An Okay for A-Rod

We knew Alex Rodriquez, serial cheater, had to be on something when he won his third MVP award in 2007, smashing 54 dingers for the Yankees.  But now a new book claims that what it was is a little surprising--a testosterone boost somehow okayed by MLB doctors.   It's in an excerpt just posted by Sports Illustrated.

A year later, the authors wrote, Smith gave Rodriguez another exemption to use the drug clomid, which is typically used by bodybuilders to boost their production of testosterone after they cycle off the use of steroids.

The fact that Rodriguez was allowed to use these substances is particularly embarrassing for Commissioner Bud Selig, who has spent a good part of the last decade toughening baseball’s drug-testing regimen and pushing it to the forefront of professional sports. To a considerable degree, he has been able to do so, which has allowed him to recast his initial legacy as the commissioner who allowed drug use to go unchecked in the sport in the 1990s.

But the disclosure that baseball gave Rodriguez, who has subsequently emerged as baseball’s No. 1 drug offender, a green light to use drugs in 2007 and 2008 will raise new questions about how baseball’s therapeutic use exemptions are granted and how the program operated in the latter part of the last decade.