“Morally, he’s broke.”

“Morally, he’s broke.” 

Neither Chad nor I have enough information to substantiate that claim as fact and we should all be extremely careful about making moral judgments at the risk of pissing off a whole host of gods, saviors, and deistic entities populating Christianity, Islam, Judaism and other assorted brands of religion worldwide.

What we can, however, be reasonably sure of is that the institution of Major League Baseball, where A-Rod plied his craft, is and has been morally corrupt for decades.

For decades, players were no more than chattle to the teams that literally owned lifetime access to their services, period.

For decades, baseball remained an exclusive white men’s club. Long after people of color were allowed to die on the battlefields of Europe and remote Pacific islands, none were allowed to play in the “All-White” American and “All-White” National Leagues.

For decades, major league baseball owners, managers and trainers, led by Mr. Commissioner Bud “I See Nothing” Selig, reveled in the superhuman stats put up by the most successful juicers of the not-yet-over PED Era and “saw nothing” all the way to the bank. This same cast of elites did everything possible to discredit players that finally broke the rule of ‘what happens in the clubhouse, stays in the clubhouse’, and let us all in on baseball’s latest dirty little secret.

Whatever A-Rod has done pales in comparison to the well-documented systemic corruption of owners and the Commissioner’s regime.

As for the “process” working? The process is defined by contractual agreement between the owners and the players union, the two groups who together fought against testing for years and finally instituted a testing program that was described by MLB’s paid sleaze and informant Tony Bosch as “easy as cake” to circumvent.  It requires a limbo-low standard of performance to have any confidence in a decision regarding PED’s rendered by that cabal.

Whether A-Rod used PED’s or not will become historically irrelevant. The lasting poster boys for PED’s in baseball are soon to be enshrined in Cooperstown. Torre and LaRussa, men paid to know, men who spent eight months a year watching their charges metamorphosing into circus freaks yet saw nothing, knew nothing and said nothing, will remain MLB’s constant reminders to baseball fans that ‘there’s a sucker born every minute’, and for years it’s been us.

V.