The New York Yankees are baseball royalty. They've won many a World Series with great players such as Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Reggie Jackson and Derek Jeter.
Alex Rodriguez was going to be the next Yankee to join that list. But his career has been riddled by injuries and rumors that he had been injecting himself with performance enhancing drugs to help him play better. His nickname is "A-Rod", but he's heard worse ones such as "A-Roid" or "A-Fraud" because fans have refused to believe how clean he claims to be. He has now become the Damned Yankee.
Monday, Major League Baseball announced that Rodriguez is among 14 players who have been suspended for at least 50 games in its ongoing battle to rid the sport of those who believe in better baseball through chemistry. These players were allegedly involved with a South Florida-based clinic named Biogenesis, for whom MLB chose to believe an informant who supposedly worked there and saw what was going on.
MLB commissioner Bud Selig could have given Rodriguez a lifetime suspension from the game, as some people have wanted--an extreme measure previously given to the likes of Pete Rose and "Shoeless" Joe Jackson. Here, Selig blinked. Instead, Rodriguez got a 211-game suspension, lasting the rest of this season and all of 2014. He has been accused not only of 'using' by MLB, but also of interfering with their investigation of him. Unlike the other players who accepted their punishment, Rodriguez has chosen to appeal, maintaining his innocence.
So while the appeals process is going on (a decision likely won't come until after the season), Rodriguez is determined to play baseball for as long as he can, whether anyone likes it or not. On the day his suspension was announced, Rodriguez was in the Yankees' lineup for the first time this season, having recovered from his injury. They were in Chicago to play the White Sox, where Rodriguez went 1 for 4 in a losing Yankee cause while getting booed unmercifully by the U.S. Cellular Field faithful.
Rodriguez will get that kind of reception everywhere he goes, even at Yankee Stadium. Not only have the fans turned on him, but so has Yankee management. They've made no secret that the massive 10-year, $275 million contract they signed with Rodriguez, which runs through 2017, is like an albatross they're stuck with. They can't trade him because no other team could afford him. So any amount the Yankees don't have to pay Rodriguez would be welcome for them, which means more money to splurge on the next big-name free agent to add to their collection. And that's what worries their rivals, who have enough problems (financially and otherwise) just trying to compete with them.
Should Alex Rodriguez lose his appeal and has to start serving his suspension, his career will be all but over by the time he turns 40. He had his chance to join Ruth, DiMaggio, Mantle, Jackson and Jeter in the pantheon of great New York Yankees, and he blew it. Now he's likely to join a list that includes Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds--players whose careers and legacies became suspect because of their alleged use of steroids. Once we found out the truth, they were never looked at the same way again.
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