Blood Sport: Alex Rodriguez, Biogenesis, and the Quest to End Baseball'sSteroid Era

by Tim Elfrink

  In 2003, Rodriguez led the league in homers for the third consecutive time, hitting forty-seven. He also led the league in runs and slugging percentage and won a Gold Glove Award as the league’s best-fielding shortstop. He also won his first MVP award that season. At twenty-seven years old, he became the youngest player in history to hit three hundred home runs, gestating in earnest the speculation that he would one day be on the hunt for the all-time home run crown.

  • • •

  As far as individual accomplishments go, that season was the pinnacle of Rodriguez’s career. It was also, unknown to most everybody outside of top Players Association offices, the genesis of his later public outing as a steroid user.

  For Rodriguez’s entire career up this point, MLB had no drug-testing policy in place. The first time the league ran essentially a blind urine poll to determine how widespread doping was, Rodriguez was one of the infamous 104 players who, as it was later revealed by Sports Illustrated, failed.

  The plan for that initial sampling was that it would be anonymous and no player would be punished for failing: The testing was only to gauge whether more than 5 percent of MLB players would test positive, which they did, triggering an actual drug program for the league.

  Rodriguez failed the test in 2003 despite the fact that players knew the sampling was coming. Rodriguez tested positive for Primobolan, a steroid, and testosterone. The test was kept secret, and it was six years until Rodriguez himself told of the key role his cousin Yuri Sucart played in his daily routine besides pairing his socks.

  The revelations to come were a result of the union failing to destroy the tests as advertised, and law-enforcement raids of drug-testing labs in 2004. But the fallout came later in Rodriguez’s career, and later in this book.

  In 2003, in the eyes of baseball fans, Rodriguez was somewhat soulless—a grating corporate shill following the biggest dollars to any team—but he wasn’t yet a cheater. That was a reputation he didn’t have until he landed on the world’s biggest media stage.

  Despite Rodriguez’s gaudy personal performance, the Rangers floundered in last place. Along with Rodriguez, Hicks had also thrown $65 million at Korean pitcher Chan Ho Park, who had enjoyed a few good seasons with the Los Angeles Dodgers. Park was regularly battered in slugger-friendly Ballpark in Arlington, and after he succumbed to multiple injuries, his and Rodriguez’s deals were ultimately be considered two of the worst free-agent signings in baseball history.

  Rodriguez played all but one game in three seasons with Texas, but it wasn’t enough to muscle the Rangers to the playoffs even once. He may have been the LeBron James of his sport—skipping college and jumping straight to nine-figure playing and Nike contracts—but unlike in basketball, it takes more than one transcendent superstar to carry a baseball team.

  The $252-million-dollar deal is often pointed to as the moment when Rodriguez soured. He was under pressure to justify an unfathomable contract. Rodriguez became AROD Corporation, the California-based entity that paid Sucart’s salary. In December 2003, Rodriguez and partners founded his Florida real estate development company, Newport Property Ventures Ltd. No longer just a baseball player, Rodriguez was a budding CEO. And some of the decisions he made in the years to come—including his treatment of Sucart—appeared cold-blooded.

  After the 2003 season, the Rangers and Rodriguez finally threw in the towel on their fruitless marriage. Texas nearly dealt him to the Boston Red Sox for Manny Ramirez, the Washington Heights–raised slugger with a $20 million–plus salary and an unmatched reputation for mystifying antics. The Red Sox were reeling from a devastating loss in the American League Championship Series, after Yankees third baseman Aaron Boone clobbered a Game Seven eleventh-inning walkoff home run to steal Boston’s ticket to the World Series. Boston hadn’t won a championship since 1918, the year before the team traded Babe Ruth to the Yankees, and the Red Sox front office was convinced they needed a revolutionary move. Relocating the best young shortstop in history to Fenway Park fit the bill.

  In complicated negotiations among the Rangers, the Red Sox, and himself, Rodriguez and his agent, Boras, agreed to defer or reduce some of his guaranteed salary in order to make the deal happen. (This was not altruism. His deal would’ve been shortened, resulting in another shot at a monster contract, and dropping Rodriguez into sports’ most famous rivalry almost certainly would have increased his marketability.)

