Madonna/A-Rod relationship denier Roger Friedman helpfully pinpoints all the dates relevant to their relationship that does not exist. As if this entire story could not get more sensational, there's this bit about a, ahem, "groin pull": "What was A-Rod’s injury? A grade 2 groin pull that occurred during a game against Baltimore on the 20th. He went back to work, but exacerbated the injury to the point where he couldn’t play. It was so bad that Rodriguez actually didn’t rejoin the team until May 20, when the Yanks lost to Baltimore 12-1. That’s a long time for a superstar of Rodriguez’s caliber to be out of commission. Indeed, when A-Rod was injured, manager Joe Girardi was quoted in several interviews saying that he was 'surprised to learn the strain was so severe.'" [Fox 411]

Backtracking is often the unfortunate side effect of being a professional gossip. Sometimes you get things wrong. Sometimes your sources lead you askew. Sometimes you're so self-sure of your own version of events that you put blinders up against the common thinking that everybody else subscribes to, ignoring tell-tale signs and well-sourced reports so you can do the Slate-y thing and zag where others zig.

It explains how Fox News gossip Roger Friedman went from denying any possibility of Madonna romancing with Alex Rodriguez to plotting out how the duo might've maintained their secret affair. Get on the bus!

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It really should be Madonna's year. She's got a new album out (although it's been panned by critics and fans), she's about to embark on an international tour this fall (to perform lyrics that include "Don't pretend you're not hungry, I've got plenty to eat / Come on in to my store, ;cause my sugar is sweet"), and her adoption of David Banda, once mired in controversy, is finally being made official. And then she had to come to New York.

It's then that rumors of a romance with Yankees star Alex Rodriguez really began pouring out, forcing publicist Liz Rosenberg to repeatedly shoot them down with the excuse that they share the same manager, Guy Oseary, rather than acknowledge the long-standing trouble in her client's marriage to Guy Ritchie. And it's then that Madonna began taking the blame for the marital woes between A-Rod and wife Cynthia, despite the baseball player's well-known man-about-town romancing, all of which forced Cynthia to run off to Paris to spend time with "friend" Lenny Kravitz, who just happened to once date Madonna.

And all of that's before her brother even has a chance to make the morning show rounds to plug his tell-all book.

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Just in time for the holiday weekend when nobody will care, Lenny Kravitz issues a statement denying he's sleeping with Alex Rodriguez's wife Cynthia while A-Rod himself diddles Madonna. "There is absolutely no affair between Cynthia Rodriguez and myself," reads the statement. "This is unequivocally 100% not true. Cynthia is a friend and is here with the godfather of her baby, who is also Alex's trainer, his wife and their baby girl." [Us]

Yankees player Alex Rodriguez and wife Cynthia are said to have split "after about three months of problems in their marriage," but it's equally likely the pair already went their separate ways and the Daily News' report is just playing catch up with what was already decided between the two — start seeing other people. (That might explain why the baseball star spent about 24 hours with Cynthia after she gave birth to their second daughter.) A-Rod, of course, has spent the week being linked to the still-married (but also marriage problem sufferer) Madonna, while wife Cynthia is supposedly seeing Lenny Kravitz, the one-time paramour of, uh, Madonna. That all of this is finally coming out in the press, though, is reason enough to start the formal splitting up process, which inevitably arrives first with gossipmongering and then with an official statement. So should we expect the same from Madonna's camp? We're still thinking no. [Photo: NYDN]