It turned out that Alex Rodriguez should have taken performance-enhancing drugs for his oral performance last Tuesday. I don’t know whether anyone has followed the story of his steroid-use scandal, but I thought I would bring to the attention of the BLSCI communication experts this video clip of his news conference following his admission that he took steroid injections from 2001 to 2003. I wonder how you’d all assess it from a presentational point of view.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WI0lZTQC2Ck[/youtube]
Here are a few bits and pieces of the critical responses from media experts and sports commentators, particularly to the 30 second-long pause near the end of the clip, when Rodriguez thanks his Yankee teammates:
- Skip Bayless, a sportswriter and ESPN commentator, calls Rodriguez baseball’s “new drama king” and his performance the most insincere acting that he’s ever seen.
- Facial expression expert Dan Hill reads Rodriguez’s emotions in his face, and finds contempt and resentment (the tightened lips and the lowered eyebrows), fear (the mouth pulled wide), sadness (the lowered eyes).
- Or, listen to what Gene Grabowski, the senior vice president of Levick Strategic Communications, had to say. I felt his comments on Rodriguez’s lack of preparation were intelligent and reasonable. Criticizing Rodriguez’s poor connection with his audiences (and maybe MLB’s ill-managed relationship with baseball fans), Grabowski wrote in his blog post, “Rodriguez recited from a prepared script with no visible indication that he had even read it beforehand. And he uplifted each page as he finished reading it, practically waving the successive pages in the public’s face. . . . The baseball world needed direct human connection, eye-to-eye, spirit-to-spirit. Not sound bytes, not message points, not even apologies.” Rodriguez’s overall grade? Grabowski gave him C-.
So, what grade would you give A-Rod?
Arod is such a turnoff on every possible level of communication and/or connection that he makes you not want to watch baseball. However, I do think it is possible that his entire existence is laced with such a permeating and thorough shame and that is why he is so detached and unengaged in his communication with other people. I don’t follow this guy, but I can’t remember ever seeing him not sullen. He’s just awful in my opinion, and how he ever got anyone to pay him so much money is really, really weird.
I thought it was a solid performance – perfunctory apology without trying to be overly contrite, which would have been far more artifical, (and he notes only in passing a real issue – that the results of the test were not supposed to be made public), basic details of substance use answering most questions. I give it an A-. He’s handled steroids issue better than anyone else in baseball.
@Nikhil: better than Petitte?
I enjoyed this. I don’t grade student presentations
but I would definitely tell him to work on not sounding or looking like he is reading off the script. (That huge wrinkle between his eyebrows because he is slightly squinting to look at it!) Grabowski’s comments seem to have a point and probably represent the views of many fans, but then in some sense he is in a lose-lose situation: no matter how well he presents it, people would pick on something to talk badly about him anyway.
There’s no love lost between A-Rod and I, but I have to say, a C- is a little harsh. In the area of delivery, the poor guy did control his pacing pretty well, threw in some emphasis and eye contact, all while swallowing a fairly bitter pill. And sincere or not, that final “to my teammates” pause was an excellent concluding gimmick!