In denial down to the end

So this ends the way it was always going to end with Alex Rodriguez, after all the sound and fury from him and his people about whata victim he was, all the shouting that did everything except shout away the evidence against him:

Hewas going to be found guilty as a drug cheat by arbitrator Fredric Horowitz and told to go away for a long time. It turns outto be 162 regular season games and the postseason of 2014. But then the guy has always been obsessed about making baseball history.

Rodriguez did turn out to be a victim in the end, mostly a victim of either denial or arrogance or both, and the idea fed to him by his handlers that somehow he could buy himself out of his relationship with Anthony Bosch and the real reason he went to Bosch in the first place:

To get good baseball drugs and game the game that he keeps telling us he loves.

He went to Bosch even after admitting to the prior use of performanceenhancing drugs in the spring of 2009, after redeeming himself in the eyes of Yankee fans with a postseason that carried himand his team all the way to the Canyon of Heroes.

“I’m here to take my medicine,” he said in spring training, 2009.

In the eyes of his sport and Horowitz, he just kept taking a different kind of medicine after that.

From the start of the whole Biogenesis case Rodriguez wanted HIS case to be about everything except the evidence against him. Wanted to make the case about Major League Baseball’s investigators, and their tactics, never his own.

When he finally had a chance to tell his story under oath, he chose not to do so, said he wasn’t going to testify unless Commissioner Bud Selig did.

“I have the right to face my accuser!” he shouted. No one asked him at the time where a law like that had ever been passed.

All along he and his lawyers have acted as if baseball’s entire arbitration process, one really put in place by the great Marvin Miller, was some kind of sham and fixed fight, even though that process has protected the rights of ballplayers for four decades, and was the foundation of baseball’s first free agency back in the 1970s.

But you want to know why they attacked the process? You want to know why Rodriguez was still attacking it on Saturday and saying that he was “unjustly punished” by Horowitz?

Because Rodriguez never had a defense, that’s why. He never had a case. He and his handlers could never explain away the evidence against Alex Emmanuel Rodriguez. He didn’t go to Anthony Bosch for advice about his diet and nutrition, he went for the same drugs that the other Biogenesis All-Stars were getting.

Rodriguez has no choice now but to try to fight on through the courts, deny that he ever used anything except legal supplements. He and his people will continue to talk about appeals and injunctions, try to find a judge willing to interfere with the decision of a respected arbitrator, and a process that has settled workplace disputes in baseball for as long as it has. They will keep trying to get suckers to believe that it is the process and the people in charge of it who are corrupt. Sure they are. The amazing thing is that enough people believed Rodriguez, as if the evidence against him was somehow manufactured, as if Major League Baseball made up all the BlackBerry messages between him and Bosch. But then from the start it was as if Rodriguez wasn’t trying to win his case with Horowitz but with talk-show listeners, as if the verdict on Rodriguez would eventually be rendered by Danny from Jersey or Marvin from the Bronx.

All the other Biogenesis All-Stars, they were guilty. Alex was innocent. Bosch told the truth about the other guys but lied through his teeth about Rodriguez, who then began to show you he was willing to say anything about anybody to try to beat this rap.

He went after the commissioner and the Yankee team doctors and Columbia Presbyterian and the Yankees. Maybe he would have sued his own union, too. And may yet, who knows? The people on his side kept telling anybody who would listen that they were victims of the arbitration process, as if somehow they didn’t know what the process was on the way into the room. They acted as if it should be on television, like some sort of new lawyer show.

You were supposed to believe Rodriguez’s cockeyed version of things and if you didn’t, you had to have some kind of agenda. You were supposed to believe that this was some sort of cheap dirty-tricks campaign really not directed at the other Biogenesis All-Stars, just Alex Rodriguez, a way for Bud Selig to enhance his legacy. Except: Except the sanctions against Jhonny Peralta and Nelson Cruz and the other Biogenesis guys were the most sweeping set of sanctions in baseball in nearly 100 years.

This was never about Selig’s legacy. It was about Rodriguez thinking he could somehow preserve what was left of his own, if he really could buy his way out of this. He couldn’t. He can’t. He goes.