  But the Players Association, disagreeable to the precedent of the game’s highest-paid player leaving cash on the table, blocked the trade. It was the first of several times Rodriguez felt stunted or betrayed by the union.

  When Aaron Boone tore a knee ligament before the 2004 season, the AROD logo—trademarked in Seattle in 1996—must have shone in the Gotham sky. In infallible team captain, Derek Jeter, of course, the Yankees already had a shortstop, Rodriguez’s lifelong fielding position.

  But George Steinbrenner was still the boss of the Yanks. The demanding, ill-tempered owner was always unmuzzled and often spoke by throwing around gobs of baseball television profit.

  One of the only teams in baseball capable of a nine-figure impulse buy, Steinbrenner’s Yankees traded budding superstar Alfonso Soriano to Texas for Rodriguez. Jeter stayed at short, and Rodriguez became a full-time third baseman.

  For Red Sox Nation, losing A-Rod to the hated Yankees thanks to the greed—and conspiracy?—of a millionaires’ union felt like a horrible acid flashback to 1919. “The Curse of A-Rod” was marketed by a Boston attorney in 2004, for adornment on everything from rainwear to cloth baby bibs.

  But what has transpired since—Rodriguez damning the Yankees with endless steroid controversy, an insurmountable salary, and, most important, weak postseason performances and a lack of fence-clearing dingers, while the Red Sox have broken their own curse and won three championships—should have Bostonians counting their blessings.

  As had been the case in Texas, Rodriguez’s first four years in the Bronx were marked by incredible solo statistics and disappointing team results. He won the second and third MVP awards of his career in 2005 and 2007.

  That latter year was particularly a statistical juggernaut, one in which he hit fifty-four home runs—including his five hundredth, making him, at just barely thirty-two years old, the youngest ever to that mark—with 156 RBIs and 143 runs.

  But what hasn’t been reported until now is that Rodriguez’s 2007 MVP season was also tainted with PEDs—albeit this time legally under the rules of Major League Baseball.

  • • •

  From his junior year of high school on, there had been suspicions—and ultimately in the case of his 2003 MVP season, proof—that Alex Rodriguez was using PEDs. But a transcript obtained by the authors of this book, revealing for the first time testimony from Rodriguez’s confidential suspension appeal in fall 2013, suggests that he was using a powerful anabolic steroid when he was crowned the league’s best hitter for the third time, in 2007.

  Under the agreement between the league and the union, players can apply for what’s called a “therapeutic use exemption” in order to use certain medical substances banned by MLB. A doctor appointed by both sides—called the independent program administrator (IPA)—reviews all applications, and if an exemption is granted, the player cannot be punished for using that substance. The exemption is good for one season.

  Before the 2007 season, Rodriguez asked for permission to use testosterone, a substance long banned by baseball. The IPA was then Dr. Bryan W. Smith, a North Carolina physician. On February 16, 2007, two days before Rodriguez reported to spring training, Smith granted the exemption, allowing him to use testosterone without consequence all season long.

  The exemption was revealed to these authors in a transcript of Rodriguez’s grievance hearing more than six years later. MLB entered several exemptions applied for by Rodriguez in his Yankees tenure into evidence. During his testimony, MLB executive Rob Manfred called testosterone “the mother of all anabolics” and said that exemptions for the sub
stance are “very rare,” partly because “some people who have been involved in this field feel that with a young male, healthy young male, the most likely cause of low testosterone requiring this type of therapy would be prior steroid use.”

  In fact, the World Anti-Doping Agency’s own therapeutic-use standards require stringent tests to prove low hormone levels aren’t due to past PED use. That agency also requires a committee of three doctors to sign off on exemptions rather than baseball’s single IPA.

  Statistics requested two years later by Congressman John Tierney, in the wake of a government probe into baseball’s PED problem, reveal just how rare testosterone exemptions are. In 2007, of 1,354 players subject to testing, 111 players were granted a therapeutic-use exemption. Only two players, apparently including Rodriguez, received an exemption for “androgen deficiency medications,” the category of medicine that would include a testosterone prescription. (The other exemptions that year involved baldness, hypertension, and—predominantly—attention deficit disorder. The alarmingly high number of exemptions for the latter was Congressman Tierney’s main concern. “I think it begs a question: Are people using this as a loophole or an end run around the law?” said Tierney then. “Are they taking these because they are perceived as a performance-enhancing drug, or do they have a legitimate medicinal purpose?”)

