600*

While it may be time to celebrate another milestone in baseball, the mood is not that of a Hank Aaron, or a Cal Ripken. The very fact that Alex Rodriguez admitted to using performance enhancing drugs should not diminish the fact that he has completed a grand accomplishment, but he should also take his fair share of criticism. Most "experts" and sports fans would say that hitting a baseball is quite possibly the hardest task in sports, which is why those who are the best at it get the fattest paychecks. The fact that A-Rod was a juicer does not change the fact that he has an eye for the baseball, and the natural ability to make consistent contact. That being said, I still don't believe that Rodriguez's accomplishment should be registered without some type of indication of his behavior (an asterisk perhaps?), because the simple truth is that he cheated. Anybody can say what they want about Barry Bonds, but he has never actually tested positive for PED's during his playing career. Now, his upcoming perjury trial may change his status indefinitely, but the fact still remains that critics don't have any solid proof on Bonds...yet.

Rodriguez is a completely different story altogether because everyone knows definitively that he cheated and subsequently lied about it; only coming clean when he was made aware of a positive test. While steroids do not give a person the ability to hit like Pete Rose, they do make you somewhat stronger, and more importantly, they decrease the time it takes to recover from injury. I don't know if I would feel so strongly on this issue if steroids only made you a bit stronger, because you still have to possess the natural ability to hit a ninety-eight mile-an-hour fastball in order to be successful. What bothers me so severely is that while A-Rod was using, he recovered more quickly than the players who were playing clean, which is definitely an unfair advantage. A one hundred and sixty-two game schedule is a lot more easy to endure if your muscles aren't wracked with pain every day (I would also bet it makes it a lot easier to hit home runs). So if A-Rod eventually gets to eight hundred-which is looking less and less plausible-there should be some indication in the record books to verify that what he did was wrong; not only for the fans of major league baseball, but also to all the clean, honest baseball players, who would rather condition their bodies to stand the rigors of the MLB season than stick a needle in themselves. If Rodriguez can stay healthy and hit two hundred more homers, he should be congratulated, but in no way should he be celebrated.