Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez at the plate before he confessed to using performance-enhancing drugs. Photo by imagesbyferg on Flickr, licensed under the Creative Commons.

My official Bucky Dent’s Baseball School lil’ slugger card read “Lex Singer, 5′4″, 148 lbs.” I was 12 years old, and my dad shipped me and my questionable hand-eye coordination off to Florida for baseball camp. I’d spent my first couple of days trying to avoid errors, pantsings and expired Lunchables this one kid kept offering me. But on the third day of camp, we had the whole morning off because the greatest player in baseball, Alex Rodriguez, was coming to visit.

Bucky Dent, the owner of the camp and Yankees legend, was A-Rod’s infield coach while Rodriguez played for the Texas Rangers. We were told that the famous shortstop would come by the camp by 11 a.m. and that he would talk, take photos and even eat a meal with us. Imagine an immortal legend, sitting down with us eating his own Lunchables and putting chocolate frosting on a cracker, err, pizza. We waited and waited for him to show up. We sat in the outfield, messed with blades of grass and made fun of kids who didn’t know how to play Magic: The Gathering.

At about half past 1 p.m., sufficiently sunburned and dehydrated, we saw a white limo pull up next to the field. In a parking lot of full of decade-old Nissans, golf carts and the overbearing dads who had set up folding chairs, Alex Rodriguez’s limo sorely stuck out. Rodriguez walked towards us with a bit of a smirk and gave Bucky a hug. After a strangely tender embrace, Rodriguez, or A-Rod as we affectionately called him, started talking to us. He didn’t mention that he was two hours late, just that he was sorry and didn’t have time to take too many pictures or eat.

Rodriguez then began to give a speech about the importance of going to college. While this practice theoretically sounds fine, A-Rod added in a personal anecdote that even made the kid who wore glasses scratch his head with confusion. Rodriguez said that when he was 18 years old, he toyed with the Seattle Mariners by threatening to almost go to college, just to leverage his contract. The famous A-Rod then continued to explain how he never really planned to attend school, but pretending to consider higher education helped him anyway. Even though I was more concerned with The Wild Thornberrys than baseball at the time, I knew there was something wrong with A-Rod. Sure, he appeared smooth, but something about him just wasn’t genuine.

Now I know that at the time, A-Rod was in the heyday of his admitted steroid use. However, I’m not convinced that was the only time he used performance-enhancing drugs. As Rodriguez admitted in an interview with Peter Gammons, he originally began taking steroids because of pressure. Almost everything Rodriguez does or says now is a result of pressure as well. He struggles in clutch situations and in the post-season because of elevated pressure, and becomes flustered in interviews because of the pressure to be perfect. When the game is on the line, Rodriguez always swings for the fences and oftentimes ends up striking out. With the media, he tries to be the consummate teammate and role model, but can be expected to say something slightly wrong which then turns into a news story. Rodriguez is so obsessed with being the best baseball player ever that he lacks any kind of sincerity. Everything Rodriguez comes out sounding like something his publicist told him to say.

Just like his visit to my camp, A-Rod’s most recent interview was late and cold. He had previously denied any steroid use in a piece for 60 Minutes with Katie Couric and only came forward about his transgression when it became clearly he absolutely had to. The latest interview with Gammons was conducted in a living room worthy of being aired on Cribs, which may as well have included that aforementioned white limo. Rodriguez danced around issues, used evasive phrases like “around then,” and blamed his performance-enhancing drug use on the current era, in which steroid usage is pervasive, but refused to go into specifics. In what was supposed to be a truthful admission, A-Rod claimed that he didn’t know exactly what steroids he took. This, from a man whose body has won him a salary large enough to bail out the U.S. auto industry.

Nothing substantive came from the Gammons interview that the tests didn’t already reveal. Rodriguez essentially avoided lunch and the photo-op all over again. A-Rod has never been real and until he finally proves he can actually be genuine, he can continue to put up Ruthian numbers for the next thirty years; but Rodriguez will remain to be one of the most hated figures in all of baseball.ate