Yankee Talk: A-Roid Strikes Out Again

Rodriguez again fails to come through with the real truth



After hearing Alex Rodriguez once again spew his line of rhetoric as a means of clearing up the lies, on top the lies he told before that, I have come to give him one simple message:

"Shut the hell up and just hit."

Its not as if what he is doing now is working. For a man who seemingly has no communication or articulation skills whatsoever, Rodriguez continues to suffer from an insidious case of Foot in Mouth disease. Someone who is attempting to try and do damage control continues to find his foot on the pedal taking a one-way trip right off the road head first straight into the river.

He had his chance in Tampa on a sunny Tuesday afternoon with his first at bat to come through in a clutch spot. To come clean with everything. All of his alleged "monkeys" that he had on his back and nail this situation shut and leave no doors open to interpretation or future investigation. As has been his history since he has become a Yankee, he once again failed in the biggest of spots. What should have been a hanging curveball to be driven out of the park, he would up swinging and missing badly.

As if we haven't seen that before.

In many ways, it was typical Alex.

Does he really believe we are all fools here? Is that what he paid his new public relations firm for several days ago? For this? Maybe he is just such a pathological liar that he actually believes what he is saying and he is simply living a lie.

You don’t believe that? Then ask yourself why each story he has given continues to have holes the size of bullets leaking from it.

Follow this timeline: Rodriguez went from never taking steroids or being tempted, to getting caught with a failed drug test (that he didn’t know about until five years later) and saying that he did not know what he was taking and how he was doing it, to now explaining how he got the stuff and how he was administering.

Huh?

He said that there was "culture" in the Texas Rangers clubhouse and that he was curious. Suddenly, rather than settling on someone trained with information on these drugs, he settled on "his cousin", who does not have a name and was recently discovered like this was Star Search. To get the drugs, "his cousin" went to the Dominican Republic to buy it over the counter and smuggled it back to the United States illegally. On top of it, he decided not to have the drug checked out by any doctor to see if it what the effects were and simply going on word of mouth.

If that wasn’t bad enough, this "cousin", (not revealing to anyone if he was a prescribed doctor) had Rodriguez’s approval to use a needle and shoot him in the rear with this drug not knowing if it worked not once or twice, but twice a month for six months over a course of three years. That is a grand total of 36 times!

Are you serious?

Ask yourself this: Would you willingly take a needle in your rear even once not knowing what it is, what it does, and from someone not certified to do it? Yet doing it over and over and over again?
He didn’t think he was doing anything wrong, yet decided not to tell anyone about it or didn’t know if it worked.

He didn’t know if the injections were working, so he kept on doing. Continuing to put himself at risk each time he took it. No idiot would be dumb enough to potentially risk fatal consequences by doing such a thing.

If you really believe Rodriguez then you have to then believe this entire tree of logic. It reeked and reeks of such phoniness (much like the fake tears he displayed) it was ridiculous.

Rodriguez’s response, "I knew it wasn’t Tic Tacs."

I bet.

As Allen Iverson did with the term "practice" in 2002, John McCain did with the term "my friends" during his presidential campaign in 2008, ARod decided to introduce the world to a new term set to sweep the nation and become the rallying cry for any person under the age of 28 to use:

"Young and Stupid."

For the next few years, that is going to be my excuse for any of my wrongdoing. I will simply say I was dumb, young and stupid and expect the world forgive me. Problem is, I’m not going out trying to hit .315, hit 40 homers and drive in 120 runs.

He couldn’t come up with any real answers because he had none. And the real truth would not be revealed by him anyway. Besides, even if you got the "real story", how much validity would you put in that anyway? His batting average in truth telling was nearly mirroring his batting average as a Yankee in October.

Even worse, being forced to show solidarity for this mentally weak character, a large contingent of Yankee players headed by Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, Mariano Rivera and newcomers Mark Texieira, CC Sabathia and AJ Burnett had to stand behind him in support. It was either do it, or end up becoming a future back page for not doing it and distancing one’s self away from the teams biggest headline maker and drama queen.

