"Honestly, whether or not Mr. Bosch had distributed drugs to minors was not of paramount importance to me."

MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred made this remark about Tony Bosch to the disciplinary committee hearing Alex Rodriguez's appeal of his record suspension for PED use.

As detailed in Blood Sport, Tim Elfrink and Gus Garcia-Roberts' excellent account of the massive effort MLB mounted to bring A-Rod to justice, Manfred was the man ("Manfred Mann?") in charge of taking down the Yankees third-sacker.

There was a lot at stake for departing Commissioner Bud "Toupee" Selig.  He wanted to be remembered as the man who drove PEDs out of baseball—instead of the man who stood idly by while they devoured the game he claimed to love.  There was a lot at stake for Rob Manfred, too, as he would undoubtedly get to take Selig's lucrative, less-than-taxing position if he succeeded.

The result was that, according to Elfrink and Garcia-Roberts, MLB may have spent as much as $20 million running down A-Rod's pusher, the notorious Mr. Bosch.

This included unleashing a swarm of "ex-cops and former [federal] agents" on the sleazy, "anti-aging" underworld of South Florida.  These operatives behaved like something out of a Carl Hiaasen novel, impersonating police officers, intimidating witnesses, handing out de facto bribes, paying a convicted felon for stolen documents—even sleeping with a source.  Meanwhile, MLB's crack legal team filed enormous, frivolous lawsuits against anyone who had anything to do with Bosch.

MLB's ops also disrupted an active, state investigation into another line of Tony Bosch's:  peddling PEDs to underaged, high-school athletes.

When A-Rod's lawyers tried to bring that up at the hearings, Manfred brushed them off:

"Honestly, whether or not Mr. Bosch had distributed to minors was not of paramount importance to me.  Rarely do you get a witness who is prepared to testify firsthand about his distribution of drugs to professional athletes, who hasn't engaged in other conduct that's illegal."

I guess we should all be glad that Bosch hadn't murdered or raped anybody.

The reason he was "prepared to testify," incidentally, was that MLB also provided him with round-the-clock, personal protection, and free legal counsel.  In other words, a bribe.

It's impossible to feel sorry for Tony Bosch, of course, or A-Rod, who got what he had long had coming.

But selling hugely destructive drugs to minors doesn't matter?  That's not what baseball cares about, as long as they can violate every legal ethic to make themselves look better?

Why anyone should expect anything resembling justice from Rob Manfred, in this cheating scandal or anything else, is beyond me.