Well, I guess we won't be discussing Joe Torre's book ad naseum anymore, will we?

No, New York (and, in this case, the rest of the nation) now has a newer and juicier topic for sports talk radio consumption: Alex Rodriguez allegedly testing positive for steroids.

According to this Sports Illustrated story, A-Rod tested positive for 'roids in 2003 when he won both the home run title and MVP honors. This has come as a shock to the baseball world, as A-Rod was considered to be "clean," a player that could (and would) and break Barry Bonds's tainted home run record; he would be the man to remove the asterisk from the most hallowed record in all of sports.

But why is this a shock? In this day and age, why should we ever be shocked when we learn someone has been using steroids? Here's a better question: why wasn't Rodriguez suspected of using steroids before?

The sad thing is, I want to be disgusted by all of this, yet I'm not. I'm numb to steroid allegations at this point. Daily News columnist Bill Madden thinks this cost A-Rod his ticket to Cooperstown. But I'm not sure if a blanket rule of "if you did or were suspected of using steroids, you're not getting my vote for the Hall" is fair. For starters, we don't know how long Rodriquez used steroids. (Was it a week? A month? A year? Multiple years? The majority of his career?) And if everybody was using steroids during this era, then will the writers refuse to elect anyone to the Hall until we know for certain the game is clean? And how exactly will we come to that conclusion?

Funny, maybe Torre was onto something in his book. You know, the part about A-Rod being called "A-Fraud."