by Tim Elfrink
Rodriguez’s sleeveless minor league jersey looked like a gag gift. He slammed a two-run homer over a left-field fence papered with local advertisements. At another point, when his baby-faced teammates huddled at the pitching mound to strategize, Rodriguez wandered around the infield alone, blowing bubbles. And after the game, he once again made an unconventional setting his location for another PED-related press conference.
The always-needling media wouldn’t allow Rodriguez to get in only a vague jab. Who were the parties that benefited from him never again stepping on a baseball field?
Rodriguez went macabre. “I can’t tell you that right now,” he said, and then swiveled his head and widened his eyes dramatically. “And I hope I never have to.”
• • •
Despite his showmanship, it wasn’t a great secret that Rodriguez believed Major League Baseball and the Yankees were joined in a conspiracy to end his career.
Certainly, the Yankees did have incentive to root for a lengthy suspension—or, more darkly, a prolonged absence due to injury—of their once-prized third baseman.
He couldn’t stay healthy, was a lightning rod for bad press, and had lost much of his pop. And he was owed almost nine figures. With Rodriguez injured, the Yankees paid only the small portion of his salary that wasn’t covered by insurance. With him banned, the team wouldn’t have to pay even that.
Before arriving in Trenton, Rodriguez had spent the year feuding both privately and publicly with the Yankees. His recovery from hip surgery was being overseen by Yankees doctor Bryan Kelly. But Rodriguez was becoming certain that the team—particularly team president Randy Levine—did not want him back, and Kelly’s conversations with Levine confirmed the suspicion. “Levine told me the Yankees would rather [you] never step on the baseball field [again],” Kelly told Rodriguez, according to New York magazine. (Levine denied that sentiment, telling the magazine he meant: “Alex, this is your health, this is your life, if you choose to get off the field because you don’t want to be disabled, we’re fine with that.”)
On February 28, Rodriguez sent a lengthy e-mail to Levine, telling him that he had heard the Yankees were offering a “bounty” to the team president if Rodriguez didn’t return. “Of course I am very concerned about these rumors and about what the team is doing and saying about me,” wrote Rodriguez in the e-mail. “People have been telling me that you have an 8% bounty on my contract. . . . I hope this is the start of us clearing the air between us. I don’t want us to be enemies.”
Rodriguez and Levine were once chummy, according to earlier e-mails, all of them published by New York magazine. Their nickname for each other, a reference to Rodriguez’s chip on his shoulder, was “Chip.” But now, Levine’s reply was terse: “First off, neither I nor anyone at Yankees every [sic] met with your cousin. This is being handled by MLB and we r allowing them to do their job. There is no bounty on you. We have no idea who MLB is meeting with or what course their investigation is taking.”
But as the summer wore on and Rodriguez grew increasingly frustrated with the slow pace of his return, he was certain that the team was attempting to stall his comeback from injury.
On June 28, Yankees general manager Brian Cashman had discussed Rodriguez’s injury on sports talk radio, saying: “He has not been cleared by our doctors to play in rehab games yet.”
Alex Rodriguez is no social media maven. Twitter is a medium of public candor, which was never his strong suit. But in an apparent attempt to gain control of his own return timeline, the day after Cashman’s interview, Rodriguez fired off the ninth tweet of his life.
Rodriguez’s tact: willful obliviousness. He posted a photo of himself talking with Dr. Bryan Kelly, whom the Yankees had assigned to oversee his recovery. “Visit from Dr. Kelly over the weekend,” Rodriguez wrote, “who gave me the best news—the green light to play games again!”
An ESPN New York reporter read the tweet to Cashman. “You know what, when the Yankees want to announce something, [we will],” Cashman responded. “Alex should just shut the fuck up. That’s it. I’m going to call Alex now.”
Rodriguez later explained that his tweet had been written out of “pure excitement.” But he did get his way. Within a week, Rodriguez had started his rehab tour on the Yankees’ single-A team in South Carolina.
