With the 2009 baseball season just underway, here are some thoughts to take with you:

To anyone who knows or talks sports with me, the one thing I’ve been saying since the middle of this off-season is that the New York Yankees are simply not the juggernaut that everyone is making them out to be.

Despite having the games highest payroll by a mile, it is still a group that is old and injury prone, and doesn’t nearly play the defense it used to.

With the news that Alex Rodriguez will be out for the first month of the season, the pressure is still on in New York, heightened of course by the off-season signings of C.C. Sabathia, A.J. Burnett and Mark Teixeira.

Mark Teixeira is the new face of the Yankees

So here it is, all out in the open. Alex Rodriguez, the pre-eminent player in Major League Baseball, the guy everyone loved to hate but secretly respected the hell out of, is now no better than anyone else. He is a steroid user and a cheater.

I can’t say I’m surprised by the revelation, this is the world we live in. Whether A-Rod is telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth, only one man knows, and that’s him.

But Rodriguez seems to have taken a cue from Andy Pettitte and learned from the mistakes of his contemporaries Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds and Rafael Palmeiro and fessed up to his wrong doings. To some degree anyways.

The bottom line is we can sit here all day and chastise Alex Rodriguez, call him every name in the book, and throw the book at him, but that’d be the wrong stance. Alex Rodriguez is guilty of the crime committed, he’s confessed to that. It’s time to forgive, even if we don’t forget.

Well Manny Ramirez, you finally got what you wanted. Manny gets to be Manny in Los Angeles, the city of angels, where stars go to be born. Say hello to your new neighbors- that’s Kate Bosworth over there, and Jeremy Piven lives down the street. What’s that? You’ve never heard of them? It’s ok, they’ve never heard of you either. Besides you couldn’t pick half of your Boston teammates out of a police lineup anyway, so what’s it matter.

If your children need a play date, I hear Jamie-Lynn Spears just had a baby. Perfect, a seventeen year old, un-wed mother related to Britney Spears- you’ve finally found someone mentally on your same wave-length.