by Tim Elfrink
As Rodriguez traveled to Trenton at the turn of August for the purgatorial game and press conference at Arm & Hammer Park, those who thought he would surely never play for the Yankees again could not have known how stubbornly he was prepared to fight all consequences of his association with Tony Bosch.
Rodriguez was already waging a secret campaign, with attorneys and private detectives skulking around Florida, investigating the MLB investigators, and lining up signatures on sworn affidavits.
In his next, and last, game for the Trenton Thunder that Saturday, Rodriguez walked four times. His belief that the Yankees were conspiring for him to be banned that Monday boiled over into an e-mail he fired off to his former confidante Yankees president Randy Levine.
“Can u please stop!!” Rodriguez wrote on August 3, according to e-mails later published by New York magazine. “I want to play baseball and I could make a big difference to the game. Steinbrenner would roll in his grave IF he knew what was happening! Stop, Randy, this isn’t going to be good for any of us!! You are a businessman and what you are doing is ruining the business of baseball. If u want to meet in person to discuss it, let’s do it!”
Levine didn’t respond immediately. Though the Yankees had taken to calling him Mr. Rodriguez, in one formerly paternal figure’s eyes he was still Alex.
“Dear Alex,” began the letter he received from Bud Selig on that Monday, August 5. It was strangled in references to baseball statute, but skimming the letter delivered the devastating gist. “This letter is to inform you that . . . you are hereby suspended for 211 regular-season games . . . This represents a suspension for the remainder of the 2013 season (including postseason) and the entire 2014 regular-season. Your discipline . . . is based on your intentional, continuous and prolonged use and possession of multiple forms of prohibited Performance Enhancing Substances, including but not limited to Testosterone, Human Growth Hormone, and IGF-1, that you received as a result of your relationship with Anthony Bosch beginning in the 2010 championship season and ending in or about December 2012.”
The suspension would start on August 8, the upcoming Thursday. “In the event you commit a subsequent violation of the Program in the future,” Selig warned, “you will be suspended permanently from Major League Baseball.”
Two hundred and eleven games represented the longest suspension for the use of performance-enhancing substances in baseball history, a willful exclamation mark meant to end that shameful run-on sentence containing Kevin Koch and Kirk Radomski and Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds. In his arbitration testimony, Manfred said that he recommended the suspension length to Selig. Banning Rodriguez through the rest of 2013 and all of 2014, the way he describes it, was almost a charitable decision. “And the reason I stopped at 2014 was that I felt that it provided the player with an opportunity to resume his career at some meaningful point in terms of his age and contract status,” said Manfred. “I thought that was a fair balance of penalties, given other penalties that have been imposed under the program.”
Rodriguez disagreed. As he himself later pointed out, the suspension kept him out of the game until exactly when Selig planned to ride off into the Wisconsin sunset. It was almost as if Selig’s retirement gift to himself was the banishment of his tenure’s most troublesome and disappointing star player.
Once Selig levied the bombshell punishment, Levine returned Rodriguez’s previous missive.
“I received your e-mail, the contents of which are a complete shock to me,” the Yankees president wrote. “As I have repeatedly told you, this is an MLB investigation. We had no role in initiating the investigation or assisting in the direction of the investigation. Despite your continued false accusations (which you know are false) we have acted consistently. My focus and direction, as well as that of the entire Yankees organization, has been, and continues to be, to treat you in the same manner as we do all of our players, to have you healthy and ready to play as soon as possible.”
Levine’s sign-off to the terse and guarded message: “Good luck.”
Rodriguez was already on a plane to Chicago. The Yankees were playing the White Sox that night, and he was starting at third.
• • •
Twelve other baseball players received suspension letters from Selig that day. Black Monday landed with a tabloid storm and a SportsCenter frenzy. The headline was A-Rod’s record suspension, but the context was the completion of the biggest round of suspensions in history: fifteen players in all, suspended from baseball over their ties to Tony Bosch.
Nobody but Rodriguez appealed their punishment. The Biogenesis suspensions were at once sweeping and incomplete.
Suspended for fifty games were a dozen players ranging the gamut of baseball prominence, from top sluggers and .300-batting-average lineup anchors to Dominican scrappers on the fringes of big league ball.
Of those who had been named in the original New Times story, Nelson Cruz, Jhonny Peralta, and Jesus Montero received the fifty-game suspensions that barred them through the end of the 2013 regular season. Melky Cabrera, Bartolo Colon, and Yasmani Grandal weren’t punished for Biogenesis connections in 2013. They had all served fifty-game suspensions the season earlier, after testing positive for drugs that baseball believed came from Bosch’s clinic. Cesar Carrillo, a minor leaguer with no protection from the MLBPA, had been suspended back in March for one hundred games. And then, of course, there was Mr. 211, Alex Rodriguez.
