A-Rod's Confession Is Solid Move

Alex Rodriguez (now officially dubbed "A-Fraud" and "A-Roid" I suppose) used steroids. This is, following his confession to Peter Gammons in an ESPN interview, an undeniable fact.

But regardless of the forthcoming repercussions -- and there will be plenty -- A-Rod's confession on national television will go down in history as a well orchestrated public relations move. I'm serious.

Look no further than the cases of Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Mark McGwire.

All three appeared to be (relatively, in McGwire's case) Hall of Fame locks, all appear to have blatantly used steroids, and all refused to confess the full extent of their use.

Perhaps A-Rod did the same today too, though; he admits only that he used steroids while with the Texas Rangers. And he says that he used steroids with Texas based on the weight of his contract. This seems to contradict his statement that he didn't use in New York, where clearly, the insurmountable pressure that comes with playing under the scrutiny of the New York media and fans took a much greater toll on him as a person and a player.

But right now, that's not important, because, frankly, most people don't care that much anymore. I mean, we all care, in the sense that baseball matters and that we want the sport to move out of the syringe-filled shadows and become the joyful pastime of our country again. But we don't care for that same reason too: We're all sick and tired of hearing about who cheated and watching the federal government waste our tax dollars chasing down millionaires, who only robbed the nation of some semi-real sense of history (as opposed to the ones who robbed us of a functioning economy).

Additionally, look at who A-Rod and his agent Scott Boras lobbed this cardigan-riddled scoop to: ESPN. No one's been more active in providing information relating to steroid abuse (read: beating a story into the ground) than ESPN, because that's what ESPN does. But if you compare their portrayals of Bonds and Clemens (guess which one had a reality show lined up with the network!) you'll see the reasonably different levels of coverage.

I'm not saying that ESPN will carefully ignore A-Rod's actions in the pursuit of other journalistic responsibilities; they won't. But if you think that Scott Freakin' Boras just hands over this interview without gaining some sort of leverage, well, you haven't watched him milking baseball teams for millions of additional dollars since he's been an agent.

A-Rod's still going to get publicly lambasted for this folks, but in all likelihood, as much as we'd like to question his production, morals and the truth about his steroid use in New York, there's a pretty good chance the entire country will be filled with too much apathy one way or the other to really manage that much interest in whether or not he cheated his entire career. The sentiment of most of the baseball-watching nation is something closer to the lines of "let's just get it all out there and move on" than "we're really interested to know who cheated so they can pay the price for their crimes."

And that's OK. Maybe it's not the best way for the history of America's pastime to unfold, but it's certainly convenient for A-Rod and anyone else willing to cop to cheating at this stage of the game.