With Spring Training just underway, you would think the big question this March would be who is the team to beat in 2009. Instead, it seems that all eyes are on one man. With the Yankees officially opening up camp on Tuesday, February 17th, the question isn’t about the team, but instead about Alex Rodriguez. This offseason has been nothing new for A-Rod, who is no stranger to the back pages of New York’s tabloids, making news everywhere when he was found to have tested positive for steroids in a 2003 “anonymous” test. A few days later, he admitted to taking steroids from 2001-2003, his 3 seasons with the Texas Rangers. This news sent a shockwave through the entire baseball world and may have officially put a damper on the MLB for this entire generation.
Being a baseball fan my whole life, I have seen some pretty good players come and go. As a die-hard Yankee fan, the late 90’s were good to me, getting to see them win 4 out of 5 seasons to end the decade. I saw the seasonal home run record broken twice and the all-time home run record, what some have considered the greatest record in sports, surpassed. I loved watching all those 450 foot home runs and 99 mph fastballs fly by. It seemed like I was lucky enough to be witnessing some of the greatest players of all-time. That was until the release of the Mitchell Report in 2007, naming 89 players who have been found to have used some sort of performance enhancing drugs during their careers. Some of the biggest names to have played during my childhood were on their, some of whom I had imagined being like while playing out in the streets or in little league. These long distant home runs and rocket fastballs had all been fake. These idols of mine had been cheaters. My whole childhood had been a lie.
Now, two years later, A-Rod seemed to be the last hope for baseball. Prominently stating he was clean his whole career in previous interviews, he was almost a “saving grace” to all baseball fans. Sitting at 553 career homeruns and being only 33 years old, he was supposed to clean up the record book and restore the all-time homerun record to the greatest record as it once was before Barry Bonds, who many see as an obvious steroid user, passed Hank Aaron. Now with his admission of using the very thing he was supposed to save baseball from between 2001-2003, a span in which he hit over 150 homeruns, it seems there is no hope for what has been dubbed “The Steroid Era”. Arguably the greatest player right now and one of the greatest players ever, it is hard to believe anything he says now or to look at him the same way. As a Yankee fan I hope the best for A-Rod; hopefully he helps the Yanks win it all this year, but as far as the past it will never be the same. In what seems to be the dawn of a new era in the MLB, with players being more lean and quick instead of bulky and abnormally strong, baseball fans can now only hope someone great does come along with pure talent gained from hard work and practice, without taking any shortcuts. Someone who can truly clean up the record books and allow the kids of today to see baseball played the way I thought I was, the way it should be. Clean.
Christopher Hopkins
Wilkes University '11
Communication Studies
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First, I would like to start off by saying during the years in which Rodriguez admitted to using performance enhancing substances (2001-2003), steroids were NOT illegal in Major League Baseball. With that being said, Rodriguez did not technically violate any rules.
If we want to break out statistics, Rodriguez had his best seasons while playing without using steroids. In his first full season in the major leagues with the Seattle Mariners in 1996, Rodriguez hit .358 with 36 home runs and 123 runs batted in, setting his career high batting average. In 2007, with the New York Yankees, Rodriguez hit .314 with 54 home runs and 156 runs batted in, setting his career high in runs batted in. During the 2001-2003 seasons, Rodriguez averaged a .305 batting average, 54 home runs, and 132 runs batted in, all near his career averages, revealing that the steroids had very LITTLE impact if they had an impact at all.
It goes by saying the past is the past and bringing it up now is not going to change the fact that it happened. If we would stop focusing on the past and concentrate on the present then maybe everyone would be able to finally move on.
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