The following players had been suspended for fifty games following outing in Yahoo! or Bosch’s revelations to baseball investigators: Everth Cabrera, Francisco Cervelli, Antonio Bastardo, Jordany Valdespin, Fernando Martinez, Cesar Puello, Sergio Escalona, Jordan Norberto, and Fautino de los Santos. Braun, already weeks into his own suspension, also fell into that category.
But several other players exposed in Bosch’s notebooks, some of whom were not listed in the New Times article and have not been named in connection with Biogenesis until now, had evaded punishment altogether. Their reprieves came, according to MLB sources, because Bosch denied giving them PEDs and there wasn’t other evidence to contradict him.
MLB investigators had “cleared” Washington Nationals pitcher Gio Gonzalez and Baltimore Orioles third baseman Danny Valencia, both University of Miami alum. “Their names came up in Biogenesis,” MLBPA chief Michael Weiner said of Gonzalez and Valencia. “That’s really about all I can say. It was determined that they didn’t use performance-enhancing substances, that they didn’t possess performance-enhancing substances and that they were—in the end, they weren’t disciplined.”
Danny Valencia was implicated in the pages of Bosch’s records supplied to Yahoo!, with his name listed, with those of Rodriguez, Melky Cabrera, Carrillo, and Cervelli, under the heading “Baseball.”
Gonzalez’s apparent association with Bosch was more frequently documented. In the portions of Bosch’s notebooks possessed by this book’s authors, he is named seven times, at one point next to his cell phone number. His father, Max Gonzalez, had claimed that Gio was as “clean as apple pie” and that the family’s only association with Bosch was that Max was on a Biogenesis weight-loss program..
Though Gio denied ever meeting or speaking with Bosch, at one point the fake doctor wrote “off visit”—presumably meaning office visit—next to his name. In another, Bosch jotted down Gonzalez’s pitching statistics. One note indicates that Bosch planned to order zinc, B12, and Arimidex “for Gio” at a charge of $1,000. None of those drugs are banned by baseball, but in another note Bosch records that he sold “creams” to “Gio/Max.” Gio’s mother, Yolanda Cid, is also listed six times in the books, at times next to the words blood and delivery. Bosch said that he’d only sold the pitcher legal supplements, MLB sources say.
Former UM star Gaby Sanchez was never even mentioned publicly by MLB as having ties to Biogenesis. But Bosch’s records named Sanchez at least seven times—with one note reading, “$$$$”—and indicate that Bosch at least attempted to meet the ballplayer on multiple instances in a relationship fa
cilitated by former UM coach Lazer Collazo. An MLB source involved in the investigation says the league couldn’t prove the meetings took place or that Bosch sold Sanchez anything.
In the clique of former UM players caught up in the Biogenesis dragnet, rumors swirled that Gonzalez, Valencia, and Sanchez had helped their own situations by cooperating with the league’s quest to bury their former teammate Braun and UM benefactor Rodriguez. League sources deny that MLB let anybody off the hook in return for cooperation.
The inverse does appear to be true, however. Fellow UM player Cesar Carrillo had refused to cooperate with league investigators. After being hit with the hundred-game suspension, he was released by the Detroit Tigers organization and was next spotted playing independent league ball in Sugar Land, Texas.
Marcelo Albir, the former UM phenom who had already washed out of baseball, also refused to cooperate with MLB’s probe. Selig couldn’t punish him with a suspension, but he was left tens of thousands of dollars in the hole from trying to fend off MLB litigation.
Other players named in the portions of the notebooks possessed by these authors escaped the league’s discipline, according to an MLB source, because Bosch maintained they were clean or provided no evidence to the contrary, or the players weren’t under MLB control when they doped or by the time they were caught.
Those players include Dominican outfielder Wilkin Ramirez, who has played parts of three seasons including 2013 for Detroit, Atlanta, and Minnesota, and is currently still in the Twins organization. He is listed at least five times in Bosch’s books, next to two charges for $1,000 each and the phrase “delivery and protocol.”
Felix Pie has had a six-year big league career, and in 2013 he played for the Pittsburgh Pirates. Bosch indicated that Pie owed him $2,500 on two occasions and even referred to him by his baseball nickname of “Felix the Cat.” (As of this writing, Pie is playing baseball in Korea.)
Ronny Paulino, a catcher, has played for four major league teams since 2005, and he spent 2013 in the farm systems for the Baltimore Orioles and Detroit Tigers. His name makes nine appearances in Bosch’s notebooks, next to a cell phone number once registered in his name, the phrase minor leaguer, and an address in Weston, Florida. Bosch’s records indicate that he provided testosterone troches and made deliveries to Paulino—who played for the Mets and the Orioles in 2011 and 2012, respectively—in New York and Baltimore.