The New York Daily News was certain that Rodriguez had, as the paper broadcast on its back cover, an EVIL PLAN. He was attempting to rush his way back to the Yankees only to then declare that he was unable to play because of a serious injury and spend the rest of his career on the disabled list in order to collect his entire contract regardless of the MLB suspension. (The Yankees’ insurance provider would pay the bulk of Rodriguez’s salary in the event of this sort of injury.) Unfortunately, the purported plan wasn’t exactly grounded in league rules, as a suspended player loses his salary regardless of whether he’s on the disabled list.
As Rodriguez jousted with the Yankees, Dan Mullin and his crew were encamped in Florida, building what was becoming a strong case against him. When Bosch had agreed to cooperate in early June, he had turned three of his BlackBerry phones over to investigators. The devices contained a trove of communication with Rodriguez.
Bosch and Rodriguez had exchanged more than five hundred BlackBerry messages and 556 text messages, and they’d spoken on the phone fifty-three times in 2012. These included those furtive text haikus between the duo: “Try to use service elevators”; “Careful. Tons of eyes”; “Not meds dude. Food.”
Investigators had the doping protocol Bosch said he had devised for Rodriguez, detailing a baseball season regimen of HGH in the morning, testosterone cream in the evening, and Bosch’s special troches right before exertion.
Bosch had also provided evidence against his other MLB clients. But as MLB investigators interviewed the two superstars they were targeting most tenaciously, they were met with stony silence.
Ryan Braun met with MLB on June 29 and refused to answer their questions. Thirteen days later, league counsel Dan Halem met with Rodriguez on a Saturday in Tampa, where his rehab tour had taken him to the Yankees’ minor league squad in that city, for an “investigatory interview” concerning Rodriguez’s purchases of PEDs from Bosch.
As in any judicial setting, baseball’s union procedures have legal precedents. When future Hall of Fame pitcher Ferguson Jenkins was busted crossing the Canadian border with a duffel bag containing cocaine, marijuana, and hashish in 1980, a union arbitrator ruled that he could refuse to answer MLB’s questions about the incident so as to not incriminate himself, baseball’s version of pleading the Fifth.
Besides the issue of his Biogenesis regimen, Halem asked Rodriguez about obstructing the investigation. The league believed that he had purchased the notebooks they sought as evidence, that he had attempted to get Bosch to sign an untruthful affidavit and offered him cash to “vanish” in Colombia, and that he had paid for the PED dealer’s legal fees. Now, Rodriguez channeled Jenkins and refused to answer everything MLB threw at him.
Halem called his boss, Rob Manfred, after the interview. Rodriguez later attested in court filings that MLB “offered” him a 162-game ban if he cooperated, but he doesn’t seem to have considered accepting it. Asked in arbitration about the investigatory interview, Manfred said that Halem relayed “that he had asked Mr. Rodriguez numerous questions and that Mr. Rodriguez had taken the Fifth Amendment with respect to virtually every question.”
Rodriguez was affected enough by the meeting that he didn’t show up at the Tampa stadium for that night’s game, an infraction for which the Yankees later fined him $150,000. He had reason to be rattled. Immediately after the league was spurned by Rodriguez, Manfred started discussing possible suspension lengths with Selig. They were sure of one thing: The punishment had to be historic. “Commissioner Selig asked me about longer discipline and specifically the issue of a lifetime ban,” Manfred testified in Rodriguez’s later confidential arbitration hearing. Though Selig’s weighing of banning Rodrigu
ez for life has been reported through anonymous sources, Manfred’s testimony is the first confirmation that the commissioner considered it.
Manfred studied the precedents. In a 2008 arbitration case involving Detroit Tigers infielder Neifi Perez, arbitrator Shyam Das had found that, as Manfred termed it, “each use of a prohibitive substance was a separate violation of the Joint Drug Agreement.” By Manfred’s logic, they could prove through Bosch that Rodriguez had used “more than three distinct banned substances.” Since 2006, the Joint Drug Agreement dictates that a third banned substance offense will automatically result in a lifetime ban—a provision that had never been triggered. “I told Commissioner Selig that there was a rationale under the agreement that a lifetime ban could be supported,” Manfred later testified. “That you would make the argument that [there] was a first, a second, and a third offense.”
