MLB is going to suspend A-Rod through next season, a suspension A-Rod will certainly appeal. An appeal A-Rod will probably win. A-Rod will be playing for the Yankees come Monday, he'll hit some homers, hang out with Jay Z, and hook up with blond strippers. MLB will see their suspension, at least, reduced to 50 games. If A-Rod's army of lawyers make Bosch look particularly bad (which I understand is a process similar to shooting fish in the freezer section of the grocery store where they are already dead and can't move the way they might in a barrel) before arbitrator Horowitz, that suspension may be gone altogether. If Braun's lawyer could convince an arbitrator, you better believe A-Rod's team has the capacity. #$%& you MLB for making me root for A-Rod in all this. I hope he wins the World Series MVP while the appeal is still pending.
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Braun got off with no penalty, really. That's why he jumped at the chance to take the plea deal and spend the rest of the Brewers losing season away from the media circus. They need to do two things here:
1. Ban A-Rod. Do not pass Go, do not collect $100M, go **** yourself.
2. Change the next CBA such that contracts can be outright voided, records stricken from the books, awards stripped, and no chance to play in the playoffs the offending year, regardless of when your suspension ends that season, and permanently ineligible for future titles such as MVP, etc. They should call it the "A-Rod Rule", forever preserving this arrogant and egotistical child in infamy.
With $100M+ deals becoming the norm, they must implement a mechanism such that cheaters don't continue to prosper, otherwise they effectively do very little to discourage it. The rewards are simply worth the risk if a needle means the difference between $10M over five and $100M over four.
Baseball, like any sport, is ultimately a spectacle. And, as in any sport, the players are the spectacle. These players happen to have a very very powerful union. A rule like that would never find its way into the CBA.
And as bad as A-Rod may be, baseball is a game of old timey stories about spit balls, and stealing signs, and barring players of color, and greenies, and gambling. In short, baseball is a game of cheating, and there will always be an incentive to do just that as long as the game is played.
I'd be more sympathetic of MLB's position if they had simply had the courage of their convictions and pursued whatever suspension they saw fit. Instead, they huffed and puffed and negotiated with the very players who are supposedly destroying the game and arbitrarily singled out one of them. Think what you want about A-Rod as a person, but however odious he is does not justify being treated differently than every other player in this situation.
Everything MLB does to look tough on PED users just makes it look weak.
Legacy is important, but money trumps everything, and that's where MLB looks the worst. Say Braun loses $3 million and ARod loses $30 million due to their suspensions. Who cares? PEDs helped Braun get $150 million from the Brewers. ARod will still get a lifetime haul of about $320 million. Braun sits out a lost season and his team will be happy to have him back next year. ARod may be finished as a productive baseball player in 2015, but he will get paid again anyway.
Even an automatic lifetime ban for PEDs isn't enough, because the player who tests positive may have already made his fortune.
PEDs are a special kind of cheating because they are dangerous. I'm not concerned about the integrity of the game because, as Roberto wrote, the game probably never had any. I'm concerned about there being demand for PEDs among young people who dream of being the next player who becomes set for life just based on his draft signing bonus. Just $1 million is an unfathomable amount of money for most people, forget about $300 million. There must be a lot of kids thinking, I'll break in and make my money, and if I get a suspension, I'll already be rich.
Forget about the legacy stuff. Everyone is tainted already, that's why there were no HOF inductees this year.
Correction: ARod will have made about $350 million through 2014, if he is suspended for that season. After that he has another $61 million coming to him, as a bench player or former baseball player. So well over $400 million in earnings despite getting suspended more than 200 games. What a cautionary tale.
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