A-Rod as guilty as others; he's just hated more

HE'S BECOME the professional sports equivalent of whack-a-mole.

Alex Rodriguez isn't really much worse than the other steroid users who popularized baseball to unseen levels over the 20-year stretch that has coincided with labor peace. He's just a bigger tool than most of them.

So when his testimony to DEA agents became public the other day, revealing a confession Rodriguez had arrogantly refused to make as he continually portrayed himself as a victim of an overzealous crusade, it was whack-a-mole time again.

Over the last 2 days, he's been called everything all over again - cheat, liar, criminal, narcissist. He did, we were reminded, once commission a painting of himself as a centaur and dare to take off his shirt in Central Park for all the New York tabloid readers to see. Worst of all, he was called what any 39-year-old ballplayer coming off a 14-month suspension hates to be called - washed up.

A-Rod is ready to play ball again, and the Yankees owe him $61 million over the next three seasons whether he does or not. That means that in the first regular-season game played after the Derek Jeter era, Yankees fans might be subjected to the seat-squirming sight of Rodriguez taking his place at third base or - would they dare? - shortstop.

In an ESPN New York poll of Yankees fans yesterday, about 70 percent said they would not cheer A-Rod as a Yankee. They were not asked whether they would cheer him as a Yankee after a game-winning hit or home run.

We know the answer. They would.

Just as we all fell in line when Michael Vick ran all over the Washington Redskins in his first regular-season game after being imprisoned for torturing and killing dogs. Or when Carlos Ruiz returned from his PED suspension. Or anytime Marlon Byrd, a PED user, came up big last summer.

Someone wrote yesterday that A-Rod's really only sorry he got caught. That makes him more like the others, not less. It's not as if any of these guys from the steroid era woke up one day, felt immense pangs of guilt, and confessed and apologized. You think Ryan Braun, who played victim to the hilt when his name first circulated among the performance enhancers, is really sorry he used the substance that helped him win the National League Most Valuable Player award? Do you think Mark McGwire is sorry he used the substance that allowed him to make home run history, albeit short-lived, in 1998? Or that Sammy Sosa, whose power numbers spiked after he was traded from Texas, is sorry about taking something that made him the unofficial mayor of Chicago for a while?

And by the way, do we really believe that Major League Baseball is sorry that era existed? Before you say yes, remember the post-strike landscape of the mid-'90s. Fans were peeved, the stars seemed spoiled, the game's most dominant faces were that of union boss Donald Fehr and interim-for-life commissioner Bud Selig.

And then the home runs started falling from the sky and the power hitters started dropping out of trees like forbidden fruit. Here are some names who won their respective league's Most Valuable Player award from 1992 through 2011, when Braun won the NL's MVP amid outraged denials of PED use: Barry Bonds (six times), Juan Gonzalez, Ken Caminiti, Sosa, Jeff Bagwell, Jeff Kent, Jason Giambi, Vladimir Guerrero, and Rodriguez (three times).

Some of those names have been implicated, some suspected, some, like A-Rod have confessed. Actually, A-Rod has now been caught twice and confessed twice. Again, he's a tool. The point is the statistics from that time suggest that there are many more like him who weren't nabbed, and have yet to wake up with the aforementioned pangs of guilt. This season's home run leader, Nelson Cruz, with 40, would not have cracked the top 10 when McGwire, Bonds, Sosa and Rodriguez were ruling the category. Cruz also served a 50-game PED suspension in 2013 for his involvement with Biogenesis, the since-closed Miami-based outlet that Rodriguez finally admitted his involvement with to federal authorities, in exchange for immunity.

The truth is, we didn't know too much about steroids back then and we didn't really want to know, just as we have come upon our concern over long-term cerebral and structure injuries in football slowly and bit reluctantly. We want simply to be entertained, and in that there is no denying that the juiced steroid seasons provided far more juice than the low-scoring ones of the past few years.

Now stories about the sport center on our waning interest. The recently concluded World Series featured two teams that paper-cutted each other to a seventh game, in which the teams combined for five runs, none of which was scored after the fourth inning. That seventh game prevented the 2014 World Series from undercutting the 2012 World Series as the lowest-rated of all time. And the desperate quest for power hitters has teams lining up for an unproven 23-year-old Cuban named Yasmani Thomas.

Meanwhile, A-Rod will work his reconstructed body back into shape and apparently report this spring to a team and fandom that doesn't want him. Right now. But if I know sports the way I think I do, he's only a few big home runs away from being forgiven for everything, even in the biggest whack-a-mole city there is.