  While being secretly allowed to take testosterone, Rodriguez’s 2007 regular season was one of the best of his career. He did not again top his slugging percentage of.645. But despite using “the mother of all anabolics,” that kid who threw away his last game at Westminster seemed to persist in Rodriguez. His monster production tended to dissolve in the postseason, the only stage that truly matters in the Bronx.

  Starting in 2005, he hit for an anemic average with little pop in October as the Yankees floundered through the first of three straight divisional series defeats. In 2006, during which he managed only one hit in fourteen postseason at-bats, manager Joe Torre had appeared to confirm his neurotic star’s ineptitude by dropping him to an insulting eighth in the batting order. And in 2007, the MVP was suddenly mediocre again, batting .267 with one homer and six strikeouts in fifteen at-bats as the Yankees were quickly dispatched by the Cleveland Indians.

  But Rodriguez still managed to, as the New York Times put it, “hijack” that year’s postseason.

  Under the New York City klieg lights, Rodriguez had been a gaffe and scandal machine. While running the bases, he had yelled, “Mine!” at a Blue Jays fielder, causing him to drop a fly ball, and had illegally karate-chopped Red Sox pitcher Bronson Arroyo’s glove to avoid getting tagged out. (“I’ll even cheat to win,” Rodriguez once said, one of those statements regrettable in hindsight.) He was a married lothario, harassed by rival fans with cutout masks of Madonna after he was romantically linked to her, and labeled “Stray-Rod” by the New York Post when he was photographed leaving a Toronto strip club with a “mystery blonde.”

  He topped all of that befuddling and loathsome behavior when, during the eighth inning of the fourth game of the 2007 World Series, with the Red Sox about to sweep the Colorado Rockies for their second championship since being unable to snag A-Rod, Fox announcer Joe Buck suddenly broke away from the action. “There’s big news brewing,” Buck declared.

  Rodriguez’s elaborate playing contract included the clause that he could opt out of the final years of the deal following the 2007 season. For years, he had promised that he would not exercise that clause, and the Yankees had vowed they would not negotiate a new contract with him if he did. But in the height of a World Series spectacle that had nothing to do with Rodriguez, his agent, Scott Boras, fired off e-mails to reporters announcing that they would be opting out.

  Rodriguez later famously posed for a magazine photo spread in which he kissed himself in the mirror. Here was the broadcast television equivalent. “For five minutes in the top of the eighth in Game Four, Fox’s broadcast stopped being about the Red Sox and the Rockies and became the ‘World Series Presents A-Rod,’” wrote New York Times columnist Richard Sandomir. “If he were charged for those minutes as if they were commercials, he’d have paid $4 million.”

  While the Red Sox were still popping champagne bottles, Yankees cochairman Hank Steinbrenner, son of ailing owner, George, suggested that Rodriguez’s maneuver had severed his relationship with the team. “If the guy really doesn’t want to be a Yankee,” said Hank, “then we don’t want him.”

  A saga of last-minute resuscitation began, starting with a phone call from one of the most revered Yankees in history. “I told him he had to take responsibility and make it right,” closer Mariano Rivera later said. “He had to call them.”

  Rodriguez’s camp maintains that he had told Boras he wanted to stay a Yankee, but that the agent went rogue with the World Series–timed opt-out. So Rodriguez distanced himself from Boras—but didn’t fire him—and cobbled together a strange emergency negotiation crew spearheaded by a financial manager he knew from Miami. With his wife in tow, Rodriguez’s mea culpa tour brought him to the house of Hank Steinbrenner’s brother, Hal, where he apologized to the Steinbrenners; Yankees general manager, Brian Cashman; and team president, Randy Levine—and shoved the blame onto Boras’s lap.

