It’s rare we see a professional athlete admit the truth while the rest of the world is still warming up to the news… Too many Floyd Landis/Barry Bonds/Roger Clemens/et al stories out there.
A-Rod may be a cheating d-bag (both on his ex-wife and in the game of baseball), but at least he owns up to being a cheating d-bag.

He was huddling with Boras and his goons all night last night.

A-Roid and his handlers have seen what happened to Bonds and Clemens. While people who apologize quickly like Pettite and Brian Roberts are cheaply lauded by an easily bought public.

For all the crying for sympathy in this pathetic “interview” (more like bought PR), A-Roid cheated and he’s only sorry for getting caught. Did you get a load of him completely denying that he took any steroids in the Katie Couric interview a little while ago? (Basically saying he was too good to cheat).
The jerk. And I had thought (been fooled that) he was doing it cleanly.

I mean, he was already seen as something of a disappointment in NYC, but I was living there at the time and after he apologized people gave him a surprising amount of credit. I just think fans are tired of being treated like idiots, of being lied to, and maybe this causes people to re-evaluate their opinion of him.

didn’t improve his performance at all.

I switched a few years ago. I was there in 01 when he first came back, and I booed the hell out of him. But I was living in New York when he got traded to the Yankees, and got so sick of all the Yankee fans saying Jeter was better, that I had to start rooting for him. Which is funny, because I never particularly liked him as an M.

when he slapped the ball from Bronson Arroyo’s glove, said he didn’t do it, and then when caught on camera claimed he didn’t know it was against the rules.

If he didn’t know it was against the rules, why did he deny it in the first place?

When I was about 5 years old, I got in a shoving match with some kid at day care. The adult in charge told us to stop, I stupidly did stop, got shoved one more time, the back of my head hit the corner of a coffee table, and I got stitches for it.

You can’t stop fighting until you know the other guy is also going to stop. If you know that there’s no penalty for PED use, and you know that the other guy fighting for your roster spot is using PEDs, then it makes no sense to stop using them until there’s a real penalty.

I don’t know how common this is amongst franchises, but Minnesota’s PR line going back to when Tom Kelly took over was that they do things “the right way.” Fans have been completely indoctrinated to the point that they take up crazy positions like, say, that it doesn’t hurt the team to be last in the league in home runs. Taking PED is the opposite of “doing things the right way,” so they may be less willing to forgive.

It’s also hypocritical, though, since no one really cared that Juan Rincon actually got caught failing a test. And going outside of baseball to MN sports in general, no one seemed to care that Pat and Kevin Williams took weight-loss drugs that were specifically forbidden in their contracts so that they could make weight to earn a bonus.

When A-Rod opted out of his contract last off-season, I suggested to some of my friends that if the Twins could support a $100M payroll, it would make all the sense in the world to sign A-Rod. The Twins have had a big need at third base ever since Corey Koskie left, and Mauer-Rodriguez-Morneau would look awfully damned good on a lineup card. Everyone I talked to was 10,000% opposed to this idea, though, since A-Rod doesn’t play baseball “the Twins way.” This was rather frustrating.

As people with full time day jobs get off work and catch up on the internet, the status of the states is likely to change?

This is presuming a lifestyle difference between people that work full time, and people that don’t.

as Alaska, North Dakota and Nebraska have all switched with more votes trickling in.

That some substances can improve reaction times, but I can’t find any evidence right now to back it up. Something about the efficiency of transmission of impulses and the ability to react more quickly because of this in combination with increased strength.

That the scare mongering would end and some studies could be done to determine the effects of these substances on athletes in complex sporting events like baseball. There are so many people who take steroids just to look good, can’t we ease up the restrictions on these substances to find out exactly what they do? There is a ready to go sample population at every gym in America. But I guess then we would lose the war on drugs and the evil-doers would win.

According to your link he did know what he was taking, he just didn’t know which he tested positive for.

Who’s more hateable?

As Derek wrote over at USSM, we don’t have much (if any) reason to believe this limited admission any more than we had reason to believe his previous denial, which turned out to be false.