Alex Rodriguez’s life would have been a lot easier if SI reporter Selena Roberts had never started digging into his past.

But after the original steroids scandal that erupted, Rodriguez hasn’t taken too many hits, at least not more than usual, even with the Roberts’ book being released a week ago.

Instead Roberts has taken the brunt of the criticism for writing a book that provides more rumors and innuendo than facts.

“You can read Selena Roberts’ “A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez” in less than four hours, and it reads as if it took about that long to write it,” Salon.com’s Allan Barra writes in one particularly critical but well-written review.

“The book is a dud, and much of this can be written off to Alex Rodriguez himself. Despite all the tattle about his sybaritic private life — he goes to illegal gambling clubs and hangs out with strippers, just as Babe Ruth did 80 years ago — Rodriguez doesn’t seem to have much of a private life.”

My favorite part of this Web site’s story is that it includes an ad with a link to where you can buy the book on amazon.com.

“Most irresponsible of all, Roberts accuses the union of warning the players that their drug tests were coming up, an old charge that stems back to the 2007 Mitchell Report on drug use in baseball. If Roberts had bothered to check the basic agreement between the owners and players, she would have found that there was no provision for letting the union know when drug tests were scheduled — that’s pretty much the definition of “random” testing — and therefore no way the union could have “tipped” players.”