It’s been a tumultuous couple of months for Alex Rodriguez. He admitted using performance enhancing drugs, he had surgery on his hip and will miss close to the first two months of the season, and everything the slugger has said since his admission is put under a microscope, with every microbe of verbiage dissected and broken down until every proton and electron is examined.

I want to defend A-Rod with every fiber of my being for admitting he was wrong and doing everything the right way to start moving his life back in the right direction. He should also not be the only player dragged through the syringe filled mud. There are 103 more names from 2003 that didn’t come to light.

Rodriguez said in one of his many interviews he DOES NOT want those names to become public. He is bearing the brunt of the scrutiny and he just wants to move forward.

It seems he can’t move forward because almost every time he opens his mouth he proceeds to start a media frenzy. Take for example when he commented on Jose Reyes, a Dominican teammate in the World Baseball Classic. Rodriguez was asked if he watched the way Reyes ran the bases. He smiled and said quote, “I wish he was leading off on our team or playing on our team, that’s fun to watch.” Immediately some of the press surrounding him took that as a knock on Johnny Damon and Derek Jeter. Please. The last thing this guy wants to do, after getting the support of his teammates at his press conference, is to publicly humiliate them.

Even though the comments were innocuous, Rodriguez sent someone outside the clubhouse to make sure everyone knew it wasn’t a knock on Damon and Jeter. To his own admission, Rodriguez knows he is not a strong public speaker. You’ll learn that and more in an interview A-Rod gave the YES Network. Michael Kay sat down with the Yankees third baseman in our upcoming Pride, Power, and Pinstripes special which airs Tuesday March 24 after the Yankees take on the Red Sox in Grapefruit League action.

You would think if he is a self admitted bad public speaker, and always catches himself saying the wrong things, he wouldn’t make himself so available to the media constantly and maybe one of his crisis management people tells him to knock off the interviews for a while. Well that advice wasn’t available to him in recent months. Case in point, after Sports Illustrated outed him as one of the names on the list of 104 that tested positive for PED’s in 2003, and before he joined his teammates in Tampa, Rodriguez did an interview and a photo shoot with Details magazine. The pictures were in the New York Post. After seeing them, I’ll take the fifth, and refer to Forrest Gump in saying, “That’s all I have to say about that.”