  It was a frenetic pattern Rodriguez first displayed as a high schooler who had ostracized the Seattle Mariners, and later again displayed as an aging slugger who had gone to the trenches against his team, league, and union. Time and again, he followed the lead of hard-charging representatives making millions off of him, until he reached the precipice of no return. That’s when he would suddenly appear to wake up and attempt to salvage his relationships, invariably with the assistance of some longtime confidante. It was a tightwire act nearly impossible to sustain.

  But the opt-out saga—in which Jay Z and Warren Buffett were among Rodriguez’s advisors—epitomized not only A-Rod but the Yankees as well. The team had sworn it wouldn’t renegotiate. But Rodriguez was a stadium draw and perennial MVP candidate who was primed to assault baseball’s career home run record, and George Steinbrenner was still the most free-spending owner in the sport.

  Just six weeks after Rodriguez went kamikaze on the World Series, the Yankees inked him to a new ten-year deal breaking his own previous financial record, guaranteeing him $275 million to stay in pinstripes until 2017. In addition, the Yankees added $6-million-a-pop clauses for each all-time home run leader he passed, starting with Willie Mays at 660 and ending with newly crowned record holder Barry Bonds at 762. With Mark McGwire, Sosa, and Bonds, the Yankees were aware of the stadium sellouts that came with a home run–record chase.

  The 2007 MVP season had been a banner year for Rodriguez and a major rationale for the record-breaking contract he received immediately afterward. It was also a season, we now know, in which he was permitted to use testosterone. But he wasn’t done with exemptions that allowed him to boost his testosterone levels with substances banned to other players.

  Before the 2008 season, in a development unreported until now, Rodriguez again sought permission to use banned substances. In January 2008, he requested two exemptions, as revealed by the transcripts obtained by these authors. Rodriguez wanted to use clomiphene citrate, a drug designed to increase fertility in women. Men who suffer from hypogonadism—that is, a dearth of testosterone—use it to block estrogen in their bodies. And it’s popular with bodybuilders at the tail ends of steroid cycles because it can also stimulate the body to make more testosterone.

  Rodriguez also requested permission to use human chorionic gonadotropin, a growth hormone known as hCG, popularly used for weight loss and as part of a steroid cycle.

  HCG was banned in baseball, and clomiphene citrate was first banned the season that Rodriguez applied to use it. The program administrator, Dr. Bryan W. Smith, approved Rodriguez’s use of clomiphene citrate in 2008. His use of hCG was denied, but according to the transcript of Manfred’s arbitration testimony, that denial was “more of a recordkeeping thing than anything else.” R
odriguez’s physician communicated with Dr. Smith, and “in their back-and-forth the physician informed Dr. Smith that the player was no longer using the substance in question,” Manfred testified.

  With the permission to use clomiphene citrate, Rodriguez was once again one of the rare players able to take medicine designed to increase testosterone levels. In 2008, only three players were granted exemptions for hypogonadism. In fact, from the 2006 season through 2013, only seventeen exemptions—or just more than two per year—were granted for the stated reasons that could require a medical testosterone boost: androgen deficiencies and hypogonadism.

  By 2008, Rodriguez had spent at least a significant portion of his career—including, at a minimum, two of this three MVP seasons—using anabolic steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs. He had shown a special affinity for synthetic testosterone. Those seasons at the top of the sport had made him by far the richest man in MLB, a league that at this time was finally coming to terms with its steroid problem. Rodriguez had a guaranteed contract until the age of forty-two.

  The only wise thing to do would be to safely ride out that contract, while continuing to apply for dubious exemptions but staying on the right side of baseball law.

  But Rodriguez wasn’t the type for lucrative laurel-resting.

  • • •

  As A-Rod’s star rocketed higher and he became more notorious, his tubby cousin tagged along in the shadows from Seattle to Texas to New York. Roger Ball has known Alex Rodriguez’s family since Rodriguez was a Westminster phenom. Ball’s family lived in the same Kendall development. Ball is good friends with Yuri Sucart, whom he calls “Shrek” due to his resemblance to the good-natured animated ogre.

  Even as his cousin and employer was traded to the city where it had gone down, Sucart didn’t talk about that cocaine-dealing conviction to his buddy Ball. “I knew that he got into some issues up there [in New York], but he never went into detail,” says Ball.