But Manfred advised that they go a different route. In 2008, an obscure but potentially powerful clause had been added into the Joint Drug Agreement. Section 7.G.2 is known as the “just cause” amendment. It reads: “A Player may be subjected to disciplinary action for just cause by the Commissioner for any Player violation” of the rules governing banned substances.
Through its vague terming, the section appeared to give the league free rein to decide the length of a suspension—provided they could get an arbitrator to agree in the event of an appeal, of course. The commissioner had never before invoked the rule. If any case was egregious enough to get an arbitrator to approve of an unprecedented method of lengthy punishment, Manfred reasoned, this was it. Alex Rodriguez’s career would be the canary in the coal mine.
Again, Manfred returned to the precedents. The baseball player most harshly punished for performance-enhancing drugs under the agreement was Guillermo Mota, the eleven-fingered relief pitcher who had been suspended for a total of 150 games as a result of two positive tests.
To Manfred, the manner in which Rodriguez had doped for at least three years, and then attempted to cover up his actions, far outweighed Mota’s crimes. “Given what I’ve described about the evidence in this case, it was my belief that the conduct here merited a penalty more severe than that one hundred and fifty games,” Manfred explained in arbitration. “That what Mr. Rodriguez had done, and what his impact on the integrity of the game on the field had been, merited more than that one hundred and fifty games. The question became: How much more?”
• • •
Though Rodriguez was bracing for a campaign against baseball and the Yankees that spanned more than a year, Braun was clearly spooked. He later claimed that he was never presented with MLB’s evidence against him. Instead, it was simply a turn of the conscience. “I realized the magnitude of my poor decisions,” Braun said. Either way, after pleading the Fifth during his first investigatory interview with MLB, Braun asked for another sit-down.
Ryan Braun—lying, maneuvering, scapegoating Braun—was finally ready to give in and strike a deal. Since October 2011, when Braun had tested positive for extremely high levels of testosterone, he had defiantly fought punishment, resulting in a smeared drug tester, a fired MLB arbitrator, and the absurd-in-hindsight notion that he’d sought out unlicensed Bosch only for his “expert” biochemist opinion.
But there was a basic financial equation behind Braun finally choosing to give up the fight in a timely manner.
Selig was threatening a hundred-game suspension if Braun wasn’t ready to plead guilty and make a deal. If he didn’t strike a bargain, he’d get fifty games for the “nonanalytical positive” stemming from his role in Biogenesis, and another fifty for lying to investigators and obstructing their probe with his Dino Laurenzi smear campaign the year earlier.
A hundred-game ban would have ended Braun’s 2013 season and cost him nearly the first third of 2014. That would have been a monetarily disastrous suspension, and appealing it could make things even worse.
The contract extension Braun signed in April 2011, six months before his failed urine test, ensured that his highest-paid years were in 2014 and beyond. He was earning $8.5 million in 2013, would get a pay jump to $10 million a year in 2014, and would receive gradually more after that until his salary leveled out at $19 million a season.
If Braun appealed the hundred-game suspension, played through the 2013 season, and then lost his appeal, he would forfeit $6.2 million dollars in playing salary in 2014. The deal his attorneys eventually hashed out with MLB cut those financial losses nearly in half.
On July 22, the league announced that Braun had accepted a sixty-five-game suspension. Braun’s public links to Biogenesis ended with a punishment that kept him out of the rest of the 2013 regular season. The year was a sixty-one-game, nine-homer blemish on what had appeared the beginnings of a Hall of Fame career. He was the first superstar casualty of Biogenesis.
Braun’s nuclear self-destruction of his image as a modern-day clean superstar for the good folks of Wisconsin was officially complete. Selig wouldn’t be eating any more lasagna at Braun’s Milwaukee Italian restaurant, which was closed by investors who wanted no part of a PED cheat. As if to seal in amber how far Braun had fallen in the eyes of his Midwestern fan base, even a Green Bay Packers icon shook his head at the antics. “It doesn’t feel great being lied to like that,” said quarterback Aaron Rogers, who was friends with Braun, “and I’m disappointed in the way it all went down.” The Brewers’ owners ended up giving away more than $3 million in free food and T-shirts to any fans still willing to come watch the team play.
