Truth stays, A-Rod goes

THIS IS WHAT you were told, for months, about the guy who used to play third base for the Yankees:

You were told that it was a witch hunt. You were told, by a marching-and-chowder society in the media whose membership somehow kept declining as the facts of the case came out, that commissioner Bud Selig needed to testify in an arbitration case, or the world would stop spinning on its axis.

I have a right to face my accuser! Alex Rodriguez screamed when given another soft place to land. And nobody asked him which law school on the planet taught that. Maybe the Planet Alex. But he got suckers to believe him, as if Bud Selig were the one on trial.

You were told that anybody who kept pointing out that the guy never told his version of things under oath had some kind of agenda. So it was Major League Baseball who was out to get Alex Rodriguez, or the New York Daily News, or the New York Yankees, or their team doctors, or Columbia-Presbyterian.

Rodriguez wanted you to believe that after all those players in the Biogenesis case got suspended in one day last summer, 13 players, the most sweeping set of sanctions in nearly 100 years in baseball, that Selig needed to make an example out of Rodriguez, professional victim.

And somehow he kept getting people to go along with him, to act as if Al Rodriguez was the most falsely accused man since Al Dreyfus. He did that right until he sued Major League Baseball and his own Players Association and allowed the whole world to find out the case against him.

You were supposed to believe that the real issue was the methods MLB had used to enforce its drug policy, not the methods Rodriguez had used to get baseball drugs from Anthony Bosch and use them. Baseball’s investigators were the bad guys, not the player who seemed to have redeemed himself after his drug admissions of the spring of 2009, who helped the Yankees — mightily — win a World Series and then went looking to Bosch for a different kind of help, almost as if he went straight to Biogenesis from the Canyon of Heroes.

You were supposed to believe that A-Rod only went to Bosch for diet and nutritional advice. Or that Bosch couldn’t be trusted because he was some lousy grafter drug dealer, and never ask — if that was true — what Rodriguez was doing with him in the first place.

Make that the issue. Or the coverage. Or Selig or Rob Manfred, who made baseball’s case against Rodriguez. Or the Players Assocation. Or the doctors. Keep calling it a witch hunt as often as possible. Keep playing to the cheap seats. Keep acting as if it were somehow irrelevant whether Rodriguez had spent years try- ing to find ways to beat baseball’s Joint Drug Agreement.

You were supposed to believe — but only if you were a point-misser — that this was some kind of TV courtroom drama, an episode of “Law and Order,” instead of an arbitration hearing, bound by the rules of a process to settle workplace disputes.

But through it all, there was only one issue that ever mattered and never changed. There was an essential truth that never changed from the first day back in August when Rodriguez appealed his original suspension and promised that he would tell his story at an appropriate time, none of us knowing at the time that he meant telling it to Vinny from Queens:

He never had a case, all the way until he finally quit on his stool.

He never had a way to explain away the evidence against him. And if you pointed that out, that this was like one of those blood cases in

a TV crime show and he couldn’t explain away the blood, then you were out to get him all over again. But that is what happens when you cover the coverage. Or only believe Rodriguez’s version of things, buy into his narrative about victimization.

Because he didn’t have a case, his defense was a show from the start. It was a reality series with him as the star, with everything except marching bands on Park Ave. in front of Major League Baseball’s offices, where the arbitration hearing was conducted and Rodriguez attended until his own cockeyed narrative — and fear of testifying under oath — forced him to storm out, to yell at Manfred that it was all a crock, or words to that effect, and somehow have a car already waiting for him outside.

He kept saying that he shouldn’t serve a single game of his suspension. You were told about all the outrage about his case from fellow players, when the only real outrage came when he sued his own union, were told how many friends he has who own baseball teams, telling him that he should have a sitdown with Selig, as if somehow that would solve everything.

To the end, make it about everything except the case against him, one he voluntarily laid out for the whole world to see.

At long last, all those who kept saying he had been overcharged and over-prosecuted saw why the arbitrator, Fredric Horowitz, ruled the way he did. No longer was it about irrelevancies, or the circus the whole thing became. It was about that.

The circus leaves town now six months after it really began last August. Alex Rodriguez finally faces facts, even if he never told his version of them under oath. He could never make the evidence go away. He goes.