No critical thinking on A-Rod

Is it just me, or is New York Yankee Alex Rodriguez, baseball's new golden boy, getting a free pass from media types who seem to think their job is to create and sustain heroes — until they fall from grace, whereupon they are set upon like sharks to a bloody carcass?

A-Rod is bashing the ball with impressive numbers but even in this era where eyebrows are raised about performance enhancement, nobody seems to be even raising the possibility, so quickly do they want to move on from Barry Bonds and embrace a new "hero". You saw this immediately upon Bonds breaking Hank Aaron's career home run record — people begain writing that, hey, it's OK, because Bonds won't hold the record long since A-Rod will soon break it.

Not saying A-Rod is or isn't using performance-enhancement and it doesn't even really matter. Regular readers of this space will know by now that the view here is that the key question that is never asked is: how do you define performance enhancement?

But why the free pass?