These are the facts of the case.

Fact #1: In 2003, Alex Rodriguez and 103 other major league baseball players tested positive for performance enhancers. The test was conducted under a guarantee of anonymity for the purpose of determining whether wide-spread testing and punishment for positive results were warranted. The thinking was that if five percent of players tested came back positive, the league would install the new rules and eight percent did. In 2004, the league cracked down on steroids and performance enhancers like HGH, human growth hormone.

Fact #2: In his book Juiced, the 2005 memoir of his time as baseball's "Godfather of Steroids," Jose Canseco made accusations of steroid use at, notably, Mark McGwire, Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez, who Canseco also accused of hitting on his wife. Canseco is largely considered a nutbag. He also seems to have been mostly accurate in his accusations.

Fact #3: Major League Baseball told the players' union that the results of the 2003 test had been destroyed, but apparently that didn't happen. Instead, the results were mixed in with various papers at BALCO, the San Francisco clinic at the center of a Congressional investigation, from where they were seized in a government raid last month.

Fact #4: Miguel Tejada lied to Congress on the subject of PED's in baseball during his interview regarding the BALCO case. Barry Bonds will (probably) also be shown to have lied to federal investigators and, in all likelihood, the various Bonds-related doping schedules and paraphernalia will prove that he did use HGH while playing for the San Francisco Giants, a fact pretty much acknowledged by everyone who follows Major League Baseball. Marion Jones has gone to prison for lying to federal prosecutors, and Tejada and Bonds could follow. (Not a fact: Congress really has better things to worry about than PED's in sports, I think.)

Fact #5: Alex Rodriguez was going to save baseball by wiping the execrable Bonds, and his statistics, out of the record books, thereby restoring for posterity the soul of the game. It seems that cannot be the case anymore.

Fact #6: I used to twist A-Rod's nickname into Gay-Rod and now there are a plethora of other options like A-Hole, A-Roid, A-Fraud, *-Rod (pronounced Asterix-Rod), and A-Pology. Take your pick.

Fact #7: I have no idea what to think about all of this.

I do know that the idea that A-Rod, or anyone else for that matter, could save baseball is ridiculous. Maybe this is because baseball is beyond saving and maybe this is because baseball doesn't need to be saved. Attendance numbers are, after all, sky high and the level of competition almost astounds; there have been tie-breaking one-game playoffs to decide divisions in each of the last two years and in the last eight years, seven teams have won the World Series, with only the Red Sox winning in both '04 and '07 following their 86 year championship drought. But this era of baseball will certainly not be remembered for the number of asses in the seats or the record revenues made by the clubs. In all likelihood, in twenty years we won't believe that one day way back when it only cost $6.75 to get a cup of warmish Bud Light. No, this era will be remembered because of steroids.

But then again, the Mitchell Report barely registered in any sort of collective consciousness way. The aforementioned Miguel Tejada was in there, but it didn't stop him from landing a lucrative contract with the Houston Astros. Other mid-level stars who've tested positive or been speculated to be a juicer have managed to get around any public stonings. Even one-time great Jason Giambi apologized for poor decisions and was let off the hook; former clubhouse favorite Paul Lo Duca answered a reporter's query about his presence in the Mitchell Report with a simple "c'mon, dude." The answer to why the world shrugged at the Mitchell Report, why it meant relatively nothing in retrospect, is simple: too many blue collar types were mentioned and few stars that we didn't already know. No one cares about what F. P. Santangelo or Adam Piatt or Rondell White had to do to stay in the big leagues. The minutiae of the lives of average working athletes is something that interests the average American sports fan exactly not at all.

What the average sports fan cares about are the stars. It's not all that unusual that it would be the Bondses and Clemenses that cause the biggest stir, they are the biggest stars after all, they are the players we go to the ballpark to see, the ones whose names we wear across our backs (or at least it's their numbers that we wear). These are the players we pay to see, these are players that time, in theory, will remember. (In a certain way, this is what accounts for the fact that the other 103 players who tested positive haven't been identified yet, they aren't important enough players in all likelihood; they aren't players who we will remember and talk about to our kids.) Remembrance is a very large part of this issue since it is especially important in baseball, but only in a certain way, specifically regarding personal achievements. This is just one of the many odd hypocrisies of this issue.

