The rites of spring.

A day late with this, but such is life.

Ah, Spring. Printemps. Snow melts, skirts appear, pitchers and catchers report. A Yankee explains to a media horde why he used steroids.

Alex Rodriguez told reporters at the Yankees' Spring Training facility in Tampa that his cousin regularly injected him with substances between 2001 and 2003. “I didn’t think they were steroids,” Rodriguez told the assembled crowd, though he conceded that “I knew we weren’t taking Tic Tacs.”

“This public bloodletting of individual stars, the fallen stars, anybody who witnesses what these individuals have to go through after the fact, say, ‘You know what? I don’t want to be that guy. I don’t want to be in the chair, I don’t want to be the one—the poster child for the problem with the game, and on every newspaper across the country and every talk show.”

Whether he likes it or not, Rodriguez is now the poster child for this era. He got into that boat when he signed a $250 million contract. He's got the best numbers in an era when everybody's numbers were inflated. The one thing he is not is shunned.

Now let's hear from that cousin.