Handwriting expert says A-Rod writes like a girl, has large ego
In a world where everything that’s said, written or otherwise expressed publicly is overanalyzed to the point where you wish we were stuck with stone-age technology, you knew it was only a matter of time before Alex Rodriguez’s handwritten apology to baseball fans was taken to a handwriting expert.
Daniel Barbarisi of the Wall Street Journal called upon Paula Sassi, a certified master graphologist for the past 35 years, to examine A-Rod’s cursive handwriting less than 24 hours after it was released, and her findings were, well, interesting, for the lack of a better term.
“He writes like a girl,” Sassi said. “Feminine writing is more rounded, with a lot of connections, which he has throughout this. And a right slant. Masculine writing tends to be more angled, straight up and down, maybe printed.”
First of all, this is real life. Just feel like we need to drive that point home.
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Second, that paragraph will be taken and spun a million different directions, but it’s far from the most telling analysis offered by Stassi.
“The capital ‘I’s’—that’s where you see the personal ego,” she said. “This is probably what gets him into trouble. He has a very strong-willed, independent ego. They’re so large, and printed. That’s the kind of capital ‘I’ where you say they’re very independent, and strong-willed.”
For a reference point, here’s an excerpt of A-Rod’s letter.
Indeed, that capital “I” is the most egotistical and selfish looking capital “I” we’ve ever seen. It’s as if A-Rod is subconsciously separating it from everything else, all the while thinking he’s above and beyond all that will be written after.
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There’s more though.
“In the second line, when he writes ‘mistakes,’ it’s interesting what occurs in that word, it has a cover on the ‘a,’ and it also happens in the fourth line, when he writes the word ‘situation,’ and both have to do with what happened,” Sassi said. “Which is being very protective of personal information.
Those are called “covering strokes,” according to Stassi, who was really just getting warmed up at this point. We’re spare most of the details and jump right to the end, where she concludes with this gem.
“In his signature itself, where he writes ‘Alex,’ the circle around it, we call that a ‘magic circle of protection.’ So he’s covering his tush. You see it a lot in signatures,” she said.
Now that we know about the “magic circle of protection,” it changes everything. He was just being evil A-Rod without knowing he was exposing his true, selfish intentions.
Man, we’re so lucky to have people out there who can interpret the true meaning of every written word, just as those people who do the interpreting are lucky to have people who actually buy in.
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Mark Townsend is a writer for Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @Townie813