Barry Bonds is a tainted player and thus the records for most home runs in a single season and most career home runs are suspect. Part of what makes A-Rod's crime so great is that, even though his career when not using PED's is theoretically still Hall of Fame-worthy (another issue that has to be unpacked), he can't take the stain off of those two records (or at least career homers), as it was hoped that he would. Unless the decision is made to strike his tainted home runs from the record, which would open up a tremendous can of worms. As is, there seems to be some traction gaining hold for the idea that baseball would go back to Maris and Aaron as the record holders, but picking and choosing which years of a career are valid and which are not is awfully specious. So, A-Rod as savior is out the window, and I think part of the uproar over his use of these PED's derives from a sense of betrayal.

Bonds was during his playing days and continues to be an incredibly loathsome person, he's the person we need to be saved from. Clemens is a total jerk-off, same with Canseco. But A-Rod could never save us from these people, because he is himself just like them. He's the guy caught with strippers in Toronto, the guy sunning himself in Central Park before he goes 0 for 4 that night, the guy who has a fling with Madonna. But he never needed to be a perfect person, just as all athletes don't have to be. We only really care about performance. As much as the sports writer in all of us loves to tout the off-field values of certain star players, the only thing we really care about is the level of production. But we also care about posterity and history.

The Hall of Fame is a large part of this discussion, both regarding A-Rod and this whole era of the game. Arguments have been made that the Hall of Fame is a museum and not just a shrine. But Pete Rose isn't, and probably never will be, in it. Ty Cobb is. Mark McGwire's poor showings in his two years of eligibility lead one to believe that tainted players aren't going to do too well in this endeavor. Entrants are voted in by the Baseball Writer's Association of America, a group almost unparalleled in their lack of moral relativism. And remember that McGwire has never been caught actually failing anything, it's just assumed that he cheated. (And there was also that book by his brother.) I wonder how much "childish naivete" and "unfortunate decisions" will really mean for the Hall of Fame voters.

What I can't stop thinking about is the dichotomy between the Hall of Fame and World Series Championships, as well as the differences between baseball and football regarding these issues. A few years ago, Chargers Linebacker Shawne Merriman was suspended for four games for testing positive for steroids and the fact that he had missed a quarter of the season was used as validation for his winning of the Defensive MVP award. The argument was something like "look at his stats, and he missed four games," with people actively using stats from games played under the influence of what he later tested positive for. We aren't bothered by this stuff in football, but the sanctity of the Super Bowl is heralded. During Spygate, the largest and most egregious offense that the New England Patriots had potentially committed was gaining an edge in the Super Bowl by taping a Rams day-before walk through practice.

But baseball is just the opposite. It's the individual numbers that will affect Hall of Fame stature and thus are most important. Not one single column that I've ever read regarding the steroid issue has ever touched on altering the history of the World Series. Not even after Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte, as mainstays of a starting rotation that won multiple World Series, has anyone ever talked about championships being inappropriately bestowed. This is because baseball is a team game, and no one person can retroactively ruin the achievement of his team. Similarly, no one player could have saved the game.

And that brings us back to A-Rod. In a certain way, I'm not displeased about his admission of guilt, having never liked him. But I feel bad for him and I recognize the pressure that he must have felt as well as the temptation of doing something to make yourself better, especially if everyone else is doing it. But he can't be immortalized, none of these guys should be, on plaques next to Jackie Robinson, Joe DiMaggio, Sandy Koufax and so many others who are legitimately mythic. If MLB wants to create a wing of the Hall so that we remember this tainted era of the game that's fine with me. If there's a twenty year hole of inductees that's cool too. And if everyone around the game continues to turn the same blind eye towards this issue that they have for the past twenty years than I will just have to accept it and hope that somehow the game gets course-corrected starting with players who decide for themselves that they won't cheat. But it seems like we're past that point now; after all, the greatest player of his generation cheated. And like him or not, this makes A-Rod the essence of what is bad about baseball and the epitome of the state of the game right now. His actions make it seem as though baseball will never be rid of PED's and that, at some point in the very near future, all the purists out there (myself included) are going to have to shrug and accept the new way the game is being played. That's just my opinion, it isn't a fact, but it certainly feels like the truth.