Who wants to be a part of that show?

If given complete immunity, they would all tell you that they are tired of the soap opera and the cloud that hovers over this team daily when the latest ARod drama surfaces. For all of his talents, he is exhausting and all one has to do is read Joe Torre and Tom Verducci’s book The Yankee Years for understanding.

Now the Yankees are required to nurture him going forward this season and beyond like a little baby because Rodriguez is incapable of his own crisis management.

Management must put on a good face. The players must put on a good face. The YES Network must put on a good face.

Everyone.

Why? Because if the Yankees don’t, they risk this malignant virus on the roster, signed for the next nine years at just over $247 million, who just happens to be their best player, from sinking their entire season. They must do everything possible to risk having their investment go down the toilet.

It is as if the season has already started and the Yankees and Rodriguez are already behind.

The player with the million-dollar talent and the ten-cent head just can’t seem to get out of his own way. His only way out of this is to hit and hit plenty.

While were at it, staple your lips shut. You and the team will be better off for it.

Yankee Talk: We're Back!!!

Yankee Talk has returned for the 2009 season! After having a great run with it last year, though starting in May, I am back to provide a full season of Yankees blog coverage. From the start of Spring Training through the final out of the 2009 season, I will be here plugging away with my thoughts as I see them.

For the next six weeks, I will provide one (maybe two) story a week focusing on a certain aspect of them going into the year. Of course, I will break format if breaking news comes through.
Hope you enjoy it. Let’s go Yankees!

Yankee Talk: Another A-Roid Tale

Yankees slugger drama continues with steroid admission


It’s amazing how one guy can always find himself in these situations.

Many of them are self-inflicted for a man that obviously cant seem to help himself.

First it was the stuff in Joe Torre and Tom Verducci’s book The Yankee Years, that was initially going to cause a media firestorm when Spring Training opens up for the Yankees.

Doesn’t he wish he could have that firestorm instead of THIS?

When I woke up on Saturday morning on turned on the laptop and the TV, to say that my eyes didn’t perk up when I saw the headline of “A-Rod tested positive for steroids” was an understatement. I said to myself, “Oh crap, not him too.”

The report stated that he failed a steroids test back in 2003 while he was with the Texas Rangers and before he was traded to the New York Yankees. Sports Illustrated had the story and cited four anonymous independent sources. I flipped over to the new MLB Network and they had full coverage on the latest new drama with a guy who seems to be a walking billboard, always craving attention.

I instantly thought about the 60 Minutes interview that he did just a few after the Mitchell Report when CBS News Katie Couric asked him the following questions:

Couric: Have you ever used steroids or any other performance enhancing drugs?

Rodriguez: “No”.

Couric: “Have you ever been tempted to take any of those drugs?”

Rodriguez: “No”.

He would go on to pontificate further as to why did not need to do the drugs. As we were now finding out, it was all a complete farce.

It was only a matter of time before he was going to have to say something. Was he going to go the McGwire (“I don’t want to talk about the past.”), Palmeiro (sticking his finger to Congress), Sosa (“no habla Ingles”), Bonds (“I thought it was flaxseed oil”) and Clemens (outright denial) route? Or if he would admit to his faults and try to figure a way past this new saga that he has dragged the Yankees into.

If you have been keeping score in the past, quality decision making and clutch play has never been a trademark of Rodriguez in the first place and you wondered if he would start now. On Monday, he admitted to ESPN that he did in fact use the drugs (though he didn’t know what they were or how he got them) from 2001 until 2003 before having an epiphany on day while suffering from a neck injury.

He claims he needed to do it to justify his new $252 million contract he had just signed with the Rangers. In addition, he blamed his usage on the “culture” that existed in the clubhouse in which players felt the need to “keep up”. The Texas team during that time in retrospect read off like nothing more than a team of druggies with the clubhouse being used as a chemical lab with needles, syringes and pills available if you asked around.

His production spiked during those three years by coincidence. Did he juice up before so could earn that enormous contract? No one knows for sure.

