Lying about steroid use is hardly shocking, but Rodriguez was pathological. Consider this passage from a recent interview by the writer Jeff Pearlman with Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci, who recalled a conversation with Rodriguez in 2002:

“It was in his hotel suite in Chicago after a game one night. He looked at me like I had two heads. ‘Steroids? Gee, why would anybody take them? What do they do? I don’t know anything about it.’ I walked out of the suite shaking my head about his complete and theatrical lack of knowledge about the worst-kept secret in the game. It would be seven years later that we all discovered, by his own admission, that he was loaded to the gills on steroids at that very moment.”

When Sports Illustrated finally exposed Rodriguez as a steroid user, part of his response was to smear the reporter, Selena Roberts, by falsely claiming that she tried to break into his home while his children were sleeping. He sounded vaguely like Michael Corleone with that line, except Rodriguez has always been the Fredo of the Yankee family, awkward and envious and insecure.

Such insecurity has surely fueled Rodriguez’s drive to achieve, while also influencing his many bizarre decisions. He has denied many of them, like sending a baseball to some women in the stands during a playoff game last fall, but with his history of lying, who knows what to believe?

Rodriguez will always have his apologists, mostly people who have never had to deal with him and have never been part of his web of deceit. To some who know him well, including the Yankees and Major League Baseball, he is a source of irritation at best, slippery and duplicitous at worst.

Remember that Rodriguez continued to lie to the Yankees even after admitting his past steroid use. After his first hip surgery, in 2009, he maintained to the team that he had not seen Anthony Galea, the Canada-based physician who pleaded guilty two years later to federal charges stemming from his distribution of human growth hormone to professional athletes.

Rodriguez had, in fact, seen Galea, and baseball officials and the Yankees remain unsure that they know the extent of his links to performance-enhancing drugs. The Yankees might be inclined to overlook that if Rodriguez were still an elite player. But his production slips every year.

That fact, of course, cannot be forgotten. If Rodriguez were a healthy superstar, the Yankees would still want him around. They might have even supported him in their terse statement on Tuesday, which pledged support for baseball’s drug program and noted that the matter was now under the jurisdiction of the commissioner’s office.

Rodriguez has won a championship and two Most Valuable Player awards in New York. He is a historically significant Yankee, emblematic of a complicated era for the game and the team. But the sideshows never end, and it is hard to argue he belongs here anymore.