Baseball Books Touch On Players, Steroids

June 10, 2009

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June 10, 2009

Three baseball books are discussed: A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez by Selena Roberts, American Icon: The Fall of Roger Clemens and the Rise of Steroids in America's Pastime by the staff of the New York Daily News, and The Yankee Years by Joe Torre and Tom Verducci.

STEVE INSKEEP, host:

Browse this sports section of your local bookstore and you will notice three topics that are well represented - baseball, performance enhancing drugs, and the New York Yankees. NPR's sports correspondent Mike Pesca is with us to review three of these books that are on shelves now. And the first one in my hands here is "American Icon," and it's an iconic photograph of an iconic pitcher, Roger Clemens. And it's just the moment many people remember this: he is about to throw a fragment of a broken bat that was flung in his direction accidentally and he threw it back at the batter.

MIKE PESCA: Yeah, that was aimed at Mike Piazza, and remember, his explanation afterwards was, well, I thought it was the ball.

(Soundbite of laughter)

INSKEEP: Well, he's got a pretty good forearm as he's throwing here.

PESCA: Yeah, well, I think the sports reporter has had to pause for two seconds and say, but you don't throw the ball at a guy either. What the book concerns is Roger Clemens' inclusion in the Mitchell Report about steroids and performance-enhancing drugs in baseball and everything he has done to try to defend himself. The book is not exactly a prosecutor's brief. But the thoroughly researched book, which was put together by four different authors who all work for the New York Daily News, it has so much damming evidence.

In fact, of all the books I've ever read about baseball, I would say this is as thoroughly researched as can be and right now it stands as the definitive book about the Steroid Era at the moment.

INSKEEP: And Mike, we'll stay on the subject of performance-enhancing drugs for a moment, shall we? Because the next book on the stack here is called "A-Rod" by Selena Roberts.

PESCA: When this book came out, there was a lot of fanfare because in advance of the book Selena Roberts, who is a reporter for "Sports Illustrated," broke the scoop of the season, which is that Alex Rodriguez took performance enhancing drugs when he was a member of the Texas Rangers. "A-Rod" is supposed to be a biography of A-Rod. And the problem is that Selena Roberts doesn't have any on-the-record interviews with A-Rod. And we don't really get a good picture of him. I mean she convinced me that Alex Rodriguez is a pretty shallow person, and so that's a problem. I'm reading a 200-plus page book and the message is here's a guy that's not that complex. Either Selena Roberts got it wrong and he really has all these different layers, or she got it right and I'm saying to myself, well, that's not very satisfying.

INSKEEP: One more book on our stack here is called the "The Yankee Years." It's by Joe Torre, the former Yankees manager along with Tom Verducci, well-known sports writer. And when you title a book "The Yankee Years," the implication is those years are gone.

PESCA: Yeah, and for Joe Torre they are. He wrote it out the door. He didn't really write the book. I mean it should be said, this is a book written by Tom Verducci. What Joe Torre did was give extensive interviews, and I think his giving the thumbs up allowed many of his former players to talk at length. The book has - if you're a Yankee fan, even if you're not - all these fantastic anecdotes about how much pressure the Steinbrenner family brought to bear. I know there is that phrase from "A League Of Their Own" - there's no crying in baseball. But this book has four or five different incidents where big time Major League players literally break down and cry, some out of joy and some out of frustration.

You know, a lot of people criticize Joe Torre for violating the sanctity of the clubhouse. But as a Yankee fan it's exactly what you want. I don't think he unduly embarrasses too many people unfairly. I mean, if I were David Wells, the former pitcher, I would not like the characterization of me in the book, but then again it seems like David Wells didn't always behave.

And let me also add one more thing that Verducci does. He talks about how Alex Rodriguez does this thing when he's on second base, conspicuously pointing at the outfielders as if to say I'm noting the depths that you're playing at. This is something that every player does, he notes the depth, but he doesn't have to go and point to every outfielder. Other players hated Alex Rodriguez for this. They made fun of Alex Rodriguez for this. I got that from the Verducci book. From 200-plus pages of the Selena Roberts book that sort of exact detail from a game situation was missing.

