6 comments Alex Rodriguez Schadenfreude? Yes, Please.

There are very few things sports columnists seem to enjoy than the misfortunes of others. More specifically, there are few things New York/New Jersey area sports columnists enjoy more than the misfortune of Alex Rodriguez. Now that Alex Rodriguez has been linked to Biogenesis of America, which apparently is a "steroid lab," the New York/New Jersey area columnists are having a field day talking about A-Fraud (it's funny, true AND a play on words!). Bob Klapisch and Mike Lupica seem to be the two that had the most fun immediately after it was found that A-Rod was a client of Biogenesis. There's nothing these guys like better than to kick someone while they are down and they get joy out of doing so.

Let's start with Bob Klapisch, who as a person with access to a computer and forum with Newjersey.com, is fully qualified to sum up A-Rod's legacy. I'm not going to defend A-Rod, but anything that happens negative to him is like chum in the water for sportswriters to start doing some moral grandstanding...though due to his height Mike Lupica may have to do his moral grandstanding on a chair so we can all see him. 

A-Rod has been linked (again) to performance-enhancing drugs, as recently as last season, putting the finishing touches on his now-utterly trashed legacy — baseball’s all-time fraud.

If A-Rod has been using PED's recently then it seems he isn't doing them right. The least he could do if he planned on using PED's is to put up some great statistics and stay healthy. Unless...A-Rod thought that would tip everyone off so he used Wal-Mart-brand PED's that would improve his performance, but not to the point it would tip anyone off to what he was doing to improve his performance due to the poor quality of the product. Either way, the moral of this story is that you shouldn't shop at Wal-Mart.

That would be reason enough to send A-Rod into hiding, but there’s an even more compelling reason to write him off now. It’s the psychological dependency on PEDs — he’s been hooked all along and was too weak to ever stop.

Murray Chass heard a rumor A-Rod had a pimple on his back two years ago, so Murray uses that as evidence it is clear A-Rod was juicing again. Bacne=steroids.

So now Bob Klapisch is using his medical license and psychiatry degree to diagnose A-Rod as a drug addict. He's a fraud, cheat, liar, self-obsessed and now a drug addict. If A-Rod were an actor, he would be revered, but he's an athlete so he is hated.

Rodriguez may look like a bruiser, but don’t be fooled. He’s nothing without his syringes and pills and creams. He can’t compete without them.

Stomp that body Klapisch! It's still got some life in it! Kick it harder, make sure your moral grandstanding really sticks in the mind of your readers this time!

Just wait and see, A-Rod will find a doctor to say he’s medically unable to keep playing, like Albert Belle, whose own career ended in 2000 because of hip problems. This convenient detour will allow A-Rod to pocket the rest of his money and give the Yankees 85 percent reimbursement from their insurers.

So after calling A-Rod a drug addict based on no evidence this statement is true, Bob Klapisch states A-Rod will probably now commit medical fraud. You would think A-Rod was a master criminal and not just a baseball player who keeps getting linked to steroid use. I'm guessing the next part of Klapisch's argument will be that if A-Rod can't pocket the rest of his money from his contract, he will rob a bank or defraud a little old lady out of her Social Security. Because that's just like something A-Rod would do.

Dishonest or not, it would be the ultimate face-saver, and don’t think for a minute Yankee elders aren’t praying for this very road map.

So the solution to this problem in Bob Klapisch's mind is to commit medical fraud. Of course that's the answer. I personally see no reason why Rodriguez shouldn't just commit medical fraud. In fact, let's encourage him to do this so we can all move on with our lives. Medical fraud is the only obvious solution to this problem.

A-Rod was listed among its clientele. The government will eventually learn if the published claims are verifiable, whether A-Rod was trafficking in controlled or illegal substances.

Wait, so we don't know A-Rod is guilty of using PED's again? It certainly seems like Bob Klapisch knows since he has called A-Rod a drug addict and stated he should consider medical fraud. Rodriguez probably did use PED's again, but Bob Klapisch won't allow any unverified proof to move him away from this conclusion.

There’s no hard proof — yet. But we all see the scaffolding of A-Rod’s cheating heart.

Proof is for people who don't have a deadline. Proof is something that isn't required when doing a hit-job on Alex Rodriguez. He sucks, so let's just keep piling on.

Somehow, A-Rod’s insecurity managed to overwhelm him — a need to be loved, to be hailed, which required a shot of steroids, a dab of HGH, something, anything to compensate for his neurotic fear of being ignored.

Bob Klapisch: Psychiatrist, medical doctor, sportswriter, and now psychologist. His talents know no human bounds.

But here’s the more compelling question: What happened to Rodriguez’s talent if he was indeed juicing and cheating his way through the 2012 season? He finished with his lowest slugging percentage since 1995 and, with only 18 home runs, turned a pursuit of Barry Bonds’ all-time home run record into a dead crawl.

What happened to A-Rod's talent is that he was injured and getting old. It's an easy answer. A-Rod isn't exactly young and he wasn't very good even when he was using PED's at the age of 37.

