After weeks of complaining about how boring this off-season is... I suppose that I am compelled to write about Alex Rodriguez failing a steroid test. Not a new one, but an old one - from 2003, that was supposed to be anonymous and the results destroyed. But then, the simple act of destroying something has always been amazingly tricky.

First, my own personal bias: I'm Canadian. We are, I like to think, old hands at this stuff, mostly because we went through a long period of self-flagellation after Ben Johnson's positive steroid test in 1988 - we had inquests and much soul-searching and all that, while Americans shrugged and continued to flush positive tests down the toilet. Then came the tipping point - I'm not exactly sure when or how it arrived, but I think that Barry Bonds was involved - and Americans got anti-steroid fever real fast and real bad.

(I knew a guy in school who was an aspiring runner, and who idolized Ben Johnson. After the positive test, his locker was busted open, and all the Johnson pics inside were torn to shreds. I know that A-Roid is getting everyone into a bit of a tizzy, but... I think I'll choose to chill out)

If the report turns out to be true... well, the Mitchell Report warned us that many ballplayers were using PEDs, and I guess we shouldn't be surprised that a guy on a pace to hit 800 homers might be one of them. It's too early to say what this does to his legacy - I'm guessing, probably not a lot. A-Rod has emerged in recent years as baseball's idiot-savant, its most prodigiously talented player but also the one who is most laughed at for his shortcomings. Now, I guess, he's more idiot, less savant, but whatever.

It hasn't taken long for a preponderence of articles to surface discussing Rodriguez' Hall of Fame chances. These articles have prodded me to start thinking a tad morbidly about demographics. A-Rod is still fairly young; for example, he's fourteen years younger than Barack Obama. He's three months younger than I am. He has nine years left on his contract with the Yankees; even if he plays them out, he'll still be only 42. Then comes the mandatory five-year wait - it could be 2025 before he becomes eligible.

Anyone who says they plan to vote - or not vote - for A-Rod is doing so on the assumption that they will still be alive 2025 - always a dicey assumption (they also assume that Google's robots will not have colonized us by then - but that's an issue for Part 273 of this series, "When Google's Robots have Achieved Consciousness, Colonized the Planet and Taken Over Our Institutions, Who Will They Put in the Baseball Hall of Fame?")

We tend to think of the "baseball writers" as a homogeneous group of middle-aged white guys who are firmly set in their ways. Mark McGwire can't get into the Hall, so... neither will Rodriguez. But, you know, people die. Some of them make babies before they die, and then those babies grow up and so on. When Jim Rice first appeared on the Hall of Fame ballot in 1994, he received only 29% of the vote, and had to gradually build his support over 15 years. Some voters changed their minds, but I wonder how much of a role demographics played.

Despite what you read about how intensely feared Rice was in his prime, that wasn't always what was written and said in the early 1980's. A lot of sportswriters then were crotchety old farts who idolized DiMaggio and Mays and all the Robinsons, but regarded the early free agents to be overpaid, million-dollar pieces of Kentucky Fried Chickenshit. When Frank Robinson was inducted to the Hall in 1982, he famously observed that, "I don't see anyone playing in the major leagues today who combines both the talent and the intensity that I had." And there were more nods of agreement than dissensions.

When Rice failed to reach any milestones (3000 hits, 400 homers), that pretty much killed any chance he had of being inducted when he first appeared on the ballot in 1994. He hit 382 home runs - the exact same number as Frank Howard, barely half as many as Hank Aaron. But 15 years is a long time, and the baby boomers have swelled the ranks of the baseball writers; many of them are near the same age as Jim Rice, and started their own careers and families at the same time he started his (and may even have lost their virginity on a night that Rice hit a game-winning homer).

And they voted Rice into the Hall. But just as they've done so, the worm has turned; now it's the boomers who are getting crotchety, and are whinging about 250 million-dollar pieces of chickenshit made by bloated chickens pumped full of steroids and hormones. Dunno how us younger folks will feel, especially those of us born the same year as A-Rod. But there's lots of time to think about it; in the meantime, it might be wise to remember that ballplayers are human, and are prone to the same foibles and failures as the rest of us.

Except Albert Pujols, who's a God among Men.