A-Rod Saga: Villains Are All Around

Certainly Alex Rodriguez, who was suspended from Major League Baseball this past weekend, is among the bad guys in this story.  But Joe Posnanski points out that he is not alone.  First, Sixty Minutes, which did a massive story on the A-Rod saga, did not acquit itself particularly well:

This theme that drugs are magic and can turn hitters into superhumans. If 60 Minutes was doing a commercial for PEDs, they could have hardly done better. In fact, they would not be ALLOWED to run that as a commercial because they did not list off the side effects. I’m constantly reminded of Buck O’Neil’s lament: If baseball leaders want kids to not use these drugs, why do they keep going on and on about HOW WELL THEY WORK? As you will see, 60 Minutes goes to bizarre extremes to make Bosch sound like the world’s greatest scientist and his drugs into enchanted candy that can make all your dreams comes true.

And Major League Baseball straddled some very questionable ethical lines to get their prey:

Fortunately, Major League Baseball’s Rob Manfred brought some integrity to the proceedings. He said that he ordered that baseball pay $125,000 for Biogenesis documents from someone that identified himself as “Bobby.” It’s an honorable name. But, if you fear that there might be some questions about documents from someone named “Bobby,” Manfred made it very clear that extraordinary efforts were made to authenticate these documents. A lot more effort, you would assume, than spent finding Bobby’s last name.

As a baseball fan, I’d just love for all of this to go away.  As a realist, I know it is going to go on for a long long time.

By: Stuart Shapiro

Stuart is a professor and the Director of the Public Policy
program at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers
University. He teaches economics and cost-benefit analysis and studies
regulation in the United States at both the federal and state levels.
Prior to coming to Rutgers, Stuart worked for five years at the Office
of Management and Budget in Washington under Presidents Clinton and
George W. Bush.