Too Many Unanswered Questions with Alex Rodriguez and "The Leak"

As the sports world awaits the response of Alex Rodriguez to allegations of a 2003 failed steroid test, the cloudy haze left over the man himself is about as clear as the method which his name suddenly popped up.

Reggie Jackson and Curt Schilling are among those saying that the entire list of 104 failed tests should be revealed. That seems fair enough in the sense that at least Alex would not be the only one put under the spotlight to endure the scrutiny.

But being one of the top five superstars in baseball to this point, his public lashings will be longer and deeper than any other of the 103 on that list.

Moral judgments aside, let's look at the one factor that is responsible for Alex Rodriguez feeling like he's about to be sat in a room with Jack Bauer and drilled for questioning: The exchange of information between the leaker and Sports Illustrated, the publication who broke the story. Let's refer to them for a second as the Pitcher and the Catcher.

First, the pitcher. We can only speculate how this went down, but it's very realistic to believe that whomever leaked this information was in possession of the entire list. I hardly doubt that the list was broken down and 104 different people were distributed the names so as to protect confidentiality.

That being said, the person who did the leaking seemed to have a pre-determined reason to scroll through that list and produce only one name.

Then, we have the catcher, SI Reporter Selena Roberts. We are still not sure of the how's and why's of this, but we know the end result was her ending up with a report that A-Rod failed his test in '03, taken exclusively from a list of 104 players. 

Given the delivery of A-Rod's info from Pitcher "X" to Catcher Roberts, there are still a few major questions that should be accounted for.

Did Pitcher "X" black out the other 103 names on the list so that Catcher Roberts wasn't allowed to see them? If this is the case, as a leaky informant, don't you tease your information out a bit at a time instead of jumping up and shouting "I HAVE A-ROD!".

That is unless it's your purpose to begin with...

Why did Roberts stop with just one name? That's hardly thorough journalism of you only produce one out of 104, and if that's the only name you saw/heard, again what's the motivation?

Is the journalistic integrity of Sports Illustrated being questioned even in the least? We don't have to time-travel too far back in our DeLorean to remember that only a couple weeks ago Sports Illustrated writer Tom Verducci and Joe Torre publish their "Secrets of the Yankees Clubhouse" memoirs to mixed-reviews at best.

Does Sports Illustrated have anything to gain by seeking out further information to justify their scribe's "A-Fraud" claims? If the A-Rod steroid story broke through Sporting News, ESPN or USA Today, there'd be far less skepticism about this.

But as of now we have one leaked claim and very little follow-up or justification as to why the other 103 participants in this confidential exercise were spared the public display, written by the same company who brought us the Yanks Clubhouse Tell-All of '07.

At this very moment, A-Rod is readying himself to step up and address the claims laid before him. Regardless of the opinion of A-Rod as a player/Yankee/superstar, accusations this serious need to be thoroughly justified by all parties, especially those in charge of handling this information.

One man out of 104 has been highlighted to slip under the microscope, and those who leaked the mess but contained the spill are mum or nowhere to be found.