Most of what's been said about Arod is probably true. But the pitch-tipping story simply doesn't add up.

Five reasons why:

1) On Baseball Tonight recently, ex big-leaguer John Kruk fulminated about the possible meaning of tip-pitching, saying that he would start a fight with a teammate he thought was doing this. Kruk, like many ex-athletes, tends to be pretty blase about steroid use, probably because he knows first hand how widespread it is and probably because he also knows that competition at the highest levels is so intense that it’s really no surprise that athletes would do everything they could to get a performance edge. But doing something that might actually cost your team on the field - that’s a line that athletes would cross at their own peril. So, the contention by Roberts that Arod’s teammates didn’t want to say anything for fear of how it would play in the clubhouse strikes me as garbage. Pro athletes would be far more likely to confront a guy who was undermining the team than to try to hush it up. This would be especially true concerning a player who, by all accounts, is not well liked by his peers. On that point, Caple says “[f]rankly, it sounds almost unbelievable — if teammates don’t like him that much, how would he convince opponents to cheat with him?”

For the rest, see my post at weilerblog - www.jonathanweiler.com

Here's some historical context on pitchers low strikeout pitchers like Wang and whether they can sustain success over the long haul.

An excerpt:

"But what’s of greater concern, perhaps than Wang’s other-worldly awful start is that Wang’s success up to this point in his career has been unusual. Specifically, Wang has succeeded up to now despite an unusually low strikeout rate. This may seem like statistical arcana, but in fact there is no better predictor of a pitcher’s long-term durability and success than his ability to whiff batters. This doesn’t mean that every great pitcher has to be Nolan Ryan. Future first-ballot Hall-of-Famer Greg Maddux was not a flame-thrower, but even he managed to strikeout a very respectable six batters per nine innings over the course of his long career. But virtually all very successful pitchers have struck out more than five batters per nine innings. Even soft-tossing 96-year old Jamie Moyer (OK, he’s only 46) punched out 5.4 batters per nine innings last season when he helped the Phillies to the World Series title. And, virtually every pitcher below that figure, even if they enjoyed success for some period of time, found that their ability to consistently retire major league hitters was short-lived."