A Rod homers #3000 hit

[Mugwump]

....right field stands, first pitch from Verlander......

[ghonk]

 Doesn't count,another cheater.Thanks for helping ruin baseball.

[Mugwump]

Doesn't count,another cheater.Thanks for helping ruin baseball.

Here's an interesting piece on that subject....

...............
http://nypost.com/2015/02/26/a-rod-josh-hamilton-and-the-hypocrisies-of-drug-forgiveness/

TAMPA ? We know well the scarlet letters Alex Rodriguez must affix to his pinstriped jersey from now until the end of his playing days and beyond: ?C? for ?cheater,? ?L? for liar, and of course ?S,? in block type, in the loudest, brightest shade of scarlet possible, for ?steroids.?

He knows it, too. Be as jaded as you want as you see the daily penance he serves around autograph seekers. Be as cynical as you want parsing his daily observations for depth and sorrow and regret. The subject he keeps coming back to is the same one: he has been humbled, and it is a humbling that has taken hold.

?Sometimes,? he said Thursday, after taking the field as a Yankee for the first time since September 2013, ?you can take being a major league baseball player for granted,? and it is clear that, at the very least, in the present moment, he is not going to allow that to happen to him again.

He is not alone wearing those letters, though. An interesting dynamic covering Andy Pettitte his last few years with the Yankees was this: if you made it from first word to 700th without using the word ?steroids? or one of its cousins, you were going to hear about it ? and not just from Yankees haters, but often from the most devout and devoted of their fans.

You can go up and down the list of those who have been either exposed as steroid cheats or linked to them with circumstantial evidence ranging from sketchy to overwhelming: There forever will be people incapable of separating the player from the sinner, the athlete from the transgressor. Rodriguez may be the most prominent, or may be forced into a virtual Mount Rushmore from Hell alongside Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire, but anyone who ever has been stained by steroids has gotten the same treatment:

We?ll let you play. But we won?t let you forget.

Which is interesting, given the way we seemingly bent over backwards, sideways and diagonally to forgive athletes involved in baseball?s previous drug scourge. If you are old enough to remember what the 1980s were like, you remember cocaine as a daily part of your life ? perhaps you never tried it, perhaps you never were around it, but it was omnipresent, especially if you were a sports fan.

There was the awful night Len Bias died, of course, followed only eight days later by the death of football player Don Rogers. There were the Mets, whose two signature players ? Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry ? had Hall of Fame careers trampled by the drug, and whose most popular player, Keith Hernandez, testified at a Pittsburgh drug trial in which baseball was an unindicted co-conspirator and famously declared coke ?a demon in me? and ?the devil on this earth.?
Modal Trigger

From left: Darryl Strawberry, Dwight Gooden, Jesse Orosco and Keith Hernandez in 1984Photo: AP

Strange, though: few of the players who wound up caught in that cocaine dragnet ever had to face lasting ramifications. Oh, there were hecklers here and there. Dick Young, in this newspaper, famously urged New Yorkers to stand up and boo when Gooden came back from a drug suspension in the summer of 1987, but the people did exactly the opposite that night at Shea Stadium.

Tim Raines admitted he slid into bases head-first so as not to damage the vials of coke he harbored in the back pocket of his uniform pants; later, when he became a veteran leader on teams (including two world-champion Yankees clubs), his drug past was rarely mentioned, and now he is probably the people?s choice among all baseball fans to make the Hall of Fame.

Paul Molitor?s name surfaced during the Pittsburgh trial. He admitted to using both cocaine and marijuana as a young player. He sailed into the Hall of Fame. And he?s now the manager of the Twins. Google all the stories written about his hiring. See if you can find a reference to his indiscretions.

It?s something of a relevant topic now, too, because Josh Hamilton met with Major League Baseball about an apparent relapse he had this offseason. Hamilton, like Rodriguez a former No. 1 overall draft pick, has had a much-chronicled history with substance abuse. Most people with compassion understand that when you are dealing with addiction, the fight is every day and forever. Hamilton deserved a measure of empathy and still does.

But is that the reason why we as a public are quick to forgive how much damage cocaine caused the sport? Not everyone who used was an abuser; most were just kid knuckleheads, looking for good times. You could argue that the very nature of ?recreational? drugs versus ?performance-enhancing? drugs opens another question: Is it really more forgivable to have taken drugs that merely allow the party to last longer the night before, than to have taken drugs designed to make you ? and, by association, your team ? better, stronger, more successful the day of a game?

We already know what likely will be in the first paragraph of the obituaries of every steroid cheat. That?s their fate. And maybe that?s fair. But we have proven ourselves capable of forgiveness in the past, of moving on, of moving ahead. Can that ever happen for Alex Rodriguez and the others who made the mistake of choosing juice instead of junk as their self-destructive chemical of choice?