The Read

A-Rod suspension 60 Minutes delivers juicy details but MLBs

Submitted by seestyle » Wed 27-Jul-2022, 18:34 Subject Area: General Keywords: A-Rod suspension 60 Minutes delivers juicy de, A-Rod suspension 60 Minutes delivers juicy de, A-Rod suspension 60 Minutes delivers juicy de, A-Rod suspension 60 Minutes delivers juicy de, A-Rod suspension 60 Minutes delivers juicy de, A-Rod suspension 60 Minutes delivers juicy de, A-Rod suspension 60 Minutes delivers juicy de

0 member ratings

Major League Baseball got exactly what it wanted on Sunday night.

After the first half of "60 Minutes" detailed the league's case against Alex Rodriguez, who on Sa ... ay was , CBS' Scott Pelley offered the final word.

"And Bud Selig has announced his retirement as commi sioner of baseball," Pelley said. "Part of his legacy is the establishment of the toughest anti-doping rules in all of American pro sports."

Why was MLB willing to air the dirty laundry of a case that it basically won? Those words are the exact reason.Bud Selig's legacy and baseball's reputation.

The Biogenesis scandal gave lie to the notion that the Steroid Era was over. This was a half-hour infomercial designed to restore and maintain the public trust in a sport that has faced more scrutiny for performance-enhancing drugs than any other, in stark contrast to CBS' preceding Sunday programming of the NFL, where PED suspensions are short and nobody gives a lab rat's needle-pockmarked a s about it.

You don't have to believe A-Rod. You don't have to believe Tony Bosch. Both are masters of the "I lied Jose Pirela Jersey before, but now I'm telling the truth" game. You do have to consider just what was happening on Tony Gwynn Jersey "60 Minutes," whose piece clearly was a sembled in advance of arbitrator Frederic Horowitz's decision on Sa ... ay, with only a few late details needing to be added.

Who, exactly, would be watching this report? There would be baseball fans, sure, curious for details about A-Rod, but that would be the case no matter where MLB decided to grant interviews. The audience for "60 Minutes" famously tilts toward older viewers, so why go there? Could it be that older viewers might have more of an interest in baseball's drug i sue?

Leading up to Wednesday's announcement of the Hall of Fame voting results, . The ballots from this exercise skew toward a younger generation of writers who post their votes for Cooperstown online. It's not universally young voters who have their ballots counted in this way, but some of the vote totals suggest a trend.

BTF's "Gizmo" projected Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and Frank Thomas at 99.5, 95.7, and 89.0 percent of the vote, respectively. In the final tally, those numbers were 2.3, 3.8, and 5.3 percentage points too high. Now check out some players who have faced drug scrutiny Mike Piazza (despite a lack of evidence), Barry Bonds, and Roger Clemens. BTF had them at 67.9, 42.1, and 40.7 percent, respectively. Their actual vote percentages were 5.7, 7.4, and 5.3 points lower. It's not an unreasonable theory that a reason for the difference is that a militant anti-drug stance is a position more likely to be held by someone who is older.

That, in itself, does not constitute evidence of a Garrett Richards Jersey generation gap on the PED i sue, but it meshes well with other themes, such as . And further to this i sue, people who live ... her than 20 miles away from a major league ballpark were more likely this year to than those living near a ballpark. Casual fans the reason you would go to CBS rather than ESPN if you were MLB also were more likely to pick A-Rod as the face of baseball than diehards.

Taking all of this together, "60 Minutes" was perfect for MLB to use as a mouthpiece, and that is just what happened on Sunday night, as the league's payments for evidence from a dubious source called "Bobby" were cla sified as a nece sary risk in the investigation, while A-Rod's payments to Bosch were characterized as damning.

Throughout the piece, Bosch was painted incredibly sympathetically for an admitted drug dealer, interviewed in a bright room and with B-roll of him getting some sun on a boat with the Miami skyline in the background. Selig and Major League Baseball COO Rob Manfred Blake Snell Jersey were interviewed in comfortable rooms that suggested cla s. A-Rod's lawyer, Joe Tacopina, talked to Pelley on a set with no environment just shrouded in black, po sibly on the inside of a cave or in an auxiliary area of the Death Star.

"This was a battle to save the game, and he was determined not to lose to Rodriguez," Pelley said as a manner of introducing Luke Seligwalker. The commi sioner's appearance was brief, and in the segment of the report that aired after the commercial.

"In my judgement, his actions were beyond comprehension, and I'm somebody who's now been in the game over 50 years," Selig said.

"You had never seen anything like it," Pelley said, without a question mark in his tone.

"I hadn't, no," Selig said.

"And so you decided to make an example of him."

"I wouldn't call it an example," Selig said. "I think the penalty fit what I saw was the evidence."

"What was it about the Alex Rodriguez case that was an outlier for you?"

Selig's response: "As I looked at everything on all the players, then you get to Alex Rodriguez, you put all the drug things on one side and then all the things that he Trey Wingenter Jersey did to impede our investigation, and really do things that I had never seen any other player do, I think 211 games was a very fair penalty."

Well, of course he does. At no point was it mentioned that baseball's collectively-bargained drug program includes nothing about 211-game suspensions. The rules are clear. First offense: 50 games. Second offense: 100 games. Third offense: lifetime ban. A-Rod tried to impede the investigation? Melky Cabrera set up a phony website to try to avoid suspension for a positive test. His suspension was 50 games, nothing extra for the shenanigans.

If A-Rod was behind what Manfred called a "known a Ty France Jersey sociate" threatening Bosch's life, that's more than impeding a baseball investigation, that's worthy of a criminal investigation. But "60 Minutes" presented no evidence of that threat other than Bosch's and Manfred's words late in the report. If there was real evidence to tie it together, the "60 Minutes" story is leading with "Disgraced baseball player threatens to kill drug dealer," not the salacious and remarkably unverifiable claim by Bosch of going into a stall with A-Rod in a public bathroom in Miami and shooting him up.

For anyone who has followed the story all along, all that "60 Minutes" accomplished was reinforcing the notion that everyone involved is operating with a nonzero amount of skullduggery. But that's not who a "60 Minutes" report is for. Major League Baseball chose a venue that would garner a favorable audience, and came out with a story whose happy ending was being anointed as a shining beacon of clean athletic pursuit, with the commi sioner riding off into the sunset, head held high and job well done.

0 Reviews