Only he understands the depth of his desperation — to keep cheating after having been caught once already. To keep cheating after knowing the game’s culture had so radically turned against the juicers. To keep cheating when there was so much to lose: money, health, legacy.

Right, like anyone in the media has forgotten about him having admitted to using PED's during his time with the Texas Rangers. A-Rod had nothing to lose because he has all the money he will need, he obviously doesn't care about his health in the first place and his legacy was shot the first time he admitted to using PED's. Writers like Bob Klapisch or Mike Lupica were never going to forgive and forget Rodriguez's PED use when it came time for A-Rod to be up for Hall of Fame induction. A-Rod's legacy was already shot.

It’s a sad tale of greed and fear, one that cannot end well. Our guess? The arc of Rodriguez’s career is already crashed and burned.

Yes, but this arc was already crashed and burned because he had admitted to prior PED use. The media has him as a cheating PED user who is overpaid and chokes in clutch situations. Much of that is true, but it also explains why he would do what he can to get some sense of a legacy together in the later stages of his career. Bob Klapisch is adding in to A-Rod's legacy that he is a drug addict and suggests he commit medical fraud.

If so, he’ll be remembered by a damning footnote: king of the cheaters.

He was already considered king of the cheaters before he was busted for PED use the second time. Bob Klapisch shouldn't pretend A-Rod's legacy has been forever tainted now. He was already the king of the cheaters in the minds of many.

Now Mike Lupica is going to lean forward in his chair and angrily stomp on Rodriguez while he is down. Hey, it beats having to think of a column idea. Mike Lupica wants us to know that the Yankees are very, very happy to get rid of A-Rod, though I would bet Mike Lupica is sad. It's going to be hard for him to get on his moral high horse when talking about how great Robinson Cano is playing or when discussing Mariano Rivera's career.

Nearly nine years after the Yankees made a trade for Alex Rodriguez that was going to start winning them World Series the way they won them after Joe Torre got to town, the Yankees want Rodriguez to disappear the way the old Stadium has.

The Yankees did win a World Series after trading for A-Rod, though they didn't win four of them. I know this is a source of much shame for Yankees fans everywhere that the self-proclaimed greatest franchise in the history of franchises hasn't won 20 World Series over the past decade, but this is the reality of this tragic situation. 

The Yankees look at a guy who people once thought might end up the greatest player of all time as their Eddy Curry. Not overweight the way Curry was. Just dead weight.

Future journalism students out there, this is not how to write a column. Don't take the most absurd comparison you can think of and then make that comparison. I can't take this column seriously when Alex Rodriguez gets compared to Eddy Curry. Lupica tries to hard to write hyperbole, and he has done that, ruining any good points he might have made with a more apt comparison. 

It is still early in the game with Rodriguez, you have to know that.

Yeah Mike, we know that. This is why we aren't writing an entire column on how terrible Alex Rodriguez is and beginning this column off with an ill-advised Eddy Curry comparison. YOU are the one who needs to know it is still early in the game with Rodriguez. 

Or — this appears to be even more of a longshot — they want the commissioner of baseball, Bud Selig, to hit him with a drug suspension so they can start exploring ways to void his contract, even though the Major League Baseball Players Association will fight to protect guaranteed money in baseball the way gun nuts protect their guns.

Leave to an expert like Mike Lupica to weave in a relevant cultural reference. The MLBPA is going to protect A-Rod like gun nuts protect their guns. It's relevant to mock gun nuts right now and the MLBPA is just like a bunch of gun nuts when trying to protect the members of their union. I'm not sure if there was a way for Mike Lupica to make any more bad comparisons in this column, but at this point I'm ready for anything. 

But if none of that happens, then what?

If the gun nuts don't protect their guns, what will happen? Obama will have won, naturally. 

They keep Rodriguez around as a $114 million scrub?

I would bet Mike Lupica worked hard to work an "Eddy Curry as a gun nut" comparison into this sentence about A-Rod being a $114 million scrub. It's a shame it didn't work out.

a player who was supposed to be on his way to Monument Park when the Yankees traded for him in the middle of February in 2004 has now become a monument to everything performance-enhancing drugs have done to star baseball players

I see what you did there! A-Rod was supposed to be on his way to Monument Park, but now he's a monument to the harm PED's have done to players from the Steroid Era. It's a lot like the Yankees traded for A-Rod in 2004 so he could hit home runs, but now that he has been exposed as a PED user they would rather he run home. 

This is how you punch a ticket to Lance Armstrong-ville.

Abso-fucking-lutely not. A-Rod is about 2000 miles away from Lance Armstrong-ville. Lance Armstrong cheated, then bullied and sued his way into showing just how innocent and clean he truly was. A-Rod hurt very few people other than himself, while Lance Armstrong sullied the name of innocent people who tried to call him out on the bullshit he was peddling. He won a $500,000 libel suit against an English newspaper for writing an article that ended up being accurate. A-Rod is a dipshit, but he is going to have to start ruining some lives before he even gets close to punching a ticket to Lance Armstrong-ville. 

