By Harvey Araton

updated 10:04 p.m. ET Nov. 4, 2009

Aided by his bat and an astute apology, Alex Rodriguez is ending the baseball season not as a former steroids user but as a home run hero. In the process, he may be clearing a path forward for himself and his much-maligned sport.

This may go down as the season that the fans forgave baseball — or perhaps just grew tired of worrying about performance-enhancing drugs. Rodriguez and Andy Pettitte, two high-profile Yankees stars who were exposed as past users, are shining in the 2009 World Series.

The St. Louis Cardinals recently announced they were hiring Mark McGwire, who went into seclusion for much of this decade after refusing to answer questions about steroids, as their hitting coach. And although neither has shown much repentance, David Ortiz of the Boston Red Sox and Manny Ramirez of the Los Angeles Dodgers continued to play to adoring crowds even after both were implicated this summer as past or present users.

Until recently, players accused of cheating selected from two popular options: vehemently deny, as Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens have chosen, or remain silent as McGwire has. But beginning with the admission last season by Pettitte that he had used human growth hormone, a third option has emerged: quickly apologize and move on.

“Obviously, success on the field has helped, but isn’t it something how they beautifully and effectively transcended their humiliation?” said Richard Emery, one of the lawyers representing Brian McNamee, the physical trainer who cited Pettitte and Clemens in George J. Mitchell’s investigation into steroids for Major League Baseball.

Emery added: “Watching the way all this has unfolded makes me believe that it was the stark juxtaposition of Clemens and Pettitte that changed the game. Alex had an easy road because Pettitte showed you exactly what you do when you’re caught.”

Will others who made a less judicious choice when they came to a fork in the road learn from Rodriguez?

“There has always been a tremendous compulsion in the American DNA to cover up, and lie, going all the way up to the White House,” the former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent said. “McGwire got terrible advice, and I think coming back almost certainly leads to him handling this better. But with this issue, it’s so obvious what to do now that maybe it even leads to Bonds and Clemens waking up, too.”

Partisanship often plays a role in the steroid discussion, one city’s hero being another city’s target of abuse. But across a fairly wide spectrum, Rodriguez has already drawn, beyond leniency, a standing ovation from the court of public opinion.

“I never thought Alex Rodriguez was very interesting, but when a sports hero is forced into this admission of wrongdoing, it humanizes him,” said Orin Starn, the cultural anthropology department chairman at Duke University. “We want these athletes to astonish us, but we also want to imagine them as someone like us.”

Flawed and accountable is what he meant. And although Starn said he was not sure Rodriguez’s remorse and confessional version of drug consumption were as sincere and thorough as they might have been, “he made the gesture.”

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In other words, he did not squander his iconic moment, as McGwire did in 2005 before Congress when he stonewalled upon being asked if he had taken anything beyond over-the-counter supplements. Rodriguez did not go the Clemens-Bonds route by summoning the defiance and machismo that serves so many great athletes between the lines but blinds them to consequences in civilian life.

“Because of their immense egos, Clemens and Bonds couldn’t get down on their knees, do a little mea culpa,” said Charles Yesalis, a professor emeritus of health policy and kinesiology at Penn State University.

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Clemens did not learn from the mistakes of Bonds, who failed to grasp the fundamental lesson of Pete Rose’s continued ban from baseball for betting on games while the Cincinnati Reds’ manager and being unable to come clean about it for years.

Different offense, same stubbornness: instead of using his head, Rose lowered his shoulder, as if running through catcher Ray Fosse in the 1970 All-Star Game.

“I think in some cases, it just comes down to intelligence, and Rodriguez is significantly more intelligent than Clemens and Rose,” Vincent said.

In Rodriguez’s case, his personality was always more acquiescent, wanting to please to the point of extremes and creating expectations he could not meet.

This season, Rodriguez finally found the answer, seemingly by looking over his left shoulder to his partner on the left side of the infield. Like Derek Jeter, he sought the security of simplicity. He lost the public-relations entourage. He lowered his news media profile. He separated himself from Madonna and took up with Kate Hudson, a more circumspect Hollywood star. He followed through on his spring training pledge to work with Don Hooton, an antisteroid activist whose program is aimed at high-school-age athletes.

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