BulletProofBlog the blog on crisis communications

At his much-anticipated news conference in Tampa, Alex Rodriguez did nothing to end the mounting disillusion that has badly tarnished his career and blighted all of Major League Baseball. At the same time, his performance offered a cautionary tale for anyone in any business caught in a crisis.

A-Rod faced a void that sorely demands filling, and he came nowhere near filling it. The baseball world needed direct human connection, eye-to-eye, spirit-to-spirit. Not sound bytes, not message points, not even apologies. Baseball' s drug-related apologies are as perennial as lilies in spring.

Instead, 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.

But even the content of his statements raised more questions than they answered. Does his "My cousin brought in this stuff from the Dominican Republic, and we never knew whether we were doing it correctly" story sound credible to anyone? Now the search will be on to find that cousin - if he really exists. A-Rod said he was "young and stupid" when he injected the substance. He was 25 at the time, with six Major League seasons under his belt.

A-Rod officially blew it at 2:11 p.m. ET, when he booted the very first question from a reporter: "If what you did wasn' t wrong, why did you try to hide it?" A-Rod paused, pursed his lips, shrugged his shoulders, scowled and said: "I don' t know. That' s a good question."

In such situations, you must be prepared for the most direct confrontational challenges, from "why did you hide your behavior?" to "why should we trust you?" Nothing is off-limits.

Gathering manager Joe Girardi and the troops in a show of support wasn' t enough. Comments in the press by teammate Mark Teixeira that "this will make us stronger" weren' t enough. The baseball public has seen and heard it all a thousand times.

By being unprepared and untrained, A-Rod and the New York Yankees reinforced the worst perception that anyone in a crisis situation wants to communicate: that, for all the crocodile tears, these guys are really, really arrogant.

UPDATE: Listen to my Wednesday morning interview with ESPN Radio's Mike and Mike.