me very suspicious that she couldn’t get one ‘source’ on-record vis a vis PEDs if there was anything concrete there. I see no smoking gun.
A-Rod might be guilty of everything she claims, but she doesn’t come anywhere close to proving it. And a lot of people will believe everything she wrote. I’m huge on free speech and a free press, but when I read something like this I wonder about the other side of that coin: if she doesn’t have to reveal any of her sources, citing journalistic integrity, what’s to keep her (or anyone, really) from writing whatever the hell she pleases with no evidence (perhaps no sources) whatsoever?
It’s almost a shame that it was such a quick and easy read. It’s not that I don’t think there’s anything behind her claims… it’s that she wrote about a lot of things she can’t prove, and presented it as fact.
It’s well written, but that seems small beer given the weight of flimsy ‘evidence’ she stands behind in order to – ahem – support her claims.
Well said, Bryan. That seems to be the general consensus. I said I wouldn’t comment any further about this odious affair, but I would strongly recommend Steve Goldman’s excellent column on the situation at http://pinstripedbible.mlblogs.com/archives/2009/05/all_rain_means_all_a-rod.html.
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