So… A-Rod is out six to nine weeks due to surgery to repair a torn labrum.  It’s a temporary surgery, a stop-gap measure to allow him to play this season, after which he’ll have surgery that will supposedly fix it for good.

Consider me skeptical.

Two names come to mind when I think about this situation: Curt Schilling and Ken Griffey Jr.  To be sure, being named in the same sentence as Schilling and Griffey is normally a compliment, but in this case, you don’t want to be named in that sentence.

Schilling had a serious shoulder injury that required surgery, but tried to rehab the shoulder without it (for reasons which won’t be discussed here) so that he could return later in the year.  The end result was that Schilling’s career was effectively ended, as rehab failed and he had to have surgery anyway.  He missed the entire 2008 season, and while he hasn’t decided whether or not to attempt a comeback, it’s unlikely he can pitch at the same level he did before the injury.  A-Rod is going down that same path.  While he’s elected to have surgery, it’s not the complete surgery required.  Should everything not go according to plan, he may eventually need the complete surgery before returning to the Yankees lineup, and his rehab will be longer than it would have been had he just gone out and had it fixed the right way.

I think about Ken Griffey for where he was in his career when it started going downhill.  Aside from an injury in 1995 that limited him to 72 games, Griffey was for the most part an everyday player, and there was nothing to suggest a slowdown in production.  At age 30 he had 438 home runs and was averaging nearly fifty a year over his previous five years.  Then the injuries started to mount, and while he still averaged about twenty-five round-trippers a season (a respectable figure), he became Above Average When Healthy Ken Griffey instead of Perennial All Star and Future Hall-Of-Famer Ken Griffey.  The man who was once a shoe-in to break Hank Aaron’s home run mark now has no shot of clearing 700.

Will it be that way with A-Rod?  I don’t know.  It would have been that way with Barry Bonds, had designer steroids not propped him up at the end of his career.  A steroid-free Bonds probably breaks down before reaching 600.  How will a steroid-free A-Rod fare?

So, A-Rod’s coming clean…. sort of.  He was outed, and so he admitted using steroids.  Commendable, I guess.  Sort of.  Maybe.  Here’s the part that screams I AM STILL LYING to me (from SI.com):

Rodriguez says a cousin, whom he would not identify, first introduced him to a substance he referred to as “Boli” that could be purchased in the Dominican Republic and brought to the United States.

“It was his understanding it would give me a dramatic energy boost and was otherwise harmless,” Rodriguez said in a prepared statement before the question and answer portion of his press conference. “My cousin and I, one more ignorant than the other, decided it was a good idea to start taking it. We consulted no one and it was pretty evident that we didn’t know what we were doing. We did everything we could to keep it between us. I stopped taking it in 2003 and haven’t taken it since.”

If you read into the comment, this is A-Rod using the Bonds Defense – I used steroids, but I didn’t knowingly use them.  If A-Rod’s guilty of anything, he contends, it’s being naive and ignorant.

Sorry.  Not buying it.

When Bonds used the “I didn’t know what it was” defense, everyone jumped on him, supposedly because finely-tuned, high-paid athletes know exactly what they’re putting into their bodies.  I tend to think exactly the opposite is true.  The average person doesn’t know half of the chemicals they ingest on a daily basis, and finely-tuned, high-paid athletes don’t either — because they pay someone else to know.  They have nutritionists and personal trainers who define their fitness regimen and their diet.  So to me, it wasn’t completely out of the realm of possibility (aside from all of the overwhelming supporting evidence) that Bonds could have been ignorant to what he was taking, because the stuff he was being given came from someone in a position of authority.

A-Rod’s source was his cousin.  Think about that.  If a personal trainer, not just a guy you hired at a gym, but a guy you know well enough that he’d do jail time for you, gives you a substance and tells you that it’s safe, legal, and effective, you’d accept that at face value and take the substance.  If your cousin gave you the same thing… don’t you think you’d do some research?  I mean, unless he’s a personal trainer and the kind of guy who would do jail time for you.  Maybe he is.  I don’t know A-Rod’s cousin.  But I doubt he’s an expert on fitness and nutrition, and this it invalidates the excuse of not knowing.

Mark Teixeira was introduced as a Yankee the other day in a tremendous dog-and-pony show at the new stadium. He said a lot, and if want to hear another athlete trying to explain how it isn’t about the money, you can find the video on ESPN or CNNSI or any one of a number of other sites. If you want the key quote from Teixeira himself, here it is.

“I was very impressed with Cash”

Taken out of context? Yeah. Unfairly? Nope.

A while back I mentioned that if you’re a baseball fan, you should be rooting against the Tampa Bay Rays because any brief success that the Rays enjoy will perpetuate the myth that parity exists in Major League Baseball and that there’s no need for a salary cap. The Rays, with their $43 million payroll, reached the World Series, while the mighty New York Yankees and their $209 million payroll missed the playoffs entirely. This is excuse enough for many people to claim that money doesn’t always win championships, and that the little guy always has a chance.

And that’s true, I guess. Money doesn’t always win championships, and the little guy always does have a chance, but money spent against that chance diminishes it a little bit with each dollar spent. With the gauntlet having been thrown down in Tampa, everyone expected the Yankees to respond. They’ve responded not with a gauntlet of their own, but by nuking the entire site from orbit, as they say.

It’s the only way to be sure.

The main reason the Yankees failed to make the playoffs last season was pitching. Their number one starter, Chien-Ming Wang, was lost for the season, and while Mike Mussina went 20-9 for the Bombers, the rest of their starting pitching was either hurt or, not to put too fine a point on it, terrible. In response, the Yankees dropped $161 million on C.C. Sabathia and followed it up with another $82.5 for A.J. Burnett. Some folks have questioned the Burnett signing, citing his history of injuries, but the fact remains that the Yankees spent nearly one quarter of a billion dollars for the best two pitchers on the free agent market.

Today the Yankees went a step further, signing the best hitter on the market, Mark Teixeira, to an eight-year deal worth around $180 million. That brings their spending total to over $420 million this off-season (in second place are the New York Mets with around $37 million committed), making The Onion’s fictional story “Yankees Sign Every Player In Baseball” somehow more plausible. Rolling into a new stadium next season funded in part by the city of New York (don’t worry, the mayor got a luxury box out of the deal), the Yankees are in the unique position of batting their lifetime .303 hitting All-Star second baseman ninth in the lineup.

Don’t hate the Yankees for this. They’re only working within the system established by Major League Baseball and allowed to continue by people who own baseball teams because they like to look like big shots and couldn’t care whether their team has a legitimate chance to compete so long as the checks roll in. The Red Sox would do it too, if they could, as would the Mets, the Mariners, and even the lowly Pirates.

Hope you enjoyed your time at the top, Tampa Bay.