If you thought Chass was rough on Roberts...

... have a read of Shysterball's take on the Roberts' trash:

But for all of the anonymous source hoopla, I think the book's biggest failing is Roberts' hackneyed theme in which she argues, time and again, that A-Rod's manifest character problems are attributable to his father leaving home when he was a kid, which led to his subsequent search for strong male role models (coaches, steroids dealers, Boras, etc.). I'd say that whole line of the book reeks of sophomore psychology class, but most sophomores wouldn't beat the theme into the ground the way Roberts does. What's worse, there's nothing to back this up other than (1) the fact that, yes, Rodriguez's father left the family when Alex was a boy; and (2) page after page of Roberts giving voice to what she believes to be Rodriguez's thoughts at given points of his life. She doesn't even go into anonymous source land here. She simply says stuff like "Alex searched for meaning constantly as if the right catch-phrase from a self-help book could ground him in a normalcy he at once longed for and feared." Um, OK, except there's no one who supplies any facts to support a "search for normalcy" or any of the other emotional drama Roberts ascribes to him anywhere in the book. It's all half-wit, pop-psychology invention. As I've written numerous times in the past two weeks, Roberts has not earned the benefit of the doubt with her previous reporting, so she's certainly not entitled to the benefit the doubt with this purported clairvoyance either.

Nice work, Craig.

And if anyone wants to make that picture of Roberts into a fathead for me, I'll hang it in my office.