Yankeetorial: Arod Kissing Arod? Whatever. Just say it. Does anyone care if it's not true?

In another predictable yak about Evil Arod, Kevin Kernan in today's NY Murdoch takes a liberty that I doubt Alex Rodriguez would escape with.

Kernan writes:

"He'll always be the center of attention because of who he is and his talent level, but will the Yankees have a talk with him about little things, for instance, how it looks to the rest of the world when you kiss yourself in a mirror for a photographer?

Kiss yourself behind closed doors, if you want."

OK, as Joe Biden would say in the aftermath of a Sarah Palin rant, where do I start?

Yes, ARod is a fool, a jerk, an egomaniac, blah-blah-blah. But the picture published in Details does not show him kissing himself in the mirror.


In other words, this is an error. Some journalists would be pressed to issue a correction. Columnists, who speak in the language of metaphor and parable, almost never issue corrections. Nobody has to correct a metaphor.

But Kirnan is wrong. The picture does not show Arod kissing himself. He looks full of himself. He's probably an asshole. Kirnan could have said many things. (And Kirnan is not generally the worst.) He chose to say something untrue.

Why care? Well, what bothers me is the witch-hunting spirit NY sportswriters channel whenever Arod's head rises up from the bunker. Whatever he does, whatever he says, gets attacked.

And if you say he kissed himself enough times, it becomes a fact.

Again, why care? Well, many times over the last four years, ARod has been brutalized in print for a careless choice of words. Two years ago, there was a week-long controversy when he said he was no longer Jeter's closest friend. You would have thought he denied the Holocaust, the way the writers picked over every word.

Whenever Arod speaks, he goes into the microwave oven, set on full for a 24-hour news cycle. He gets pulverized by writers like Kirnan. (Again, he's not the worst.)

Arod gets killed in every interview. He's not a writer. He's jabbering away in a locker room. Here's Kirnan, a professional journalist, theoretically writing several drafts before filing a piece. He should be held to a higher standard of factuality when it comes to choice of words.

He is wrong. And because of that, it was a cheap shot.

Of course, it's only Arod, so why care? Right?