MLB: A-Rod, Down; Team Standings; Colorado Rockies & "The Slide."

For more analysis, go to Mile High Sports Radio AM1510 or FM93.7, and to Denver’s best sports blogging team, milehighsports.com. SPORTS NOTEBOOK posts its columns Tuesday and Friday of each week. Ed. & Publ., Marvin Leibstone; Copy & Mng. Ed., Gail Kleiner) . . . MLB: A-ROD, DOWN --- A priest confesses to having embezzled Vatican funds, a city cop admits that he accepted payoffs from a drug dealer for looking the other way, a U.S. government intelligence analyst tells his superiors he did indeed provide classified information to a news reporter, and against overwhelming evidence a skilled and powerful professional baseball player cannot deny plausibly his use of performance enhancement drugs (PED’s). We cringe at this information more than when professional criminals commit acts many times as bad, and that is often because these individuals had committed to professions asking more of them than is asked of the average citizen. Society keeps expecting such persons to be above reproach---honesty, loyalty, exemplary behavior within all settings. Why, then, the rogue behavior, the lawlessness, the rule-breaking? Case in point: N.Y. Yankee third baseman, Alex Rodriguez, not long ago a potential heir to the throne, a king of baseball in the making, stripped now of that, self-criminalized, PED-use having dragged him down, before us the great A-Rod caught in a vise, being squeezed from all opportunities for redemption. He’s purchased a 211-game suspension, long enough to take the game out of A-Rod, not just A-Rod out of the game. Even if minor league-caged, A-Rod will be forever suspect at the plate, maybe at everything else, as well. So, too, will the impressive data that he’s amassed be suspect. BUT, this year a dozen more MLB players have been suspended for similar wrongdoing, this after the PED scandals of years past---Barry Bonds, Mark McGuire, Jason Giambi, Roger Clemons, Andy Petite. Why the errors of their ways? Is it more than just bad choices made by athletes wanting to maintain an edge, men foolish enough to think they’ll always get away with deals made with greedy clinics, with physicians they knew to be dirtbags capable of being informants? Could it be that along with all that amazing talent of his, A-Rod also owns a giant bubble of insecurity inside him, fear of his talent never being enough to match the expectations of fans, of teammates, of front office execs, of his own expectations, an insecurity driving him to risk “the big trade,” i.e., risk losing respect and admiration to humiliation, shame? When so many top ballplayers are discovered to be PED-users, are we to blame only them for the waywardness? Found to be a user of PED’s, former Red Sox and Dodger player, Manny Ramirez, left the U.S. to play for a Taiwan ballclub. Should that be A-Rod’s choice, is MLB commissioner, Bud Selig, to say, “Have a Nice Trip, Alex,” and then forget all about PED usage, having this year also suspended the dozen other PED-users? More important is that MLB Commissioner Selig continue looking for what it is that enables PED behavior? Surely the discovery of numerous PED-using ballplayers from different franchises mirrors an aspect of how Selig’s multi-billion dollar organization exists as an institution that stills claim the role of America’s national pastime, “an aspect that is corrosive.” Something within calls for an examination of greater depth than has occurred in the past, never with exoneration of A-Rod or of other players in mind, purpose: a scouring away of whatever it is that causes an MLB athlete to believe that he can get away with using PED’s. . . /// MLB STANDINGS---THE NL East’s 68-45 Atlanta Braves are still the division-leading franchise with the best edge over a second place club---13 games above the NL East’s 54-58 Washington Nationals. The Braves also hold the number two position within the National League, just one game behind the NL Central’s 67-44 Pittsburgh Pirates. And, the Braves are second within both the NL and the American League from only a game behind the AL East’s 68-46 Boston Red Sox, which has a tenuous division lead, being just two games up on second place team, the AL East’s 66-45 Tampa Bay Rays. The second best division lead over a number two team now belongs to the NL West’s 62-49 Los Angeles Dodgers, six games ahead of the 56-55 Arizona Diamondbacks. Third are the AL Central’s 65-45 Detroit Tigers, being three games ahead of the 62-50 Cleveland Indians. All other division leading clubs are of two games up. Meanwhile, third place teams seem to be in a hurt, three of which are more than 10 games behind first place, the remaining three six, six and seven behind, and one third-place team of last week is now fourth within its division, the 52-61 NL West’s Colorado Rockies relinquishing the third spot to the 52-60 San Diego Padres. Another show of decline is that half of the major league franchises are now below .500, best among them the .482 Nationals. If the Nat’s current win/loss ratio continues as is, the team could be the year’s only below .500 team vying for a league championship and a shot at the World Series. How fair is this to the AL West’s third place team, the 52-59/.468 Seattle Mariners, or for the AL East’s fifth and last place club, the 51-60/.459 Toronto Blue Jays, should they also continue their current rate of wins and losses? Still at the very bottom of either league this week are the AL West’s 37-74/.333 Houston Astros, second worst the AL Central’s 41-69/.373 Chicago White Sox. . . /// COLORADO ROCKIES---IT hasn’t been a classic fall from grace, not one of those sudden dives from a mountain’s highest peak to a ravine under the sea, no overnight drop from earned stardom to insignificance. Instead, the 2013 Colorado Rockies have been of a one yard forward/two back “slow slide” from a promising though not amazing start to being beneath a watermark separating winners from losers. The Rockies are 52 wins, 61 losses today, under 500, therefore a losing ballclub. After a winning April (16 wins, 11 losses), it’s been more downhill than up for the Colorado franchise, 12-16 in May, 13-15 in June, more losses than wins in July and it seems to be going that way in August. After being just one or two games behind first or second place within the NL West, by July 30 the Rockies were in third place and six games back of the L.A. Dodgers. Today, the Rockies are in fourth place, 11 games behind the Dodgers and only three games ahead of last place team, the S.F. Giants. The bend in the road that made the difference for the Rockies was a 10 game homestand versus teams that if defeated one after the other would have offset the team’s following away-from-home losses to teams a lot harder to defeat than those of the 10 day homestand, namely the Atlanta Braves and the Pittsburgh Pirates, two of the year’s best MLB clubs, either league. Instead, the Rockies lost half of the July 10-game homestand. Why the increase in fallbacks? Check the boxes: Player injuries, YES; Starting pitchers + relievers with low strikeout/high ERA ratios, YES; Hit-inconsistency among skilled and powerful batters, which has caused runners left in scoring position at third outs, YES. All are causes repeated often in the media. If there’s a good side with regard to the Rockies current standings, it’s only that the Rockies are NOT in the bottom third of the NL along with four other teams; they are but two games shy of being in the top half. A better tag is that the Rockies are NOT DULL, they are an interesting ballclub. What makes this so is that the Rockies keep having short bursts of skill and power, a sudden though short stream of strikeouts from starting pitchers Jorge De La Rosa, Jhoulys Chacin and Tyler Chatwood, and home runs and extra base hits resulting in runs, plus successful steals. But this hasn’t been enough to offset the opposite, not enough to erase those zip, zero and nada half-innings allowing games to be lost. So, it’s time to watch Rockies games with less attention given to standings relative to a possible post-season slot or even the .501 grace-saving mark, rather with more attention given to the good baseball that the team seems to provide just enough to be free of the sin of boredom “win or lose.” END/ml