A-Rod plays the dope again with half-measure mea culpa

Alex Rodriguez swarms himself in advisers. He gargles advice like it’s a huge bottle of Listerine. If he could, he would have Dear Abby AND Ann Landers on his payroll. If he could, he would have had Haldeman AND Ehrlichman on his staff.
He has had gaggles of lawyers whispering in his ear, he has had flocks of flacks shouting from mountaintops, he has had supporters — some paid performers, some genuine acolytes — defend him to the death, all of them tugging A-Rod to and fro, hither and yon, all of them proving the age-old point that opinions are like … well, you know what opinions are like. Everyone’s got one.
You know who Rodriguez needed as an adviser here? He needed Mike Ehrmantraut. If you watched “Breaking Bad” (or “Better Call Saul”) you know that Ehrmantraut, played by the fine actor Jonathan Banks, was a world-weary, cold-eyed operative who had seen everything twice and had lapped the block a thousand times. And this was the advice that he famously gave Walter White in one signature “Breaking Bad” episode, explaining how he had failed one night during a past career as a cop to follow his instincts to the core: