Tuesday's A-Rod Opinions

Since each day there is so much about A-Rod I'll just leave it all it one post for you guys to read.

- Mike Lupica isn't buying the confession:

Just because Rodriguez copped to just enough - the way Andy Pettitte did one year ago - does that mean he told us everything? Or did Rodriguez do just enough to get people to feel sorry for him, the way Pettitte did when spring training '08 started? They tell you what they did was wrong, wrong, wrong and then act as if we're supposed to carry them around the room on our shoulders.

We are all supposed to believe Rodriguez when he says he stopped cold turkey in 2003, that he hasn't just replaced steroids with human growth hormone.

We are really supposed to believe he was using these drugs and got tested along with everybody else six years ago and never wondered whether there was a dirty test on him.

Rodriguez stepped to the plate Monday in a way a lot of us thought he never would. Bonds never admitted to knowingly using baseball drugs, Roger Clemens hasn't, Mark McGwire wouldn't, even in front of Congress. A-Rod did. It was some show. But as always with him, you wonder how much of it was real.

- Neither is Bob Klapisch:

So Alex Rodriguez wants us to believe he had no idea what illegal substance he was putting in his body from 2001 to 2003. Nice try, but any discerning fan could feel that lie clinging to them like a second skin.

For almost an hour Monday night on ESPN, A-Rod looked earnestly into a camera — or just as tenderly at interviewer Peter Gammons — and delivered a slick explanation of his now-confirmed steroid use. The slugger said, yes, he cheated, but only because he got carried away with the juicing culture in the Texas Rangers’ clubhouse.

That was a promising start to what could’ve been a legacy-changing moment for A-Rod. Only, this is where our fraud alert kicked in. When Gammons asked which steroids in particular were used, Rodriguez stammered and said he wasn’t sure.

When asked to detail how and where he obtained the junk, A-Rod tugged on his ear, scratched the side of his face and said the banned substances used to be so prevalent they could’ve been purchased at GNC.

That’s all we need to know about Rodriguez’s confession — it went just far enough to earn sympathy points, but lacked the details of true penance. A friend of Rodriguez who watched the interview practically leapt through the TV screen when he heard the slugger plead ignorance to the drugs he was using.

“Alex is so meticulous about what he eats and drinks and puts in his body, if there’s broccoli on his plate, he has to know where it was grown,” the friend said. “For him to say he had no idea what was being put in front of him over a three-year period, that’s just [bleep].”

- Kevin Kernan thinks it's a good first step, but there is still more to explain:

FOR a guy sitting on a positive drug test, Alex Rodriguez's interview yesterday with ESPN's Peter Gammons was a positive first step in the rebuilding process of a superstar caught with his hands in the steroid jar.

The fact that A-Rod admitted to taking steroids in 2001, 2002 and 2003 was a hit in the right direction following the Sports Illustrated report that he flunked MLB's survey testing in 2003.

In that respect, Rodriguez is way ahead of Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Jason Giambi and even Andy Pettitte. So he deserves credit for that.

But there remain some tough questions for A-Rod, so that baseball can learn from this:

How were the steroids obtained? How did he take them? How were they transported through baseball? How can you prove you did not take HGH, and are not taking it now?

- Kat O'Brien feels the same way:

Yesterday's admission by Alex Rodriguez that he did use performance-enhancing drugs was a good start for him in this situation. However, it is by no means over. He can't just move on with his merry life. This will follow him forever, whether he realizes it now or not.

Also, there are many more questions that were not answered during his interview with Peter Gammons. Among them:

*Who introduced you to PEDs?
*What exactly did you use?
*When exactly did you use? (None of this, 'That's pretty accurate'.)
*What are you going to do going forward to prove you're clean?
*Why the outrageous diatribe against Selena Roberts?

- Wallace Matthews sees yesterday's confession as a short-term win for A-Rod:

Alex Rodriguez was the player baseball expected to lead it out of the bad neighborhood it had stumbled into while drunk on steroids.

Yesterday he made good on that promise, although not the way he was expected to.

He did not do it by hitting 800 homers or knocking in 2,500 runs or passing 100 percent of his drug tests.

He did it by admitting to being a druggie himself, by failing an open book test baseball had rigged worse than the old "$64,000 Question."

Now, by offering himself up as the biggest prize in the steroids sweepstakes, he stops the hunt dead in its tracks, drains the juice out of the syringe and allows Bud Selig, the architect of the whole mess, to finally exhale.

Where do you go after you've bagged A-Rod? For the crusaders who would clean up baseball, this is game, set and match.

And, a shrewd move by a remarkably clever and manipulative individual, who has learned how to disarm his critics while winning their sympathy along the way.

For A-Rod, the pre-emptive strike is a tried and true tactic, honed numerous times before his locker after a particularly bad game, when he has been known to volunteer "I stunk" before anyone else could say it to him or write it.

All in all, it was a grand slam for A-Rod and an even better day for baseball, which need no longer hold its breath over which of its biggest names will next be exposed as a cheater. After Alex Rodriguez, they're all David Newhan.

- Bob Raissman thinks Peter Gammons failed in pressing A-Rod on the issues and asking him tough questions.

When word started spreading Sunday night that Alex Rodriguez would do a TV interview, a Major League Baseball official was asked if the Yankees' third baseman, outed by Sports Illustrated as a steroids user, would do the spot on the MLB Network.

The suit just chuckled. Then he asked: "Do you really think A-Rod wants to sit down and talk to Bob Costas?"

Instead, Rodriguez took the path of least resistance, so to speak. The road is named Peter Gammons. For A-Rod, this street had no potholes. When Rodriguez sat down Monday with Gammons, ESPN's veteran baseball analyst, there were no booby traps, either, especially if you consider a follow-up question some kind of trap.

Gammons' line of questioning took a lot for granted. First and foremost, the fact that anyone watching was believing what he or she was hearing. Monday night, Gammons needed to press A-Rod, get him to clarify what the heck he was saying.

- Texas Rangers owner Tom Hicks feels betrayed:

"I feel personally betrayed. I feel deceived by Alex," Hicks said in a conference call with reporters.

"He assured me that he had far too much respect for his own body to ever do that to himself. ... I certainly don't believe that, if he's now admitting that he started using when he came to the Texas Rangers, why should I believe that it didn't start before he came to the Texas Rangers?"

- Peter Abraham thinks all this could lead to a very big season for A-Rod:

Think about it. He literally can’t get booed any louder than he does already, so the idea that he’ll somehow be tortured by fans is ludicrous. He’s past an ugly breakup and divorce. He’ll have Mark Teixeira hitting either in front of him or behind him. He also has this dark secret out in the open. In theory, he can just play baseball and stop worrying about what everybody thinks.

Personal goals of any sort are meaningless at this point for him. The only solution he has is to lead the Yankees back to the World Series. He’s a few big October hits away from Yankee fans not caring what he did. Fans from the other teams didn’t like him anyway.

The Bill James Handbook projected him for a .961 OPS, 42 jacks and 115 RBI. But if he went .325/.425/.625 with 45 homers and 140 RBI, would you be surprised? I wouldn’t.

- Hitting coach Kevin Long had this to say:

“I don’t think he needed to do them,” Long said. “But knowing Alex, if everyone else was doing it and there was a possibility that someone else could be better than him, he wasn’t going to allow that to happen. That’s the best way to explain it.”

Long also said Rodriguez is driven to be the greatest player in baseball history, and the stain on his legacy would be difficult.

“That part of it is going to be tough,” Long said. “There are going to be certain people that go, ‘He’s a cheater, he did stuff he shouldn’t have done.’ Well, look at it however you want, but I saw him hit 54 (home runs), and they get tested all the time now. There’s not a big disparity of what he did then and the numbers he puts up now.”

“You know what? A part of him is probably glad this is out,” Long said. “Maybe he’s glad this is out in the open. It’s something, at that time, that they were allowed to do, pretty much. So a part of me thinks Alex will think it’s a relief. I know Alex, and I know anything he hides or has to keep inside, it gets to him. I don’t think it’s going to have any effect. I really think he’s going to be fine.”

- Not that anyone here really cares what he thinks, but Mets' ace Johan Santana was surprised by A-Rod's admission yesterday:

"I was surprised to hear about it, just like everybody else," Santana told The Post. "It's a tough situation. You just have to let him give his side of the story and go from there."

- You can check also out this article for opinions from Johnny Damon, Joe Torre, and Brian Bruney. This one has some quotes from Jorge Posada and Derek Jeter. And this one has quotes from Brett Gardner.