Story About A-Rod Is Pumped At The Rear

Yesterday was a typical slow day at work.

I had to watch The Transporter 2, a movie so off-the-wall outrageous that I think I have to Netflix the first one just so I can smoke my weight in carpet fibers and laugh through the whole thing. (Noticing that there is a bomb planted under his car, and forced to drive off at gunpoint, British/Scottish/Irish/Welsh/Australian/Kiwi/Oyster Bay actor Jason Statham gets in, speeds off, sees a crane with a large hook hanging down, drives over some crates and assorted boxes so that the car flies 30 feet into the air WHILE ROTATING HORIZONTALLY, whereupon said hook perfectly knocks off said bomb literally nanoseconds before it explodes. Whew!)

Normal hump day.

Then a co-worker sent me this.

By nature, AP stories are supposed to be bland. There's a formula that all of us lowly journalism students learned the day we stepped into a soulless lecture hall - the inverted pyramid.

It goes like this: you put the good shit at the top, where people are likely to read it. Then, the further down they go, and the more bored they get, they stop. That way if you need, say, four inches to fill and you have a six-inch story, you just chop-chop-chop off the inconsequential dredge at the bottom until the story fits.

This AP story about Alex Rodriguez at spring training, however, is too good to snip, with everything from how he exaggerated the number of times he was tested for steroids to how he'll never be among the Yankee greats until he wins a ring.

The best part, however, is the best part. When my co-worker e-mailed it to me, all he said was, "Ninth paragraph."

That graf was this:

Andy [Pettitte] is one of the greatest human beings I've ever met. I have two daughters -- well, I have one and one on the way. If I had a daughter, I would want 'em to marry Andy Pettitte. The age difference might be a little awkward, but in today's day and age anything is possible.

Looking at that story again one sees that the loquacious verse in question has been moved to the very bottom of the piece, light-years beyond the ninth paragraph. I can't prove that it was changed, but two of those three links were updated pretty late in the evening for a wire story, and the other was updated a good two hours after I read it initially (at roughly 5 pm ET Wednesday, Feb. 20).

I'm trying to go easy on the guy here and shift the focus away from the contents of the actual quote. But look at it again: "I have two daughters -- well, I have one and one on the way. If I had a daughter ..."

Wow. Just ... amazing. And I haven't even begun to psychoanalyze the absolute and utter awkwardness of a man trying to hook his "alleged" daughter up with someone 32 years her senior.

When asked about saying that he had been tested for steroids nine or 10 times last year, A-Rod said: "My quote from earlier today was taken literally."

Too bad he was talking about the wrong one.