One of the most irritating byproducts of the ongoing Alex Rodriguez saga is that it detracts attention from the entertaining stories in baseball. Let’s hear less about the Joint Drug Agreement and more about the Pirates, who own the second-best record in baseball and are poised to finish above .500 for the first time since 1992. Let’s also read less about an anti-aging clinic in Florida and more about the Royals, in the midst of a 15-3 streak and firmly in contention for their first playoff berth since 1985.

For fans of the Yankees, the Rodriguez fiasco, though frustrating, at least has the silver lining of distracting from the poor performance by the rest of the team. As long as Rodriguez is being booed, the rest of the team is spared the same, possibly deserved, treatment. Only once have the Yankees missed the playoffs in the wild card era, but they sit seven games back of the second wild card spot and must hurdle four teams to reach that position. With a 58-57 record, they are in danger of becoming the reverse Pirates: finishing with a losing record for the first time since 1992. Just as an entire generation of fans in Pittsburgh and Kansas City prepares for its first set of meaningful games in September, the similar batch of Yankee fans must brace itself for the opposite.

As much as its starting rotation has been plagued by …

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I. A question (which just won’t quit):

If Major League Baseball, as its commissioner boasts at every opportunity and then some, has the toughest, strongest, best testing program in all sports to combat performance-enhancing drugs, why was Alex Rodriguez able to elude detection of his alleged use for “multiple years,” to use the commissioner’s phrase?

II. A prediction (I am not big on making predictions, but I like this one’s chances of being right):

Frederic Horowitz will join Raymond Goetz, Richard Bloch, George Nicolau and Shyam Das in the ranks of baseball’s impartial arbitrators who have …

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If Alex Rodriguez, Ryan Braun and other players are guilty of drug violations that warrant lengthy, if not lifetime, suspensions, how should Commissioner Bud Selig be judged? A case could be made for a lifetime ban for the commissioner.

Selig has long claimed he didn’t know players were using steroids and said no one came to him complaining about steroids use. He also blames the players’ union for delaying implementation of a drug-testing program. In a brief telephone interview Friday he angrily rejected any suggestion that he had been guilty of tardily dealing with the issue.

“I put a minor league program in place in 2001,” he said. “It’s nonsense to say we were slow. Was I late to the party? I don’t think so. That’s insulting.”

I have often pointed out that Major League Baseball could …

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