A-Rod Inspires Verducci To New Levels of Nonsense

Last Tuesday, Sports Illustrated's Tom Verducci graced us with the following sober, reasonable assessment of the A-Rod allegations' impact upon the Yankees:

   "[W]ith this story, the franchise and to 2009 championship are smeared by Rodriguez's connection to PEDs."
 
I must be a bad man, because I have looked into my heart and found that even if these allegations prove true, I'm always going to feel a thrill whenever I envision Robinson Cano closing out the 2009 season by fielding a meek ground ball induced by Mariano Rivera. Or Hideki Matsui's exploits. Or A-Rod doubling to left to put the Yankees up 3-1 in the World Series. Etc. It was awesome.

But what I wanted to draw attention to is another Verducci comment related to 2009, which he wrote a week later:

     "A discrepancy in dates assigned to a notebook labeled 2009. The notations refer to Feb. 7, 14 and 28 as falling on Mondays -- which was true in 2011, not 2009. 

    "The notes in the 2009 book list "Alex Rod" and Yuri Sucart under "Mon./Feb. 14." It was on Feb. 5, 2009 that Selena Roberts of Sports Illustrated confronted Rodriguez while training in Miami about information that he flunked his 2003 survey test for the steroid Primobolan. The story... was posted Feb. 7, 2009, a Saturday -- making it more likely the "Mon./Feb. 14" notation refers to 2011"

This weird juggling of dates gave me an unpleasant sense of cognitive dissonance - which I recovered from once I remembered that this is just crap from Sports Illustrated, a magazine I have detested from the first very time I came across its slick, superficial articles in a dentist's office as a child.

Anyway, there are a few things here worth questioning:

• If the date on the notebook is not 2009, then if Verducci deals honestly with his readers, shouldn't he at least be questioning whether he prematurely tried to taint the 2009 Yankees?
• If the details in these documents are supposed to be so damning, isn't it troubling that the dates are wrong? Shouldn't that be a rather clear signal that we should not be so hasty in coming to conclusions about handwritten entries in unauthenticated documents? 
• Isn't it weird and telling that the sole conclusion Verducci draws from the dates being wrong is that they would be the correct dates if they had occurred in some other year!?

Now I am not saying A-Rod is innocent. Anyone who has a firm opinion right now, before the investigators share their finding, is just being a fool. Which also explains why the only issue of Sports Illustrated that is ever worth "reading" is the swimsuit issue.