Barra: A-Rod’s Latest Steroid Mess: What’s True, What’s False, and is Anyone Getting Blackmailed?

Barra: Rumors/Sources and The NY Daily News—The Parallel Lives of Baseball’s Golden Rage.

Trying to sort through the latest Alex Rodriguez-related mess—I’m not going to call it a scandal yet for reasons that will come up in a moment—is like trying to read the New York Review of Books on a crowded subway: it’s hard to find one line that connects with the next.

The Times fired the first shot in an online report Thursday that appeared in the Friday print edition. All subsequent reports that I’ve read (including the Daily News, SI.com, etc.) took their lead from The Times story.  The first piece to put the facts in place without jumping to conclusions was written by ESPN’s razor-sharp T.J. Quentin and Mike Fish.

...Did A-Rod outbid Bud Selig and MLB for the documents? And if he did, here’s one juicy scenario, suggested, of course, by the Daily News, about what might happen: “Rumors have spread through the league and its players that A-Rod possesses a list of names and documents that he has either leaked to the media to deflect attention to himself or destroyed them before anyone can see them.”

According to the source, Rodriguez “also knows all the players who are on the list.”  Are we talking possible extortion here, or maybe A-Rod figuring that if he goes down, he’s going to take everyone else with him? The possibilities are fascinating.

I checked with my own source about those rumors and sources, and he told me that those rumors and sources all started with the Daily News.