But Braun knew his contract from 2014 onward was safe. Whatever hit he’d taken to his image, he’d lost only a relatively minor $3.25 million in salary for the rest of the season. Braun, who seventeen months earlier had declared, “I would bet my life that this substance never entered my body at any point,” now issued a vague quasi-apology.
“I am not perfect,” allowed the outfielder, who did not admit to taking any specific drugs. “I realize now that I have made some mistakes. I am willing to accept the consequences of those actions.”
That Braun was the first Biogenesis major leaguer to receive a negotiated settlement, despite his tortured previous two years with the league office, wasn’t an accident. Baseball’s message to the rest of Bosch’s clients—those not named Alex Rodriguez, at least—was clear: Accept your punishment and you can move on with your career.
If Rodriguez was intimidated by Braun’s suspension, he didn’t show it. He was too immersed in his escalating squabble with the Yankees, a back-and-forth saga that had devolved into a sort of high-stakes game of Injury Battleship.
On July 21, Rodriguez was then with the Yankees’ Scranton-area triple-A affiliate. That game was supposed to have been Rodriguez’s last in his rehab stint, before rejoining the Yankees for a road series against the Rangers. But after showing up at the ballpark, he complained of stiffness in his left quadricep. The Yankees took him out of the lineup and flew him to New York City, where Dr. Chris Ahmad had him undergo another MRI.
Rodriguez, who believed that Ahmad had failed to diagnose his hip injury during his disastrous playoffs the year before, deeply distrusted the team doctor. And when Ahmad now found that Rodriguez had a mild quad strain, once again derailing his comeback, the superstar spun through his Rolodex of dubious acquaintances for his next trick.
On July 23, the day after Braun announced his acceptance of his suspension, a New Jersey doctor named Michael L. Gross was interviewed on Mike Francesa’s WFAN sports radio talk show. Dr. Gross, an orthopedist at the Hackensack University Medical Center, said that he had spent twenty minutes looking at Rodriguez’s MRI, studying the quadricep muscle that had him sidelined. “To be perfectly honest, I don’t see any sort of injury there,” Gross told Francesa.
The doctor added that he had asked Rodriguez in a phone call that morning whether he was in any pain. Rodriguez had said no. “If there’s no pain, to me as an orthopedist, that means there’s no injury,” reasoned Gross. “I’m guessing a guy who’s been playing ball
his entire life knows his body. If he thinks he’s fit to play, that’s what he said.”
As the bizarre radio cameo spurned scrutiny into his relationship with Rodriguez, Dr. Gross later clarified that he never examined or even met Rodriguez, nor received payment for reviewing his MRI. Rodriguez had been pointed his way through a physical therapist both men knew. “I did it because I thought it would be fun,” Gross said later.
As was the case with Dr. Galea—and “Dr.” Bosch—when it came to medical consultants, Rodriguez knew how to pick ’em. Reporters quickly uncovered after his appearance on WFAN that Dr. Gross had been reprimanded by the state of New Jersey in February 2013 for allowing an unlicensed underling to treat patients at the Active Center for Health and Wellness, a facility Gross runs in Hackensack. More significant, Gross was also cited for “failing to adequately ensure proper patient treatment involving the prescribing of hormones including steroids,” according to an administrative report.
Gross was fined $40,000 by the state. According to its website, the center offers “Anti-Aging and Bio-Identical Hormone Replacement Therapy,” the same services Biogenesis publicly touted. In his defense, Dr. Gross said his center didn’t generally treat athletes, and it was not anabolic steroids that he was found to have overprescribed. “We were treating people with a medical problem,” Gross said—men with low testosterone.
In a statement, the perpetually peeved Cashman said that he heard about Gross’s appearance through a text message. He implied that Rodriguez may have violated union rules. “Contrary to the Basic Agreement,” said Cashman, “Mr. Rodriguez did not notify us at any time that he was seeking a second opinion from any doctor with regard to his quad strain.”
To the Yankees front office, their ten-year star had gone from “Chip” to shut-the-fuck-up Alex to “Mr. Rodriguez.”
