Leave A-Rod Alone But Baseball Will Never Be The Same

Written by Godfrey Logan, Monday February 09 2009

It's very sad that A-Rod took steroids but test was anonymous.

A friend once told me a few years ago that she wouldn't be surprised if any baseball player had taken steroids. I thought she was irrational because there are certainly players who don't need to use steroids. Like Ryan Howard or Prince Fielder. Those are just massive human beings. There was nothing more they could do to hit homeruns as there some of their moonshots that still have not landed. Alex Rodriguez may not be a massive man but he is arguably one of the more talented men in sports and in my mind the last person I figured would be linked to performance enhancing substances. While I now sadly agree with my friend that I cannot be surprised if anyones name is linked to steroids I do believe that we should not jump on the A-Rod is a cheater bandwagon. It is reprehensible that anyone regardless of your status in beaseball, whether you're in the minors, an upcoming superstar or riding the bench on a major league team it is never good to be a cheater. In this era of hitter friendly ball parks it is unfathomable to me that anyone needs to cheat. What's worse is the era of steroids will now overshadow the era when black players were not allowed to play in the major leagues. But in Alex Rodriguez's defense this was an anonymous test where one lab had the names of the players and one lab had the samples. No one was to ever know which name went with which tests. This was supposed to be a survey to see if mandatory testing will kick in and sadly more than 5 precent of the players in 2003 tested positive. And allegedly Gene Orza was tipping off players as to when tests were coming. It is just sad to hear this news but the test was anonymous and players went into it thinking nothing would come of it especially discipline since there was no discipline at the time of the test. Someone is going to get sued over this and rightfully so. This won't be the end of it and hopefully there won't be anymore ridiculous hearings in congress over this. Although Alex Rodriguez's name will be tainted in a very difficult year for him already with his divorce and being linked to Madonna. Not to mention going on televsion in an interview with Katie Couric and denying ever using steroids. Though he has not been in anyway linked to steroids since, to me no one is above it and it will make watching baseball in the future much more difficult.