AMERICA AT LARGE:SELENA ROBERTS' book came out on Monday. A day later, down in Tampa, where he has spent the past two months rehabilitating a surgically-repaired hip, Alex Rodriguez hit two home runs in an "extended spring training" game. Speculation has it that the major leagues' highest-paid player could rejoin the New York Yankees as early as tomorrow night in Baltimore, writes GEORGE KIMBALL
It’s a move that, from the Yankees’ standpoint, can’t come soon enough. A team whose $200 million payroll ranks as the highest in baseball has struggled this far to an undistinguished 13-13 record. Worse, having unveiled their sparkling new $1.3 billion home in the Bronx just a month ago, the Yanks are 6-5 at home, and the television people haven’t yet figured out a way to show pictures of pitcher and batter that don’t also reveal an embarrassingly high number of empty seats behind home plate.
You could chalk it up to misfortune that the completion of the New Yankee Stadium happened to coincide with the collapse of the global economy. Raising the ticket prices to $2,500 for those seats probably wasn’t a great idea in the first place, and before April was out the team had already slashed the prices on many of its more expensive tickets.
Rodriguez’ absence from the line-up was even less predictable, as was the fact that his torn hip labrum coincided with February’s revelation, and his subsequent admission, that he had tested positive for steroids while in the employ of the Texas Rangers in 2003.
In any case, his team-mates are eagerly anticipating his return. In the best case he could be the A-Rod of old and immediately elevate the Yankees’ performance on the field. And at the very least he will immediately become such a lightning rod for media attention that the rest of his team-mates will be spared daily interrogation about their position in the standings.
Its publisher, Harper Collins, moved up the publication date of Roberts' A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez, ostensibly because the New York Daily News, having obtained a pre-publication review copy, jumped the gun and revealed some of its more salacious details last week, but the Rupert Murdoch-owned publishing house probably doesn't mind that the impending return of the three-time Most Valuable Player will coincide so neatly with its release.
Roberts’ book wasn’t offered for sale until Monday, and by yesterday it had already hit the number one spot on Barnes Nobles’ list of sports best-sellers.
Roberts, a Sports Illustratedreporter who first broke the story of Rodriguez' prior steroid use, was widely lauded by her contemporaries just a few month ago, but the release of her apparently hastily-compiled book has brought her squarely into the crosshairs. A-Rod, if he ever gets around to reading it, isn't going to be pleased by the content of A-Rod, but over the past few days Ms Roberts hasn't come off too well herself.
When she initially broke the A-Rod/steroids story she apparently had the goods on her subject, as evinced by Rodriguez' quick retreat and subsequent confirmation. You'd have to say, on the other hand, that Sports Illustrated'sjournalistic standards are somewhat more rigorous than those of Harper Collins – the folks who brought you James Frey and who paid OJ Simpson a million dollars for If I Did It.
As its subtitle suggests, Ms Roberts deals with the multiple facets of an intriguing subject in expanding a bombshell revelation into a full-length book. But A-Rod’s dalliance with Madonna and his proclivity for patronising strip clubs, hookers, and bringing bimbos along on Yankee road trips aren’t going to shock anybody. That stuff is not new to the readers of the supermarket tabloids who have been tracking Rodriguez for years.
But Roberts does make some other, pretty serious charges – that Rodriguez was bulking himself up with steroids as a teenage player at his Miami high school, that (although he claimed his Texas steroid experiment was a once-off aberration) he continued to use HGH well into his Yankee years, and that, at least in his Rangers days, he tipped off opposing batters to what pitch to expect by relaying his own catcher’s signs – that are offered without a shred of compelling evidence.
Roberts has declined to offer substantiation on the grounds that she is protecting her sources. That high-minded principle would be more persuasive had it not been for her role a couple of years ago when, in the employ of the New York Times, she more or less led the charge in a highly-publicised "Duke rape case" that turned out not to be a rape case at all.
The bare bones of that story: in March of 2006 the members of Duke University lacrosse team held a party at an off-campus house, replete with kegs of beer and two strippers for entertainment. The strippers were black; all but one of the players were Caucasian. A stripper named Crystal subsequently claimed to have been raped by three players. Duke cancelled the rest of its games that season and disbanded the team.
Mike Nifong, the Durham District Attorney, obtained indictments against the three players and repeatedly spoon-fed details of his investigation to eager reporters, none of whom was more eager than Roberts. The Times'scoverage of the sordid episode had the players all but convicted.
Eventually, as the “victim” changed her story for the third or fourth time, it became increasingly clear that this had been a clumsy shakedown attempt and that no rape had occurred at all. The charges were eventually dropped, the accuser investigated for perjury, and Mike Nifong, charged with withholding evidence, lying in court, and perjuring himself before the ethics committee of the North Carolina Bar Association, was driven from office in disgrace and disbarred from his profession.
The Timesdid not exactly fall all over itself in offering a retraction, but it might be noted that, not long afterward, Roberts departed the newspaper for a job at Sports Illustrated.
Selena Roberts has enjoyed a fairly meteoric rise in her profession. When we first met her 18 years ago she was the local correspondent covering Red Sox and Detroit Tigers spring training games for the Tampa Tribune. From there she moved to Orlando, where she covered the NBA Magic for the Star-Sentinel, to Minneapolis, where she covered the NFL Vikings for the Star-Tribune, and then to the Times, where she began covering the New Jersey Nets but shortly progressed to become the paper's chief Olympics correspondent. But this enviable pattern of consistently upward mobility had never before placed her under the microscope of scrutiny that the publication of her A-Rod book has brought.
Interestingly, one of her most prominent critics has been Jayson Whitlock, who has torn into Roberts both in his Kansas City Starcolumn, and, on Tuesday, in a widely-aired ESPN interview. Whitlock, himself a black journalist, revived Roberts' Timesrole in the Duke "scandal," which he likened to a lynching, and essentially suggested that she herself should have been disbarred.
"Instead," wrote Whitlock, "she moved on to Sports Illustrated, a seat on ESPN's The Sports Reporters, and a new target . . . Alex Rodriguez." When he accused Roberts of "playing by celebrity gossip book rules", Whitlock probably had a point, but were he just a bit more circumspect about ethics he might also have noted that that seat on The Sports ReportersRoberts was handed previously belonged to him.
It’s open season. A-Rod isn’t the only one who will have to be keeping his head down in the coming weeks.
