ESPN Accused AROD Of Taking PEDs In 2015

HBT- Over at ESPN New York Wallace Matthews and Andrew Marchand talk about Alex Rodriguez‘s rebound 2015 and the fact that he was not involved in any controversies or snafus in the past year. And, of course, rather than merely note it and note how that is different than the past, they decide to be cynical and skeptical about it and ask whether or not Alex Rodriguez is “truly a changed man.”

Not just from a P.R. perspective, mind you. They seem to each suspect, on some level, that A-Rod is still using performance enhancing drugs. Here’s Marchand:

The other thing that can’t be ruled out is how the heck did he do it last year? I mean, two hip surgeries, his 40th birthday and basically two years of inactivity and A-Rod was great for three-quarters of the season. My mom taught me a long time ago, if it is too good to be true, it usually is. That said, maybe A-Rod was doing things on the up and up — but at this point, it would be naive not to at least wonder if he still had some extra help.

Here’s Matthews:

Unfortunately, baseball and all professional sports have made this dirty bed for themselves and it’s not only naive, but irresponsible for us as journalists not to suspect hanky-panky when an athlete of an advanced age does something it seems unlikely he would be able to do. I’ll give Alex the benefit of the doubt on 2015, but would be very surprised if he were able to remain healthy all season and produce like that again in 2016.

First of all, I hate both of these guys. This is the old guard of sports media that are self righteous pricks, that think sites like Barstool shouldn’t be considered part of the media because we don’t sit in the press box without cheering. Now because the hot stove is over and Spring Training hasn’t begun, they are taking shots at the guy who carried the Yankees offensively last year.

They are only even bringing these kind of accusations up because going into last year, every part of the “real media” was hoping that ARod would implode and they could write the story about how he dragged the team down. Writing about how ARod carried a beaten up team into the playoffs doesn’t drive clicks for ESPN so they hope for the worst, in order to make athletes look bad and drive controversy. They do it on Outside The Lines all the time and they did it last year with Brady. It could never be that an older player who had multiple injuries got a year off to rest and came back having to do half the work as a DH, because that doesn’t drive clicks for ESPN.

I get why the public hates ARod. He was the best baseball player for a long time, and we love nothing more than to watch people fail. He had no self awareness in interacting with people and in the end took the same drugs as a lot of other guys, just better. People are going to hate that, because we’re a society of haters. Now though, ARod has shown humility and a tireless work ethic while taking additional drugs test, even though he has never failed a test because people snitch.

It’s sad that ESPN has basically turned into Incarcerated Bob just making guesses at breaking news but that’s where we stand with the “real media” now.

PS: I hope Arod took steroids and takes even more this year not just for the on-field results but so guys like these two have to find a way to write positively about ARod.

PPS: Let me and Carrabis in the media game and all is forgiven.

BUY A SHIRT