To the end, Armstrong was telling Oprah and the world that he used drugs in the old days, but hasn’t used them lately. Rodriguez is now denying he belongs on Bosch’s list.

They are still two different kind of cheaters in how they treated others while denying they cheated. If Mike Lupica can't see this, then that's on him. A-Rod is to blame for a lot of things, but he isn't the asshole Lance Armstrong is when it comes to ruining another person's good name to protect his own damaged name. 

There is no way of knowing how this plays out, no way of knowing if Rodriguez will be content to cash checks — for five more years — as a part-time DH and pinch-hitter and full-time Eddy Curry payroll albatross.

I think in knowing the kind of competitor that A-Rod is, he is going to find a way to use PED's again and come back to be a contributing member of the Yankees team. 

Think about where they are with Alex Rodriguez now and where they were when they made the trade for him in 2004 because Aaron Boone, the hero of Game 7 of the 2003 American League Championship Series, ripped up his knee in an offseason basketball game and the Yankees found themselves needing a third baseman, and fast.

The Yankees traded for A-Rod in February. They needed a third baseman fast, but they still had a few weeks. It's not like position players need to learn plays or need time to gel with their teammates. Players get traded every year on July 31 and are playing for their new team within a day or two. My point? Mike Lupica is exaggerating (again) when he says the Yankees needed one fast. They mostly needed to just find one in a timely fashion. 

A-Rod, who had always been a shortstop, agreed to make the switch from short to third.

Which, honestly, I don't think he ever got enough credit for this. Michael Young is treated like a deity for switching positions when the Rangers find a superior player to him at his old position. A-Rod was the superior player to Derek Jeter, including defensively, and he agreed to switch positions so Jeter could stay at shortstop. I don't think A-Rod should be treated like a deity, but I'm not sure he gets enough credit for swallowing his ego and pride to share the spotlight and move positions for the sake of Jeter. 

This is what they were saying in the middle of February that year:

“I really cannot describe how happy I am to have been able to acquire a player of the caliber of Alex Rodriguez,” Yankees general manager Brian Cashman said. “It was perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I am ecstatic that a lot of hard work enabled us to consummate a deal of this magnitude.”

And it was a good opportunity. The results were very, very good. A-Rod (PED-enabled or not) won two MVP awards and was one of the best baseball players in the majors his first five years in New York. It worked out for the Yankees, regardless of whether Mike Lupica believes it did or not. The Yankees didn't win as many World Series as they would have liked of course and that is all Alex Rodriguez's fault. 

Everybody was happy. Why not? The Yankees thought they were getting the best player in baseball, one in the middle of his prime, they had even gotten the Rangers to pay nearly $70 million of his contract.

And I can't emphasize this enough, the Yankees DID get the player they thought they were getting. Don't start writing a revisionist history because you think A-Rod continued to use PED's and he was a disappointment to you. A-Rod was very, very good for the first 5-6 years with the Yankees and then was just pretty good after that once he hit his mid-30's. Blame the Yankees for giving him that huge, new contract, but A-Rod held up his part of the bargain after his trade from the Rangers. He still put up great numbers for the Yankees, and even if it turns out he used PED's during much of that time, the Yankees benefited from his use of PED's. 

Mike Lupica is trying to make it seem like A-Rod didn't live up to his end of the bargain and this isn't true. He averaged 38 home runs, 120 RBI, .296/.392/.557 from 2004-2010. He held up his end of the deal. 

Maybe we should have paid closer attention to that, how the Rangers didn’t just want to get rid of Alex Rodriguez, they were willing to pay the Yankees big money to get out from under the last seven years of the $252 million contract they had given Rodriguez when he had left the Seattle Mariners.

Mike Lupica is such a dipshit. He's taking the new PED allegations directed towards A-Rod and trying to pretend like A-Rod didn't hit the ball well for the Yankees after being traded from Texas. He can't have it both ways. He can't bitch that A-Rod is a fraud who tricked us all into believing he was a great player and also bitch that A-Rod didn't perform. It's a lie. A-Rod played very well during the majority of his original $252 million contract and he shouldn't be blamed for accepting a ludicrous contract extension no player in his right mind would have turned down. 

Only now they all want to do anything and everything to make sure that he never puts the uniform on again. Nine years after the Rangers punched Alex Rodriguez’s ticket out of Arlington, Tex., the Yankees want to do the exact same thing with him in New York.

This is true, but this is a reflection of A-Rod's current performance, not a reflection of his past regular season performances. 

That is the dream at Yankee Stadium, where they want Alex Rodriguez to go away. But the nightmare for the Yankees is that he might not be going anywhere.

Who caused that nightmare? The Yankees did. A-Rod may be a cheater and a fraud, but the Yankees benefited from his cheating and fraudulent activity. It's also ridiculous to blame him for the contract extension he signed. He didn't force the Yankees to offer him that contract. At least blame him for the things that are his fault, there's a good list of options to choose from on that front.