Bonds and A-Rod
Two huge stories out of the baseball world today, involving perhaps the two greatest active career players in the game: Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez. Both are free agents, but after today’s news, it’s clear their careers are going in opposite directions.
Barry Bonds, the aging home run king, was officially indicted today by a federal grand jury on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. Essentially, the feds think Bonds lied when he claimed under oath that he never knowingly took steroids. It’s just an indictment, but this is still big. The government has been investigating Bonds for the last four years, and many people, myself included, didn’t believe this day would actually come. It will be interesting to see if this development, plus the coming release of the Mitchell investigation, leads commissioner Bud Selig to take action against Bonds, be it a suspension, a ban from the sport or the dreaded asterisk. I imagine this will be a very slowly developing story (after all, it took us four years to get to this point), but the situation obviously bears close watching.
Alex Rodriguez, meanwhile, is on the verge of signing a big contract with the New York Yankees, the same team he opted out from just a couple of weeks ago. Initial reports have this new deal coming in at 10 years, $275 million, but perhaps the most interesting part of the story is how this all went down. A-Rod’s agent, the infamous Scott Boras, has guided some of the biggest deals in the history of the sports, but he seemed to finally miscalculate with this situation, apparently overestimating A-Rod’s demand on the open market. With a sudden lack of suitors, Rodriguez was forced to humbly go back to the Yankees without Boras and take a deal worth about $21 million less than he could’ve made if he’d just done an extension with the Yanks without opting out. Still, a deal is in place, and it looks like the best player in baseball will remain a Yankee.
So, one star’s future is reassured, while another’s past is called into doubt. Quite the day.
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