Has he been “on the stuff” since joining the Yankees? No one knows for sure.

However A-Rod wants everyone to believe that he was clean before and after his time in Texas. Problem is, he has already been proven a liar and now was trying to convince the public this time that what he was saying is “the real story”.

It is like the old saying, “I lied on Monday, but today I’m telling the truth.”

But what is “The Real Story”? He was never asked. What makes it even worse to begin with was Rodriguez, along with the other 103 players who failed the test knew the test was coming and STILL failed it. The Players Union were hoping to have less than five percent of the players test positive so there would not be any testing at all in baseball.

When the results showed more than that, the tests could have been destroyed by the Union but were not because the leadership felt that they could detect enough false-positive results to lower the percentages of failed results that were later seized by the Federal Government as part of the BALCO investigation.

He would not have apologized if he were not caught. So how sincere is he really? It would seem as if the performance enhancers only seemed to work six months out of the year and expired whenever the clock turned to October.

Its always something with him.

Five years of this drama and there are nine more to go.

Whether it is his struggles in the clutch, his postseason failures, the problems with his ex-wife, Madonna, the A-Fraud stuff in the Torre/Verducci book.

Now this.

I wish I could say that he conned the Yankees out of an additional $6 million for each homerun record he surpasses. He was originally supposed to leave after he opted out of his contract before the end of the 2007 World Series. The problem is that the team has not had a brilliant record themselves on the moral grounds of performance enhancing drugs and their players. They signed Jason Giambi knowing he was a rumored juicer. Numerous members of the 2000 championship team were drugged up, including Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte.

There is no sympathy to given to the Yankees here. It’s a bed they have to lie in. They invited this mess.

The question now going forward is how the team proceeds with this “character” on its roster, which is already weak-minded and at other times a mental head case that has had problems in “clutch” situations.

How is it going to be when he goes on the road? The games at Fenway Park or Shea Stadium are always not so inviting and that is only expected to ratchet up even more. At new Yankee Stadium, it may be even worse if he is struggling or cannot get the big hit. Will he have the mental capacity to put this all behind him and not succumb to the overly increasing scrutiny that will follow him this season?

Thanks to Rodriguez, the Yankees season has been given a two-month head start.

It is just another in the unfortunate episode of “As the A-Rod (or A-Roid) Turns.

Random Crap: 25 Things About Me

After being hounded with tags from everyone about their "25 Things" that they wanted others to know, I was sucked into doing one myself. I remember doing something very similar in college and decided to do it again.

Here goes: 25 Things About Me

1. Before my sister was born (I was six years old at the time), the doctor asked me in the elevator whether I wanted a brother or a sister. I told him “brother”. Seven or eight years later, my mother retold this story to my (now) sister. She has never allowed me to live it down. Whenever she doesn’t get her way with me, she breaks out the “You didn’t want me in the world anyway!” Damn.

2. My first (real) kiss came when I was 15 years old. Apparently, it was later than most everyone else was and that still eats at me.

3. I know I am very fast talker. However, I didn’t know that how fast until I started listening to myself on tape. I’ve been like this since I was little, so it will take a while for me to fix that.

4. Steak is the greatest food ever invented. The way to my heart is someone who can cook that to perfection.

5. I don’t trust people easily. Even if I’ve known you for a while, that doesn’t mean I trust you. I grew up with the model of “Don’t Trust Anybody”. It works for me. There are maybe 10 people in the world that I would put my complete faith in and that’s it.

6. I will almost always give you an honest answer. You may not want to hear that answer, but if you didn’t want the truth, don’t ask. The only exceptions to this rule is when I know the person asking the question is lacking some confidence and needs a boost.

7. I’ve only had three real serious girlfriends in my life. Two of them lasted two years and the other lasted one-year. Everything either before or after does not count. I have never had a bad breakup. This is probably because I have always ended relationships before things ever went bad. Why have I done this? I’m not really sure. Possible insecurities, maybe.

