No Tears for A-Rod

The big news today in the sports world is Alex Rodriguez's confession to ESPN's Peter Gammons that he took performance enhancing drugs (steroids) during a three-year period when he was on the Texas Rangers.

Here's the video clip and article: ESPN

Of course, his excuses are poor:

"Back then, [baseball] was a different culture," Rodriguez said. "It was very loose. I was young. I was stupid. I was naive."

Keep in mind that A-Rod was 26 years old in 2001, having been in the majors since 1994. It wasn't like he had just been called up and didn't know much about the big leagues.

As for things being loose, by 2003 MLB was already conducting random drug tests. (At that point, this was just to see if drug testing was needed.) So there was already the sentiment that steroids were wrong, even though no penalty system was in place.

"And I wanted to prove to everyone that I was worth being one of the greatest players of all time."

This pressure comes from A-Rod's asshole agent, Scott Boras, who spent A-Rod's free agency period in 2000 hailing his client as the greatest player ever and predicting that he would shatter the home run record. This kind of pressure came straight from A-Rod's camp, so he has no one but his own people to blame.

One more reason to hate the Yankees.

EDIT: CBS News reminds us that A-Rod told Katie Couric in 2007 that he had never taken any performance enhancing drugs.

And, ESPN provides us with some interesting statistics:

Alex Rodriguez came clean about taking performance-enhancing drugs during a three-year period beginning in 2001. Here's a look at A-Rod's numbers during that time compared to the rest of his major league career:

	'01-03	Other 10 Seasons
Games/season	161.7	148.4
Batting avg.	.305	.309
Homers/season	52.0	39.2
Slugging	.615	.574