Nothing To Lose, A-Rod

Reading all the stories about A-Rod today, I feel like we have the perfect bookend to the steroid era in baseball. It all started just over a decade ago with the feel-good home run derby in 1998 between McGwire and Sosa, which later turned out to be a steroid-fueled fraud. The era then reached its apex with the revelations, subsequent angry denials, and finally trials, of Bonds and Clemens. And now it comes to an end with the greatest player of the modern era, who is clinically desperate to be liked and respected, and will now most certainly be neither.

The A-Rod story feels sadder than the others. Sure, he's a prick like the rest of them, but he's such a needy prick. I would guess that he'll react to his predicament differently than the others. His former manager/father figure just wrote a book that acknowledges his talents but also reveals that neither he nor his teammates like him very much. (This dude is having a seriously bad week.) This much bad karma might just be too much for him to maintain the charade. Instead of stubborn denials, we might see something resembling remorse.

But maybe that's his ticket out. Gone are the dreams that he would "cleanse" the home run record of the Bonds stain in a handsome pinstripe uni, trotting around the bases in a gold-plated new stadium.  As Dylan famously sang, "When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose."  Well, A-Rod certainly doesn't have "nothing," but he sure doesn't have the only things that seem to matter to him.  Maybe by telling the truth, he can finally get rid of the phony Roy Hobbs persona that he has been dragging around since he left Seattle for the big bucks and glory in Texas.  He can finally shed himself of all the emotional baggage and regain a shred of his honor. His legacy is tarnished forever, but maybe by telling the truth, he'll attain the one thing that's eluded him his entire career: maybe, for once, he'll come through in the clutch.