Get Your Story Straight, Or Shut Up

I suppose it’s possible Alex Rodriquez could be getting worse advice than he is currently, although I am hard pressed to figure out how.

Maybe a team of chimp advisors?

Like I said two interviews ago, he’s not so much telling “the truth” as much as he’s like Microsoft issuing incremental updates and patches to a program called “Truth Speaker 1.0.”

Currently, he’s working on “Truth Speaker 3.2 v4” (beta) until the facts change again under his feet.

First, he told Katie Couric he was clean as David Eckstein (Eckstein’s clean, right?). Then he told Bristol’s $20 Bill that he used some stuff but can’t even remember what it was. Then he told the media in the “Yankee Steroid Confession Pavillion – Sponsored By Avodart” that he used “Boli” as an “over the counter” ‘roid from the D.R. with only his cousin, whom he wouldn’t name.

Then he stopped talking.

Which was smart, only too late by about 3 media encounters.

In hindsight – because even I didn’t see this ahead of time – he should have stuck with the simple and reliable Barry Bonds/Eddie Murphy defense: “Wasn’t me.”

Think about it.

We have about 10x the amount of totally incriminating evidence against Barry. Records being demolished, head growth the size of Sputnik, clown shoes, doping calendars, jailed ex-‘roid docs from Balco, and even a former girlfriend.

For A-Rod, it’s four “sources” claiming he failed an “anonymous” test.

Relatively speaking, that’s nothing. And if you are in for a lie already (Couric interview) then you are “all in” anyway on your reputation. Suck it up, and be prepared to go all the way like Bonds.

Listener Chuck in Richmond wrote it best, and didn’t even charge and expensive retainer fee like A-Rod’s PR firm.

A-Rod should have said: Well ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to defer from talking about this report right now. I did take the drug test like every other Major Leaguer and I'm not exactly sure how my name was leaked as testing positive. Until my representatives and I can look at the results and look at the testing method and the way they kept their documentation, I would like to stay quiet on the subject.

REACT: Amen. In hindsight, A-Rod should have pressed hard on the notion that a lab with pee-pee samples in one part of the country, coupled with a lab in another part of the country with “matching” numbers and names of MLB players, could be anything but a farce.

I know any Olympian would not have accepted such a broken chain of evidence that would affect his livelihood. Why should A-Rod.

A-Rod and the other 103 players should be pressing their case like MAD about how could “anonymous” testing be matched to players?

A-Rod should say emphatically: “How can I prove a negative? With supposedly 104 positive samples, on a test that was illegal, with two separate locations, the potential for mischief on matching names to samples to players is immense.”

Now, the story has spun way out of his control. And most of the damage, is squarely on his own dopey head.