Why Should A-Rod Go Unpunished For Steroid Use?

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While the baseball world looks disdainfully at Manny Ramirez, life goes on as usual for self-proclaimed cheater, liar, and breaker-of-rules Alex Rodriguez.  It seems like a perversion of justice, not to mention integrity of the game itself, that Rodriguez gets a bye.

Ramirez misses the best part of the season, loses 50 games salary, which is in the neighborhood of $7.7 million.  That is Jed Clampett money folks.

Do you think for one moment that A-Rod would have confessed his sin had he not been found out? I don’t think so.

Mark McGwire’s punishment is coming in the form of snubbing at the hands of the sports writers voting.  Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, Roger Clemens and Rafael Palmeiro will undoubtedly find that the Hall of Fame lake is very cold. 

Now Ramirez is going to be finding it harder to find the key to the door of the Hall of Fame, despite numbers that will have probably knocked the socks off of many of them currently there. 

The shame is that every one of these players I’ve mentioned (except for maybe Sosa) would have been HOF material before they started drawing the asterisk which will appear on their statistical performance sheets. 

Rodriquez is no better than any of these men as far as obedience to rules is concerned.

Shoeless Joe Jackson was implicated (whether he took part or not) in the Black Sox scandal, so he was excommunicated from the game he loved.  The same thing happened to Pete Rose.  Do you think if Rose had said, “Hey, I gambled on baseball games and I am sorry, real sorry,” that he would have been forgiven and allowed to be on HOF ballots?  Hell no.

Neither should Rodriguez go without anything but a small taste of public scorn.  Regardless of what some may think, Rodriguez is not the tallest tree in the baseball forest. 

I am not sure of the rules they have made up for steroid usage, but it should be equal to all.  It looks as though it is “fair and balanced” the way Fox News Channel is.  Not a Democrat in the studio.  Just sayin’.

Andy Pettitte is another who should face something.  I don’t believe he even suffered as much as a slap on the wrist.

Rules are rules, laws are laws; if one is punished because of a test result, he should be no more guilty than the man who confesses after an article finds him out.