8. I have never been a big fan of approaching women. Ironically, the three girlfriends I had all approached me. For someone who is built on communication, this is one thing that I haven’t been able to overcome. Why? I’m not really sure.

9. I admit that I am slightly arrogant, pompous and sometimes overly smug. But its all in a good, quiet way. Most of it comes from a self-assured that I’ve always had. I wouldn’t be the same person if I wasn’t that way.

10. I’m probably the best non-restaurant chef you will know. There is a reason I do not go out to many restaurants. Why buy someone else’s food when I can arguably cook it better than they can in the first place?

11. The word “Excuse me” is not in my vocabulary. I will always say “Watch out” whenever I am out in public. If you are in my way, you have two options – 1. Move out of the way, or 2. Get run/trampled over. I know that may make me an asshole, but that’s fine.

12. I am not Mr. Handyman when it comes to fixing things in my house. This is what I pay other people to be for me.

13. I have known my long time friend Olga off and on for nearly 20 years. I remember writing in her yearbook after we graduated high school that she was the one person I would trust more than anyone in the world. Though we haven’t seen each since high school, I still feel the same way.

14. I’m still pissed to this day my parents did not teach me Spanish as a child growing up. Apparently it wasn’t that important as learning English. Can you imagine growing up with the last name of Martinez and not have a 100% knowing of Spanish?

15. I get a kick out of people that say, “How can you have a last name of Martinez? You don’t look Spanish”. My suggestion would be that you need to get out more. Yes, I’m half-Spanish (even though a lot of my relatives try to run away from it) Besides, what exactly does a Spanish person look like anyway? I’m curious. Help me out with this. Open your eyes a little bit and experience the world. Yes it is possible and we are out there. It goes to show how just plain stupid (I like to call them “morons”) some allegedly intelligent people are. What, because I happen to speak better English than most people?

16. I’ve noticed since I was a kid sometimes have to bring my intelligence down for some people in certain situations depending on where I am and then raise it back up for others. I shouldn’t have to do that, but as a means of “fitting in”, I had to do it and I still do it to this day.

17. In my closet, I have certain clothing matches that I compare to a baseball starting rotation. I’ve been doing it since high school. There’s a certain pair of jeans and a shirt that is in my closet right now that I consider my “Big Game Starter”. I believe every guy has this whether they choose to admit or not.

18. I wonder often how everything would have turned out if I never left at St. John’s.

19. There are eight people from St. John’s whom I’ve kept in touch with all these years later after leaving and I consider them friends for life. They know who they are.

20. The only time I cried (more like “tear up”) over a sporting event was Game 7 of the 2001 World Series when the Yankees lost to the Arizona Diamondbacks. I was watching the game in my friend Stevie J's dorm with a group us. Little did I know some of those guys would become lifelong friends. I guess you can say we all bonded that night. It's what sports does sometimes.

21. Since I was nine years old, it’s been my dream to be in broadcasting. At first, I admired Marv Albert, later John Sterling, and now Bob Papa. If I can grow and be anywhere close to a great as those three guys, my future career will be a success.

22. My dream job since I was 11 years old has been to be the Yankees play-by-play announcer in some capacity. If luck were to having me doing the same job for the Boston Red Sox or another MLB team, I wouldn’t have a problem with it. There's only 30 of those jobs! However, if you told me I can work for MLB.com and get to be in their control room and get paid to watch every game, every night and produce highlights and call that “work”, I would say “Sign me up”.

23. I still personally do not get into these social networking sites like Facebook. Thanks my two great friends Nicole and Stacy, I was talked into this stuff. I think it’s been all downhill since that moment. The “Wall”, “Status Updates” and the “Pokes” are something I probably could have done without.

24. I doubt I will ever be truly content with anything. It is my way of striving and believing that something greater is out there that I believe exists even if it may not really be out there.

25. I’ve grown such disdain for my job over the last few months that I have decided to use my work time and dedicate that to such interesting things as listening to streaming internet radio, my own personal blogging, my class assignments, podcast shows and what I am (was) writing right now. And to think, I’m actually getting PAID for this!

