The media has been all over the story of A-Rod being AWOL from his Friday rehab. The Daily News wrote on Saturday night that Rodriguez was “chastised by the Yankees Saturday for failing to report to the team’s complex for Friday night’s game following a four-and-a-half hour meeting with MLB officials who outlined their case against him.” The article also says that:
According to another source, Rodriguez’s meeting with MLB ended at about 4 p.m., and a clearly shaken Rodriguez then met with MLB Players Association reps for an hour and a half to discuss what had been outlined by MLB officials. When Rodriguez didn’t show up at the Yankee complex, GM Brian Cashman then tried to reach the three-time AL MVP, who told him that he “just couldn’t make it.”
Yet the same newspaper, and some of the same writers, wrote earlier in the day that A-Rod did show up!
Hours after meeting with MLB at an undisclosed Tampa location, Rodriguez trotted onto Steinbrenner Field, the team’s spring training site, to the hushed applause of maybe 50 fans. But a deluge delayed the game, which was eventually postponed.
Both articles are still live on the DN website. As James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal says about such coverage, it’s two newspapers in one!
I also have trouble believing the story that A-Rod and his attorneys are negotiating a plea deal for 150 games. The article also quotes an anonymous source that says:
“I can see a scenario where if they’ve got multiple offenses (against A-Rod) that rather than going for his career with an arbitrator, baseball might settle on something like 150 games,” said one of the sources.
If they are, they are the stupidest attorneys in the world, because MLB’s Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program clearly lists a 50-game suspension for a first offense, and a 100-game suspension for a second offense, with a lifetime ban only coming after the third offense. And try as I may, I could not find anything in MLB’s rules on the matter which would justify 150 games, even for alleged multiple offenses at the same time. There is also nothing that says that a player could be banned for life if he were caught at one time with multiple PEDs.
And by the way, as I have pointed out before, Melky Cabrera’s people set up a fake website to make it look like the substance he tested positive for was legal, and he still only got a 50-game suspension. What is the precedent here for Rodriguez? Why would a 150-game ban be, as another source says in the article, “a victory for both sides”? How does that make any sense?
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