Monday's A-Rod Opinions

As you might imagine there are a lot of articles this morning about the A-Roid situation. Instead of posting each of them separately I'll just put them all here.

-Bill Madden of the NY Daily News believes that if the Yankees want to restore their reputation as a brand they need to cut ties with A-Rod and eat the remaining $270 million of his contract.

Now that A-Rod's pursuit looks as counterfeit as Bonds', they should do what's best for the organization:

Cut him loose - no matter the cost.

As difficult as it is to imagine eating $270 million, the Bombers will be making a statement, not just for the Yankee brand but for baseball as a whole.

- On the other side of the spectrum, ESPN's Rob Neyer still considers A-Rod a great ballplayer (thanks to commenter Eric for pointing out this article to me.):

I hope Alex Rodriguez didn't cheat. If we do find out that he cheated, I will wish that he hadn't. But whatever happens, I'm not going to change my opinion that he's a great baseball player. Like many of the greatest players, he'll do whatever it takes to be the best player he can be. For a stretch of five or 10 years -- and yes, perhaps even today still -- being the best player could have meant cheating. Maybe the cheaters were wrong; that's the direction in which I lean, probably because I've got a streak of the moralist in me. But I will not sit idly while great athletes looking for an edge -- not all that different from the many generations before them -- are demonized by the high priests of baseball opinion. I will not.

- Newsday's Ken Davidoff has heard that the Yankees want A-Rod to clean up his own mess.

The baseball world awaits Alex Rodriguez's next step, and it will be A-Rod's move.

The Yankees, having been rebuffed in their independent efforts to confirm the SI.com report Saturday that A-Rod tested positive for two anabolic steroids in 2003, have no choice but to support baseball's highest-paid player. But they don't anticipate being heavily involved in the preparation of any public statements.

"He's got to clean up this mess," a person familiar with the Yankees' thinking said Sunday. "He's got the keys to the kingdom. It's his show."

The Daily News reported the same thing:

One Yankees official said the team has no intention of coming to the party boy's defense, and general manager Brian Cashman has not returned reporters' calls, which is no surprise, the official noted.

- Mike Lupica believes that A-Rod is the real owner of the Yankees.

The real owner of the Yankees isn't anybody named Steinbrenner, not anymore. The man who really owns the Yankees now, in all the big ways, is Alex Rodriguez.

Joe Torre and Derek Jeter and Mo Rivera and Jorge Posada and even Andy Pettitte - they're the faces of the old Yankees, what the Yankees used to be. A-Rod is what they have become.

The headlines about steroids are just the most recent episode. And it's irrelevant whether anybody saw them coming or not. This is A-Rod. There's always another headline coming. For the Yankees to act surprised or offended or even like an injured party here would be the height of hypocrisy. A-Rod owns the Yankee brand more than anybody now. This weekend he just gave it a little extra juice.

"The amazing thing about Alex," an American League manager said Sunday, "isn't that the Yankees traded for him in the first place. It's that they re-signed the guy after he walked away from them the way he did.

"Because that means they drank the Kool-Aid twice."

- Jon Heyman reminds us that we should not only blame A-Rod for this mess, but the MLB players' union is to blame as well.

Those test results were supposed to have been destroyed, expunged, wiped away. And they would have been obliterated, had the union not kept them around for no good reason.

"The Players Association screwed up royally,'' one player agent said on Saturday after hearing the revelation that the first and biggest name on the infamous 2003 steroid list had leaked out. "They fought for something that didn't mean a thing. Well, now they got [Barry] Bonds. And they got A-Rod. Now we have to wonder: Who else is going to fall?''

That steroid survey list from 2003 was supposed to be anonymous, nameless and faceless. And the list of 104 player failures was supposed to be destroyed immediately after it was tallied up. That was the plan. The only need for the litany of names was to determine whether enough failures would mean that testing would begin in earnest, with penalties, in 2004.

The list wasn't supposed to last.

- Peter Abraham calls these 'The Worst of Times' for baseball:

Nearly 100 college basketball games in the New York area were fixed by gamblers from 1947-50. The NBA was awash in recreational drugs in the 1970s and arenas were half empty. The NFL was little better than professional wrestling when it started, a bunch of goons pounding on each other.

But baseball never really suffered. Sure, the 1919 Black Sox fixed the World Series and Pete Rose bet on games. But those were isolated incidents that were quickly cleaned up. Segregation was a terrible stain on the game, but that was more the fault of society. Even lockouts and strikes were overcome.

Every time somebody tried to kill baseball, the sport got up and was better than ever. More people watched, new stadiums were built and great stars emerged.

Now we have the steroids, the scandal that won’t go away.

Baseball has overcome bad times before, but this will be the greatest challenge.

- Jose Canseco is back in the spotlight. He told the NY Post that there's a lot more coming about A-Rod.

"According to Jose, there's a lot more that'll be forthcoming," Greg Emerson, Canseco's attorney, said.

That claim, Emerson said, was with regard to A-Rod and others.

Meanwhile, Emerson, who said he spoke to Canseco last night, claimed that Rodriguez's steroid use was "pretty clear to [Canseco]."

- And just how is A-Rod dealing with all of this? By living it up in the Bahams of course.

Just hours after the steroid-tainted slugger earned his nickname A-Fraud, Alex Rodriguez was drowning his sorrows with Grey Goose and Red Bull in the VIP area at Aura Nightclub in the Bahamas.

Rodriguez avoided any 'roid rage by staying at the luxurious Atlantis Resort, one of his favorite escapes. He crashed in a two-bedroom suite in the exclusive and lush Cove section of the hotel, complete with private gardens, waterfalls and the butler.

The butler in A-Rod's suite told reporters that he had gone to a Grammy party for the evening and was not expected back at the hotel Sunday night.

So that should give you all the A-Rod info you need. Hope it wasn't too much all at once.