A Polite Forum for a Careful Confession

On Sunday, ESPN got the call: it had its big get, an interview with Alex Rodriguez to discuss the Sports Illustrated report that he had tested positive in 2003 for a steroid. The request went directly to Peter Gammons, ESPN’s lead baseball writer.

Rodriguez’s people did not reach out to ESPN reporters like T. J. Quinn or Mark Fainaru-Wada, veterans of the steroids beat, or its legal reporter, Lester Munson.
And they certainly weren’t going to reward Sports Illustrated by agreeing to an exclusive with the magazine, even if one of its Web site’s baseball reporters, Jon Heyman, has reported extensively on Rodriguez’s agent, Scott Boras.

Rodriguez has known Gammons for much of his career and felt comfortable with him in a way he would not with reporters who have specialties in steroids and the law. A year ago, Roger Clemens sought out Mike Wallace of CBS’s “60 Minutes,” because of a comfort level derived from previous interviews, to discuss accusations of steroid use.
A candid Rodriguez gave Gammons plenty — the admission to using steroids and the often-repeated self-flagellation that he was stupid and naïve. But Gammons, ESPN’s Hall of Fame baseball writer, did not ask a crucial question: “Alex, how often did you take Primobolan or any other banned substances?”

The answer would have given viewers a greater sense of how much Rodriguez felt he needed to experiment in that “loosey-goosey” era of drug use he described, a period that included his three years as a Texas Ranger. What was the frequency, Alex?
Rodriguez was a willing but careful interviewee, although at the start, he searched through elaborate mouth movements to best express himself.

Hiding a secret for six years can be torture, but it would have stayed hidden if not for the Sports Illustrated article that appeared on the magazine’s Web site Saturday morning.

Usually, you hear the World Wide Leader crow about how leagues love its myriad platforms — the TV networks, its radio network, its Web site, etc. — but if Rodriguez wanted widespread coverage for his confession, he went to the right place.

On Saturday, ESPN deployed ESPNews to react for hours to Sports Illustrated’s scoop and generated 1.5 million page views of A-Rod content on ESPN one of the best weekend days ever. And on Monday, the site posted video excerpts from the Rodriguez interview in advance of running it on “SportsCenter” at 6 p.m. Eastern.