I Knew More Dirt On A-Rod And Steroids Would Come Out!

I Knew More Dirt On A-Rod And Steroids Would Come Out!

On February 7th, Selena Roberts and Sports Illustrated broke the story that Alex Rodriguez took steroids.  I wasn’t suprised then as it’s unfortunately impossible to know or trust anyone in baseball from the early nineties until about two years ago.  Except for maybe Jamie Moyer and Greg Maddux.  Everyone else is fair game in my opinion.Selena Roberts’ book “A-Rod, the Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez” will be released on Monday and more details came to light recently.  Roberts is really sticking her neck out with some conclusions she’s made based on her various conversations about A-Rod.  We’ll never fully know the truth on if she’s right or wrong because you now have to take everything A-Rod says with a grain of salt.  Some highlights include that A-Rod took steroids in high school and in Seattle.  She also says that if the game was a blowout that A-Rod would tip off pitches to opposing players to help their stats and expected the same in return.  If that’s true, that’s even worse to me than taking steroids.  If I was a pitcher and found out he did this to me, I would walk right up to him and punch him in the face…Real, real hard.  It just shows you how massive his ego is and how stats are more important to him than winning.  Probably why just like Stephon Marbury in the NBA, teams improve after he leaves.

The whole steroids and performance enhancement era has put a pox on baseball forever. And the main culprit for all of this is Bud Selig for letting this go on for so long. He knew what was going on, but turned a blind eye to this because he needed the home run chases to bring fans back to the game after the strike and cancellation of the World Series in 1994. Baseball has always been a game about stats and it’s impossible to know which players cheated and which didn’t. Voting for the Hall of Fame will be next to impossible for the next 15-20 yearsOn a side note, I covered ARod in Seattle for a few years when I worked as a producer for KJR. He was fake nice but ultimately a douche. For a whole year I tried to get him on the radio station and he made me go through his marketing guy out of Atlanta. Ultimately, we didn’t get him on during the season.

In the off-season of 1999, the Super Bowl was in his hometown of Miami and we thought maybe we could get him there in a more relaxed setting. I called his marketing agent and he told me if we were able to get ARod and his then best buddy Derek Jeter tickets to the Super Bowl that he would do an interview with us down in Miami. Granted, he would pay for the tickets, but asking a peon producer like myself to track down Super Bowl tix for him and Jeter was insane. I was able to land 50 yard-line seats and ARod agreed to do an interview. I had to meet him at the arena the Heat play at where he was playing in the Magic Johnson/Backstreet Boys charity hoops game. He grudgingly gave the station less than five minutes in a corridor with awful cell service (especially in 1999) and the interview was barely audible. From that day forward, he went from fake nice to really weird to just a big douche.Selena Roberts joined The Dan Patrick Show on Thursday and talked about the lastest details that were leaked from her book.

On the speculation that A-Rod did steroids in high school:

“One of the big red flags for Alex in high school, and this was a long time when he described his high school career, but he said that as a sophomore, he could barely bench 100 pounds. Six months later, within six months, he had bulked up 20-25 pounds and he had increased his level from 100 pounds to 310 pounds. That is a pretty shocking leap for six months. So that, in conjunction with the reporting that I did with the teammates would make it irrefutable to me, not a “may have”.

Has anything changed since her original Sports Illustrated story A-Rod?

“I reported well after the story was broken in SI. I went back to sources and sources also came to me and said, “Listen, there are some things that he said in his press conferences that just don’t jibe.” And I went about trying to report those out, doing my due diligence to make sure the information I was getting was credible and accurate.”

What didn’t jibe?

“I think the issue of him saying it was just from ’01 and ’02 and ’03, I think that raised a lot of suspicion among everybody who was listening to it. But also the people that knew him and had evidence of other issues with him at other times came forward to me and said, “Listen, that’s not exactly what’s going on here. Here’s what else went on.”

Was he lying in his spring training press conference?

“In describing that it was just ’01,’02,’03, I would say yes.”

Will he be called before Congress?

“I don’t know because I think that there are issues with what Major League Baseball can do with a player. Obviously, what we know is that in ‘03 he did test positive for anabolic steroids. I don’t know if MLB has the ability to call somebody in unless they have tested positive since then when it became a punitive issue, so that would be a question for Major League Baseball.”

Is there anything in the book to exonerate him?

“You had a high school superstar and everybody knew that he was going to be great…I think it does go to society’s need for a child star. A lot of people took advantage of him early on and I don’t think that the people around him were always having his best interest at heart and I do think that he was molded. I don’t think this on my own, this is coming from people I’ve talked to. I’ve interviewed dozens of people around him and they all say the same thing – that he was molded from an early stage by the adults around him. You can go to agents, you can go to a union that enabled it, you can go to friends that really needed him to be great because they were living off of him. So I do think that he is, in some ways, a sympathetic character in how he was used by many people over the years.”

Does she believe he did steroids in Seattle?

“Well if you believe Jose Canseco. I actually do understand and you look at the physical evidence and I do believe at that point, just from talking to a number of players that played for Seattle and also the Canseco issue that he brought up in his own book; certainly there is a visual evidence there that shows that yes he did.”