This was my way of cleansing who I actually am. It would have been very easy to lie about certain stuff, but what's the point.

Random Crap: The Super Bowl, The War Zone and my new shoes

Stupor Bowl

All week, I had a difficult time getting into the Super Bowl between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Arizona Cardinals.

Zero interest. None.

I thought I had gotten over the Giants losing several weeks prior, but as the game was getting started in Tampa, it finally hit me.

How the hell are we not playing in this game?

It pissed me off even more. So much so that I didn’t even choose to hangout with friends as is customary on Super Sunday. I had my spaghetti and 20 ounce steak in my home and you couldn’t give me a better alternative.

Actually, I have implemented a self-imposed hiatus where I will not be going out to socialize on weekends where I do not have studio time until the third week of March, but to hell with accuracy.

I keep replaying parts of that loss against the Eagles for some reason.

I'm not sure why, but it keeps happening. At inopportune moments, I'll think about how open Steve Smith was when Eli Manning missed him. The 3rd and 20 play that changed the whole game, along with others.

I come up with the losers lament that the Giants are still a better team than Philly. Very likely, I will continue to believe that for months into the off-season. Listen, we all know that the Eagles did the Cardinals dirty work for them.

I will still hold true that had the Giants gotten past the Eagles in that game, there would have been no way in hell the Cardinals would have won in Giants Stadium the next week.

Nothing can change my mind on this. From there, it would have been our team playing in the Super Bowl.

Unfortunately, we will never find out.

This is probably a good thing.

Put the Giants in the Cardinals position as Ben Roethlisberger found Santonio Holmes for that incredible winning touchdown in the corner and I likely would have been depressed for a minimum of a month.

It would have been too much to take. The Cardinals looked like they were dead after that interception James Harrison made to make the score 17-7 at halftime. It was an incredible comeback for them to make. When Larry Fitzgerald streaked away from the Steelers defense to give Arizona a 23-20 lead, I thought about what the scene would have been if we were at Trinity with all my Giants fan friends jumping for joy at what would have been (at the time) the greatest comeback in Super Bowl history.

Yet as the Steelers kept making plays in that final drive, I could have pictured the emotions of everyone else and me seeing our hearts being ripped out.

This is why if I wanted the team to lose; it had to be before the Super Bowl. Losing that game is too tough to take. It is even worse if you lose in the fashion the Cardinals did. Why? Because there is no consolation prize or any solace.

You are forgotten about.

Add to it that when you lose like that in “that” game, very rarely do you ever get back no matter how good you are.

I thought the Giants would have lost to the Steelers had they gotten to that game. However, upon further review I have concluded that they would have repeated as world champions had they played again.

The Steelers did not play like gallant champions. They played like the flawed good team that they were. Had they been better, that game would not have been competitive and I would have been sleeping by the start of the fourth quarter.

The Giants were the best team in the league that unfortunately did not get a chance to prove it.

In many ways, they are the uncrowned champions.

The Steelers and their fans may not want to hear that (nor should they care) but it’s true.

Would they have won with Burress on the field instead of at home, season over because of shooting himself in the leg?

Yes.

However, we will never really know for sure. It just ranks up there with another one of those "What If?" questions.

Just look ahead to next year.

The War Zone taking over!

I always wanted to know if I had the ability and confidence to get on the radio and not sound like a bumbling idiot.

Mind you, this has been a dream of mine since I was about 11 years old. Kept awake at night with talk radio and sometimes never getting a proper amount of sleep. I would use old cassette tapes and do my own shows and always hated hearing the sound of my voice.

As I would listen, I would say, "Who the hell is this?"

I got away from it in college for reasons I am still not sure of yet. Perhaps it was because the SJU radio studios resembled a space area at Public Storage. Writing became my love and it was all I would do right up until it was over. Then, I wasn't completely sure if I seriously wanted to do this 100 percent.

Consider it nervousness or the fear of not making any reasonable amount of money to justify moving, Mom got into my ear and instructed me to get a job immediately to have some income coming in. For the last two plus years, I took that advice.

