Earlier this morning, we discussed Jason Whitlock's excellent piece about Selena Roberts from Sunday's Kansas City Star. He takes the media to task for believing everything she's reporting at face value, even though it comes from the same anonymous sources and conjecture that led her to convict players from Duke's lacrosse team of a heinous rape that they never committed.
Matt Lauer of "Today" didn't touch on Roberts' role in that miserable moment in rushing to judgment on Monday morning, but he did ask her about the use of anonymous sources, especially if any of them might be telling tall tales to fulfill their own motivations of seeing Rodriguez taken down a peg. Roberts' response is curious, to say the least.
"But I think there’s not so much jealously as disillusionment because he’s so great, he’s such a great player, he didn’t need any of this," Roberts told Lauer. "He didn’t need to embellish anything, he’s a great story in and of himself."
If, as Roberts' book alleges, A-Rod was doing steroids in high school, how is it true that he didn't need any of this? According to Roberts, he wasn't embellishing anything. Rather, he was maintaining the steroid use that he started well before stepping foot on a big league diamon. Unless his sixth-grade Little League season was so good that he could have been in the majors right then and there, it is Roberts' contention that he was never a great player because he was always taking steroids.
And a great story? That's not evident in what's been leaked from her book. Stories about A-Rod tipping pitches for the opposition or forcing clubhouse attendants to put toothpaste on his toothbrush are meant to make judgments about Rodriguez's character. Judgments that all flow from the fact that he used steroids, something that Craig Calcaterra, who hit on Roberts' Duke connections before Whitlock, quite rightly calls bogus.
Those stories, all anonymously sourced, are being roundly rejected by A-Rod's teammates. Those denials are from Doug Mientkiewicz and Michael Young, which we know because they were willing to put their name behind their words.
As Roberts told Lauer, her use of anonymous sources broke the report of A-Rod's failed drug test. Every word she writes may be true, but it certainly appears that she's just as interested in using them to judge A-Rod as a person as she is in finding out if he broke any laws or rules of baseball.
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Josh Alper is a writer living in New York City and is a contributor to FanHouse.com and ProFootballTalk.com in addition to his duties for NBCNewYork.com.
