Breaking over the weekend, thanks to Selena Roberts and David Epstein of SI: Yankees star Alex Rodriguez — and 103 other MLB players! — tested positive for steroids in 2003. Given what we already knew about the sea of performance-enhancers in baseball, this isn’t really a huge surprise, and as I said of Barry Bonds, I’m not even sure juicing should be deemed a mortal sin anyway. Still, as pro-athletes go, A-Rod is almost as easy to dislike as Kobe, so I’ll fess up to a bit of schadenfreude in this case.
That feeling also extends to the rending of garments now happening among the “Baseball is America‘s game!” crowd in the wake of the A-Rod revelation. This notion that baseball has some special place in our hearts — a “unique paragon of American culture,” as Jayson Stark effusively puts it in this example — is a sentiment I’ve never shared and don’t particularly agree with. (Besides, the sport survived the 1919 Black Sox. It’ll survive the juice.) And, in my pantheon of annoying sports fans, the baseball purists are right up there next to the bandwagon jumpers. Take me out to the Ball Game…but please don’t sit me next to the stats obsessives or self-appointed diamond historians.