ARod All Day, All The Time

Just a quick follow up on the A-Rod posts of the last couple of days. First, some people have asked me for the cite on the Harper Collins publicity document I copied to my post of February 9th, With ARod, Nothing is Ever Simple. The document appeared in several places– at Amazon.com on the preorder page for Hit & Run: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez, at the publisher’s website, HarperCollins.com, and at PublishersWeekly.com— where I personally saw it. When the controversy over the journalistic ethics of author/journalist Selena Roberts started to take off, however, Harper retracted the publicity statement and it was scrubbed fro the sites. This isn’t a terribly rare occurrence– the controversy around Jim Frey’s A Million Little Pieces caused a lot of the publisher’s marketing material to get scrubbed from sites that are dependent on a good relationship with the publisher. The last bit of the marketing statement that I can find is at Publisher’s Weekly, which under its “Spring 2009 Hardcovers: Sports” (scroll down to the “Harper” entry) still describes the book sing words from the statement: “Hit and Run: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez (May, $26.99) by Selena Roberts exposes A-Rod’s controversial path to self-destruction. 150,000 first printing.” You can scrub all you like, but some spots don’t come out.

Also interesting to note is that HarperCollins yesterday changed the name of the book; on the HarperCollins site linked above, the book is now known not as Hit & Run: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez, but as A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez. I wonder why the change? Could it be that the original title was a bit too close to the public perception of Selena Roberts journalistic style?

Additionally, word out of the publisher in the trades is that a new, accelerated release date is under consideration to take advantage of the publicity generated for the book by Selena Robert’s article in SI… but please, remember, Ms. Roberts can in no way be accused of generating this story at this point or releasing the name only of Alex Rodriguez from a list of 104 players in a naked attempt to generate publicity for her book and thus personally benefit from the news. Never. Really. Please, don’t do it.

Oh what the hell, go ahead.

Alomar, Tejada and the Straw

We’re talkin’ baseball, but we aren’t talkin’ Willie, Mickey & the Duke. No, it’s time for the newest preseason ritual, not Pitchers & Catchers, the Caribbean Series or claims of fat and disappointing players claiming to be in the best shape of their lives– no instead it’s Preseason Scandal time!

We have a full crop this year, and it’s about to get fuller. ARod we all know about, Tejada has been indicted for lying to Congress (that’s a crime?), and Alomar either has erectile dysfunction, a history of anal rape and full blown AIDS or one very pissed off ex-girlfriend. Next up- Darryl Strawberry, no stranger to scandal he, is cashing in on his preseason controversies with a new book from Harper Collins, Straw: Finding My Way. Ironic title, given how many times the straw found its way up Straw’s nose in the ’80s.

But hey, at least he’s on the right side of his scandals– he’s making money off of them while the others are losing money. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, boys! Just follow the Strawberry Express.

The Alomar thing just has multiple book deals written all over it. Deal one to the girlfriend, who claims she had unprotected sex for three years with Alomar despite thinking that he might have HIV– he became ill and she constantly pressured him to have an HIV test, according to the suit she filed, but she kept having unprotected sex with him because he claimed he couldn’t have AIDS or HIV. For kicks, she included in the filing her uncorroborated claim that Alomar was anally raped by two Mexicans (you have to appreciate how she managed to toss in the ethnicity, to boot) when he was 17 and that Alomar suffers from erectile dysfunction… I’m sure that in her first interview she’ll also claim that Alomar has a two inch penis and that he enjoys wearing high heels and things. Whether or not her suit has merit is for the judge and jury to decide, but this one sounds like it may have, oh, a hole or six in it.

Book deal two is Alomar’s and its thrust could follow many paths. Will it be a book about how his ex-girlfriend tried to shake him down? A tearful recounting of his life with HIV? A Wilt Chamberlain “I screwed 13,000 women and none have any diseases” romp? How about the big kahuna, the Times #1 bestseller in the batch– for years Alomar was rumored to be gay and the infamous spitting incident has been alleged to be about umpire John Hirschbeck calling him “a little fag”… could we have our first potential Hall of Famer coming out in the pages of an “Out of the Locker: My Tortured Life Denying My Sexuality in MLB”, Oprah Book Club shoo-in? Editors are already camping out in front of his house in hopes of that one.

Now, not to distract from the salacious details of a lurid lawsuit filed against a player that people love to hate, but we do have one guy in this stew who may be in danger of a trip to Federal Prison. Miguel Tejada is your general baseball bad actor– an inveterate juicer, an all around schmuck, and now an indicted liar. The Al Capone irony of this one is rich– instead of going down for his own steroid & HGH use or even for lying about his own use, Tejada is screwed over his lying about the steroid usage of ex-prospect, current nobody Adam Piatt. In an interview with Congressional staffers, Tejada denied talking to Piatt about obtaining HGH and steroids, for which he is now being charged with lying to the Congress. Now I know a lot of Congressional staffers and it is true that making them look bad has negative implications for your life if they cacth you at it and can prove you did wrong, but this? Really? Is anybody sending a CEO to prison this month for lying to Congress? How about the entire previous Presidential Administration? How about every Director of Central Intelligence since Wild Bill Donovan? I’m no Tejada fan, but he’s getting reamed out of frustration by a bunch of Congress Critters and a US Attorney who can’t find any other way to cash in on steroid mania. This is just stupid. Maybe he’ll at least get a book deal out of it though, right? I imagine it’ll be published, or at least hyped, in February of, oh, 2011.

That brings us to the book being hyped now for release around Opening Day, Darryl Strawberry’s combination of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Bronx Zoo. According to publicity releases on this one, Straw talks at length about ballplayers in the ’80s using coke and speed, drinking beer to take the edge off of the illegal stimulants, and getting head in the clubhouse during games. New ground there, eh? Just in case that doesn’t hook you, there’s also the promise of details on the nightly three and four ways the Mets engaged in after a night in the bars and clubs… or you could just go out on the net and see the real thing at any porn site. I’m sure this one will fly off the shelves at Barnes & Noble outlets all over Queens and sell, well, less robustly everywhere else.

Maybe it’ll spawn a new book from some of the Strawberry-Alomar overlap women who can write that they gave Straw head in the clubhouse while having unprotected sex with Alomar and don’t have HIV. Coming soon from (extremely)Random House, I suppose.