60 Minutes did a story last night on Alex Rodriguez and his steroid usage, interviewing Tony Bosch (his purported supplier) for the story. Rather than go into all the history of ARod and the claims that he has been a big juicer for years (a simple Google search will give you more than enough to read on this subject), I am instead going to offer a few quick psychology thoughts pertaining to what I got from the 60 minutes story last night:
- Nothing about this story “feels” right to me. ARod’s “fight” has always come across as more like artificial PR stunts, and Tony Bosch is about as dirty as they come when talking about integrity and sports. I believe in gut feelings and intuition, and I’m not sure anything I feel is good about ARod’s innocence.
- I think ARod’s personality is certainly one built on narcissism and easily fits the psychology model of someone likely to follow this kind of 100% denial pattern against the charges he faces. I do believe he wanted to be the only member of the “800” club, and I also believe he thought he would never get caught cheating his way to that number of HR’s.
- ARod’s unequivocal denial of everything — including any kind of associations, cheating, etc — are probably the most telling sign of all of this that he is lying.
- Similarly, even though Bosch has changed and flip-flopped on his story, even if you throw out the outlier comments and simply look at the evidence MLB does have you have to believe there was most certainly some degree of cheating going on – to what extent may never be known, but that really doesn’t matter.
- It was chilling to listen to Bosch make dead pan claims that ARod cheating essentially to “keep up” with everyone else in MLB cheating. While there will always be cheating in sports, I don’t think the problems in baseball are what they were just a few years ago, and I never think the excuse “other people are doing it” justifies throwing integrity out the window.
- While I don’t think MLB was on a witch hunt to get Rodriguez, I do think it got a little personal the more it became obvious Rodriguez was leveraging the situation through his money and “muscle” (influence). As is usually the case, had ARod simply come clean early and admitted to some wrongdoing, it’s very likely his sentence would be much shorter and that MLB might have stopped digging deeper into his history.
- Alex Rodriguez displays a number of undesirable personality traits and clearly sees himself as invincible — while these qualities often help with on-field sport success, they can also be the worst qualities when being honest with oneself and realizing that nobody is above the law. Similar to Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds, these players have shown the worst in people over these last few years — that cheating is OK and what’s most important is to fight and defend yourself at every turn rather than owning one’s actions. Alex Rodriguez is a sad story of a sick man who thought exclusively about himself and MLB will be much better off without him moving forward.
- If I had to guess I would say Alex Rodriguez has cheated most of, if not all of his career. Having already been busted once, it’s hard for a rationally minded person to think that he only cheated once and is completely innocent amidst the mountain of evidence he faces today. Sure, he passed all of his drug tests, but so did Lance Armstrong. With today’s technology, it’s no secret that if you have enough money you can certainly surround yourself with a team of folks who know just how to stay one step ahead of the tests (as was the case with Armstrong).
Will this be the end of Alex Rodriguez? I hope so, as it is beyond disheartening to think this guy’s entire career was likely built up by drugs and not hard work.
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