I’m not. Honestly. I wasn’t shocked at all.

I just remember Alex Rodriguez looking a lot like Derek Jeter when he was in Seattle, and then like Tiger Woods when he was in Texas and then like Mark Bavaro as a Yankee.

I remember that he had a big greet-and-meet (if memory serves, it was on a cruise, and Michael Kay hosted) where he AND Barry Bonds charged fans tons of money for the privilege. If memory serves, as Bonds approached Hank Aaron’s record, he said that it would only last until A-Rod gets it, and that when his buddy A-Rod breaks the new record, well, Bonds would be in the ballpark.

So we knew that A-Rod had a relationship with Bonds, and we knew he had a relationship with Jose Canseco, the high priest of truth when it comes to naming Steroids’ Who’s Who?

How, then, could we be shocked?

Actually there are only two players whose names would knock me off my chair if they were positively linked to steroids. One is Derek Jeter. I just couldn’t imagine that. The other is Frank Thomas, who rallied hard and long for testing in baseball, who welcomed any tests, and who volunteered to address Congress via video hookup during the steroid hearings.

So the question today is, were you shocked by A-Rod’s ‘Roid outing, and would you be shocked by any other names that might come up?

I’ll have some thoughts on the Hall of Fame, which is now almost sure to be tainted in the future, and on whether A-Rod, guilty as he may be, probably got a raw deal by being the only one of the 104 positive tests from 2003 to be leaked to the press.

CARP SAYS:

Sam (who’s off this week) and I discussed the whole Barry Bonds Hall of Fame issue last week, and this new A-Roid episode has made me realize something else …

I may give up my Hall of Fame vote forever. Why? Because what happens when, just for the sake of throwing out a name, Ken Griffey Jr. and/or Manny Ramirez comes up for election. They are no-doubters, absolute first-ballot Hall of Famers, right? There is no evidence whatsoever linking them to any drug use. So what if we put them in and find out later that they used? Then what?

See the problem? I will not vote for A-Roid or Bonds or Clemens or McGwire (or Palmeiro, or Sosa, or Sheffield, etc). But now I don’t know if I’m voting in a clean guy when I vote. I do not want to be even partially responsible for putting in a steroid-cheat when I so clearly in my mind won’t vote for a known cheat.

I don’t know what to do with my vote going forward.

The other point I want to make is that I think it’s totally unfair to A-Rod, fraud and cheater that he is, to have his supposedly anonymous test leaked to the press. I blame this on the union, which could have destroyed the results, and I blame it on whomever leaked it. If they find out who it was, he should be fired and perhaps prosecuted.

JOE ERWIN (filling in for Sam) SAYS:

It’s sad when the thought of anyone cheating doesn’t surprise you anymore, but I’m to that point. Perhaps a guy who would surprise me if he was juicing was Pedro Martinez, not because he necessarily had more integrity than A-Rod or anyone else, but because of how small he is. I know not everyone gets big from using PEDs, but Pedro never seemed all that toned, unlike his former teammate, Nomar Garciaparra, who never got huge but got ridiculously toned.

When the Bernard Madoff scandal came out, I wondered how someone could do something like that and still be able to look himself in the mirror and sleep at night. My conclusion is that some people are both without consciences.

I don’t think that’s the case with A-Rod or other steroid users. I don’t think they’re necessarily bad guys. Their problem isn’t a lack of conscience, it’s a sense of entitlement. Some of that comes from the coddling star athletes receive, often from a young age, and the rest, in the case of baseball players, comes from Donald Fehr and Gene Orza. The union has shown it would go to bat for anyone, even a player spitting in an umpire’s face. The players believed, until recently, that they could get away with anything because for about 30 years, the union pretty much ensured that they did.