Kuzul

You can loathe Alex Rodriguez all you want.

You can support his imminent suspension—a lifetime ban even.

You can beg that he just goes away quietly.

You can even root for the New York Yankees in any potential effort to void his contract. 

But if you know baseball, and you are honest with yourself, you cannot—even in the darkest recesses of your dislike for A-Rod—come away from this ordeal believing A-Rod is getting a fair shake.

And when someone famous is given a raw deal, when someone famous gets the shaft, you—like me—should be afraid of a very sad possibility to come from this uneven treatment.

That very sad possibility: turning Alex Rodriguez into a martyr. 

MLB, on Monday, is expected to ban A-Rod for anywhere from 200 games to life. It’s all the same, really. Who seriously thinks A-Rod is going to mount a comeback two years after a second hip surgery at 40 years old? 

The suspension will cost the man who once seemed poised to break most every offensive record on the books—most importantly, the all-time home run record—at least $40 million and as much as $100 million. 

MLB can couch A-Rod’s suspension in all the doublespeak it wants, it can say the suspension reflects the fact that A-Rod lied to MLB, that he lied to investigators. It can say he obstructed MLB’s investigation, that he intimidated witnesses.

And that may all be true. 

But ask yourself this: What makes him any different than Roger Clemens?

Do you honestly believe Clemens didn’t try to obstruct investigators, that he didn’t try to intimidate his former trainer, Brian McNamee, leading up to his perjury trial?

Sans the obstruction and intimidation charges, you can ask yourself what makes Rodriguez any different than Mark McGuire, Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, Rafael Palmero, et al.

MLB, no doubt, is swinging a bigger hammer when it comes to A-Rod and because of that the league runs the risk of doing what a year ago seemed impossible—turning Rodriguez into a sympathetic figure, a martyr even.

What’s truly amazing is that MLB could come out of this witch hunt smelling like roses if it did several things right that it is currently doing terribly wrong:

• Stop the leaks because they’re undermining the league’s credibility.
• Stop speaking with the presumption that Rodriguez is guilty.
• Acknowledge that MLB has failed to consistently apply its rules to PED users in the past, and that A-Rod’s suspension, and those of the other players coming down Monday, heralds a new beginning.

In other words, MLB needs to admit it screwed up in the past, that this is an imperfect process and that the game has suffered because of it. 

Those actions won’t satisfy everyone, but they would go a long way in avoiding the worst-case scenario for Bud Selig and the league by turning Rodriguez into a martyr. 

Lou Rom covers the NFL and whatever else gets under his skin for Bleacher Report and he does so from the greatest city on the planet, right here in NYC. Follow him on Twitter at louromlive.

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The Rocket launched another unbelievable shutout Monday, leaving federal prosecutors holding their bats in disbelief at the end of a costly, drawn-out perjury trial.

A day after the verdict, the consensus is that Clemens’ acquittal doesn’t mean he’s innocent, but rather that the jury was unconvinced of his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

That is certainly one possibility.

The other is that the jury went O.J. on prosecutors and ignored the evidence at hand. 

This is a case, if not an air-tight case, where jury nullification may have played a role for some jurors.

When Clemens walked out of a a federal courthouse acquitted on all six charges that he lied to Congress about his alleged use of performance enhancing drugs, I can’t help but feel that yet another jury told the federal government that it’s time to stop wasting time and taxpayer money policing a child’s sport played by man-children.

While the evidence against Clemens might not have been Simpsonesque, this jury, I believe, sent a message to prosecutors, to Congress, to anyone who would listen.

That message? We have bigger fish to fry, more important problems to solve.

It’s the same message that a Bay Area jury sent last April when it deadlocked on all but one count of lying to the government brought against Barry Bonds, MLB‘s career and single-season home run leader.

The Clemens jury may not have believed Brian McNamee, and they may not have believed the countless prosecution witnesses.

But maybe they also did not believe that they lost 10 weeks of their lives over a guy who is famous for throwing a a 5-oz. ball of string wrapped in cowhide for a living.

While our country continues to wage two wars, while unemployment continues to grow unchecked and while big banks and bigger investment firms continue to lie and cheat, the public’s interest in whether or not middle-aged pro athletes cheat—if there ever was interest—has waned beyond recognition.

Let this be a lesson for Congress, a clarion call to adopt a bipartisan approach the next time they think about meddling in such irrelevant minutia — just say fugghetaboutit.

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