INSKEEP: Mike Pesca, thanks very much.

PESCA: You're welcome, Steve.

INSKEEP: And the books that he reviewed for us are "The Yankee Years", Joe Torre and Tom Verducci; "A-Rod" by Selena Roberts; "An American Icon," by the New York Daily News sports investigative team.

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Not Much Juice In The A-Rod Biography

by Mike Pesca

May 27, 2009

New York Yankees star Alex Rodriguez is apparently on a one man mission to prop up the ailing newspaper industry.

The tabloid back pages love his home runs. The business pages drool over the 10-year $275 million salary the Yankees are paying him. The front pages blare details of his steroid use. The gossip pages can't believe that this guy was benevolent enough to be seen canoodling with Madonna.

A-Rod gives and gives, and he's given Selena Roberts material for an entire book. A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez is an attempt at a biography. As a reporter for The New York Times and now Sports illustrated, Roberts has proved to be one of Rodriguez's most dogged chroniclers.

But, Roberts herself has been dogged by critics, who say she was quick to play judge and jury in the Duke University lacrosse players' rape case, where she penned columns that fell apart in light of evidence that the players in question committed no crime.

Yes, Roberts says, she was diagnosing the "culture of entitlement" so prevalent among college athletes, but there are better teaching moments to be found than in the case of the falsely accused.

Roberts has been faulted, even by her former colleagues, for relying on anonymous sources in compiling the two main charges she levels at A-Rod.

One is the accusation that he took performance-enhancing drugs, which A-Rod wound up admitting to after Roberts' revelations ran in Sports Illustrated. In her book, Roberts alleges that Rodriguez also took steroids in high school, which he denies.

Her other big scoop concerned tip-pitching, or informing opponents what pitches were on their way in late innings of blow-out games. I cannot quite square why the pitch-tipping scoop is seen as ill-gotten and inaccurate, when her steroid scoop — also entirely based on anonymous sources — was picked up by every news outlet this side of the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, and ultimately confirmed by A-Rod himself.

If your idea of a good time is hearing Roberts herself offering lengthy defenses to these and far stupider charges, watch her interviews on Deadspin.com, WFAN and with Bob Costas on the MLB Web site.

Not only have Roberts' methods been questioned, but so have her motives. It has been speculated that she "does not understand men that well," while at he same time, she has been told by WFAN radio host Craig Carton, that she "might personally have feelings for A-Rod."

If you think those charges are bad, or at least contradictory, I recommend you avoid the message boards of blogs, where Roberts has been pilloried in a way that's pretty indecent, even by the Augean stable standards of the message boards of blogs.

So Roberts has had to deal with a few brushback pitches.

OK, as she says, she's a big girl and she knows the score. But all the unfair criticism obscures her book's failure to deliver the goods. The problem isn't Roberts' journalistic missteps or pernicious motives, but the subject himself: A-Rod is not exactly an onion to be peeled.

It's tempting to treat him as a melon to be thumped. Without real access to the people closest to him, Roberts too often gives in to pop psychoanalysis. When A-Rod is in a slump, the tabloid attention is said to be "a distraction." When he's going well, the media circus "seemed to sharpen his focus. He liked the cat and mouse with the papers. He liked being all over the tabloids," she writes.

Rodriguez likes to spend time in Las Vegas. It is, after all, one of the most popular tourist destinations in America. But to Roberts, this reveals character: "Alex loved Vegas in all its decadence, with its fake facades and phony flair."

The theme of phoniness also pops up in an examination of Rodriguez's real estate holdings. Some of the condo units owned by the richest player in baseball are run down. Roberts interviewed residents and noted piles of dirty mattresses lying by a dumpster. I wondered if these mattresses had not been picked up since 2007 when Roberts first reported their existence in an article in the Times.

That she uses the same interviews in a book published in 2009 speaks to the dearth of evidence she could uncover that would justify this project being a bona fide biography. The reading into small statements to draw grand conclusions and the example after example proving that Rodriguez is essentially a very shallow person all drew me to the same conclusion: The information Roberts uncovered is fine. It just yearns to be two or three interesting articles in Sports Illustrated not almost 250 pages of a "so what?" biography.