A-Fraud Steroid Allegations: The Sports Equivalent Of A $500,000 Cap On Executive Pay

With the Yankees set to dominate baseball this year, we needed something to level the playing field:

The legend of “A-Fraud” grows.

Joe Torre took a lot of heat last week over excerpts from his new book. Among the myriad of skeletons he exorcised from the Yankees closet, he said the idea that Alex Rodriguez may not be the most genuine soul in the world had always been a running joke inside the Yankees locker room.

Well, it looks now like A-Rod’s words and actions are going to have to be good for more than just his teammates. With Saturday’s bombshell CNN/SI report that Rodriguez tested positive for steroids back in 2003, he now finds himself in the unenviable position of having to choose his words carefully because if indeed failed that test what he says next will go a long way toward determining if the rest of baseball — and the sports world for that matter — will be as forgiving with him as they were with players like Jason Giambi and Andy Pettitte.

If Rodriguez doesn’t play this thing perfectly, he’ll be the East Coast version of Barry Bonds and the Yankees’ 2009 traveling zoo will be inhabited by far more than its usual cast of 800-pound gorillas.

Whether or not you buy the apologies from Giambi and Pettitte, those guys are generally very likeable, players you rally behind because they appear to be good people and good teammates. New Yorkers are a forgiving bunch. They want to see their heroes fight back from adversity, even if the hole they have put themselves in is because of their own doing.

New Yorkers are the polar opposite of fans in a city like San Francisco, where despite every single piece of evidence suggesting Bonds is as guilty as O.J. Simpson, the people who buy the tickets continue to turn the other cheek and actually support the guy, almost to the point where they have convinced themselves that Bonds is the victim and that this is all one big witch hunt.

Street Art Is Not A Crime!

Oh wait, yes it is:

A guerrilla “artist” known as “Poster Boy,” who cuts up and rearranges subway advertisements into designs of his own, was busted after an undercover officer overheard him bragging to a girl about his exploits at a party, sources said.

Henry Matyjewicz, 27, of Bushwick, Brooklyn, was arrested Friday at an art show at a SoHo loft that featured his work and was hosted by a group called Sly Art vs. Robot City.

Transit police had gotten a tip that Matyjewicz would be at the party, advertised as “The Friends We Love Festival,” and sent the undercover officer, the sources said.

Poster Boy’s work has caused tens of thousands of dollars in damage to ad campaigns, and he has long been a thorn in New York City Transit’s side.

But not knowing what he looked like, the officer was able to nab him only after he overheard the artist/vandal bragging to the girl, the sources said.

He was charged with counts of criminal mischief, graffiti and possessing a tool to make graffiti. He was also held on a warrant for shoplifting in Manhattan last August, court records show.

Prognostication: Karma!

Moral: no third term, no pandering (er, “campaigning”); no campaigning, no getting your hand bitten off by a rodent:

If Mayor Bloomberg’s pride was wounded — along with his hand — in his encounter with Staten Island Chuck, hizzoner wasn’t letting on this afternoon.

Hours after the borough’s prognosticating groundhog snapped at Bloomberg’s hand during today’s Groundhog Day festivities at the Staten Island Zoo, West Brighton, the mayor laughed off the run-in.

Bloomberg joked at another event later that city residents should rest assured that their mayor is “willing to put himself and his physical well-being in harm’s way to protect them” against what might have been “a terrorist rodent.”

In other news: It will be an early spring.

Masturbators Of The Universe

First the entire financial services industry collapses, then the skirt gets all uppity. These guys just can’t win:

They shared their sad stories the other night at an informal gathering of Dating a Banker Anonymous, a support group founded in November to help women cope with the inevitable relationship fallout from, say, the collapse of Lehman Brothers or the Dow’s shedding 777 points in a single day, as it did on Sept. 29.

In addition to meeting once or twice weekly for brunch or drinks at a bar or restaurant, the group has a blog, billed as “free from the scrutiny of feminists,” that invites women to join “if your monthly Bergdorf’s allowance has been halved and bottle service has all but disappeared from your life.”

. . .

Some women in the group said the men in their lives had gone from being aloof and unattainable to unattractively needy and clinging. Others complained of being ignored — one, who called herself A.P., wrote on the blog that three weeks had passed without her boyfriend “asking a single question” about her life. Another wrote, fearfully, that her beau had told her to make a list of their favorite New York restaurants before the bad market forced a move to the Midwest.

“Next time you are stressing over some finance guy, remember that he is just a math-club nerd,” one woman wrote after recounting a breakup. “This recession just bought everyone an extra two years of the single life.”

So Not Only Will We Get An Absurdly Expensive Campaign But A Dirty (Sorry, “Aggressive”) One As Well

Despite spreading around all that cash (“Mr. Bloomberg, the self-made billionaire founder of the Bloomberg financial information firm, donated $235 million in 2008, making him the leading individual living donor in the United States, according to a list released online on Monday by The Chronicle of Philanthropy”), the Mayor is kind of not in command of the mayoral election yet:

Mayor Michael Bloomberg is starting off this election year in the lead, but it’s not as wide of a margin as one might expect for the popular incumbent.

According to an exclusive NY1 poll, Bloomberg beats City Comptroller Bill Thompson by 13 points in a hypothetical matchup, but only wins reelection against Congressman Anthony Weiner by seven points.

It’s a sign the mayor will have to wage an aggressive campaign.

“He does have his work cut out for him because he is not at the comfortable 50 percent,” said NY1 pollster Mickey Blum.