Look where that got me!

Sure, the money is "ok". But settling for "ok" is danger. It is as if to suggest that you are will to be content with what you are doing. In plain English, it’s called being a "paycheck collector". You know how many people are miserable at what they do? They wake in the morning and internally say, "Damn, I have to go to work today." At their desk (or designated area) during the day and they are counting the minutes until lunch hour and that is followed by the countdown until the day is over.

Think about that and then consider the fact of doing that for days, weeks, months and even years!

Why go through that? There is no point of putting yourself through excessive agita? And for what? To tell people how much the job sucks? As people, we all should be better than that.

Over these last seven weeks, all of my theories have been confirmed.

I love this. It is the best decision that I ever made.

I can only hope that this will lead me into the media industry and from there, my own niche can be carved out. Since I started learning "by doing", I have been able successfully start my own radio show and have done three episodes with many more to come.

I write, direct, produce and host the show myself. Putting it together solo is very difficult because you have to make sure you have all of your audio clips molded to your liking and run everything. For me, that is what makes it so much fun.

All of the control is in my hands.

Though my love is sports, the show is about more than that. Upcoming I'll feature shows dealing with movies, pop culture and politics. I love it all.

It's all about me.

I am in essence, my own executive producer. Editorial content is controlled by me and no one else. It has also been fun to get all my friends involved and have them be a part of the show. Most of them have never been on the radio before and they get their first chance to do it. As words of encouragement, I have suggested that it is in essence just as if we were talking normally, only this time microphones are there.

The microphone is your friend.

As I get better at this and I am in the position to be marketed, my career will officially start. There won’t be any turning back. No regrets. Just two eyes staring ahead with a singular focus on trying to make it.

Will it be in Chicago? Who knows?

Could it be in New York? I would love to be that way.

Los Angeles or San Francisco? Works for me.

Boston or Philly? If that's how it worked out.

You can never predict the future. However, success is the one place I want all of this to end up.

New Shoes!!

You know, I had wanted to get a new pair of shoes for about two months now.

Full disclosure: I am not one to overly buy shoes. My feeling is that if it lasts for a year that is considered a happy marriage.

The shoes I had were wearing thin. During several rainstorms, my Timberland boots were susceptible to water finding its way into the shoe. How this was possible, I am not sure. Yet, it kept happening.

When he snow melted in late December and streets and sidewalks were nothing more than one big puddle, my shoes would find themselves soaked. I couldn’t take it anymore. Why don’t I just walk around with any shoes at all if my feet are just going to feel like water anyway?

Mind you, these were great shoes when this type of weather wasn't in play. Going out with those shoes were great.

Of course, nothing can really take me away from my sandals, which should be a sign to me that living in Southern California or Florida is actually a best-case scenario for me.

Yet this time, it appeared as if the consistently cold weather was getting the better of my shoes. I looked down one day and notice a tearing of the rubber along the side of it and that was the ultimate red flag. In this climate, it was only going to be a matter of time before slush started finding its way there.

Time was up.

The next day I quickly sped over to DSW in search for a new pair. I believe I walked around the store about five times and I struggled to find anything suitable to my liking. There were some steel toe shoes I saw that I know keep the water out, but when I tried them on, it seemed as if the damn thing weighed about twenty pounds!

You think I’ll be able to run for any period with those dragging me down? No way!

I ended up settling on some brown leather shoes that looks like something out of the show Gunsmoke or Bonanza. Before the days of baggy jeans, if you looked at them, you would probably cover your eyes and start thinking about country western stuff.

From the second I grabbed the box and made my way to the checkout, I kept trying to talk myself out of buying the shoes. They did not look terrible (which was part of the reason the box was in my possession) and compared to everything else I saw in the store, this was like settling for fourth place in the beauty contest.

When I got home, I broke out my “going out” jeans and put the new shoes on and it turned out that I actually liked the look. I did not look like a fool or as a potential cast member for Walker, Texas Ranger. All I need is for these shoes to last me is three months.

I am sure I’ll get by.