Baseball officials apparently determined that Paulino shouldn’t face additional punishment for his Biogenesis links, because he had been suspended for fifty games in August 2010 after failing a drug test, presumably while on the Bosch regimen. (Paulino claimed that the positive test was the result of taking a diet pill.) In February 2014, however, Paulino tested positive for exogenous testosterone and was suspended for one hundred games.
At the time of the Biogenesis suspensions, Adrian Nieto was a prospect in the Chicago White Sox organization. Nieto was enrolled at the Fort Lauderdale–area Plantation High School when he first started seeing Bosch. He is listed at least seventeen times in the Biogenesis records—his customary payment was $500 cash—and Bosch wrote “ballplayer” after his name.
And nineteen days after the suspensions, Ricardo Cespedes signed a $725,000 contract with the New York Mets on his sixteenth birthday. Cespedes was—as revealed by Bosch’s letter to Juan Carlos Nunez—an apparent Biogenesis client under the wing of the ACES employee, though MLB could garner no evidence that he received PEDs from Bosch.
If any baseball fan—some mythically naïve kid in America’s heartland—still considered the sport’s stars to be infallible heroes, that notion must have finally been euthanized after thirteen players accepted their punishment. Players who had adamantly and angrily denied any links to Bosch now accepted their suspension, mostly in silence.
Some tepid, vague apologies were issued via representatives or read aloud to reporters. (Cruz: “I want to apologize . . . for the mistake I made.” Peralta: “In spring of 2012, I made a terrible mistake that I deeply regret.”) Cervelli, the Yankees catcher who MLB officials believed was outed by his far wealthier teammate, was so disturbed by his suspension that he didn’t even show up for the game that night, causing him to be fined by the team.
With the rest of the suspensions issued, Braun issued a one-thousand-word statement in which he finally confessed to the drugs he said Bosch gave him. “During the latter part of the 2011 season, I was dealing with a nagging injury and I turned to products for a short period of time that I shouldn’t have used,” the statement read. “The products were a cream and a lozenge which I was told could help expedite my rehabilitation.”
All eyes were on A-Rod, though one retired major league pitcher was fixated on a lesser, appropriately named former nemesis from their joint tenure in the Philadelphia Phillies bullpen. “Hey, Antonio Bastardo,” tweeted Dan Meyer, “remember when we competed for a job in 2011. Thx alot. #ahole.”
Bud Selig took a probably premature victory lap. “We continue to attack this issue on every front from science and research, to education and awareness, to fact-finding and investigative skills,” the commissioner said in a statement.
In his mind, he had lopped “steroid commissioner” cleanly from among his honorary titles.
Jose Canseco, for one, wasn’t buying it. “All of a sudden, Bud Selig, that coward, doesn’t want his legacy to be that he was the steroid commissioner,” the former slugger said in an interview for this book. “It shows his arrogance. That’s like me saying I don’t want my legacy to be that I used steroids.”
But drug-testing experts laud the turnaround, however tardy it may have come. Just a decade earlier, the idea of baseball’s commissioner lobbing more than a dozen suspensions at players who hadn’t even failed tests—and the union supporting the punishments—would have been a fever dream.
“The light switch went on in terms of the threat these drugs played in the game of baseball,” says Travis Tygart, the USADA chief. “After BALCO hit them hard, they made a really smart move in hiring Senator Mitchell and his team . . . and that report laid the groundwork for the response we saw in Biogenesis.”
• • •
To have Alex Rodriguez return to Major League Baseball on the same day his record suspension was announced created a bizarre spectacle. Sportswriters traveled to Chicago from all over the country. A Boston media outlet live-blogged the otherwise unremarkable August contest.
As word of the suspension broke on every news channel, Rodriguez sat on a couch and watched canned footage of that night’s opposition, White Sox pitcher Jose Quintana. Reporters stalked Rodriguez from a distance in the visiting clubhouse at US Cellular Field in Chicago.
As he had already announced, the next day the union would appeal the suspension on his behalf, allowing Rodriguez to play through the rest of the 2013 season.
For every other Biogenesis-linked major leaguer, the suspensions added up to a cost of doing business. All of them would be back in time for the playoffs if their teams made it. New, lucrative contracts would be signed in the off-season. Careers would go on.
Rodriguez peeled himself off the couch and headed to yet another press conference. It was a choked-up, emotionally schizophrenic appearance. At one moment, he lamented the “nightmare” of the last seven months. He complained of undergoing multiple surgeries and being thirty-eight years old. A few seconds later, he was exclaiming with bright eyes that he felt once again like an eighteen-year-old making his debut at Fenway Park in 1994. He thanked his “Dominican people and all the Hispanics all over the world.”
Then he remarked: “I’m fighting for my life. I have to defend myself. If I don’t defend myself, no one will.”
Though Rodriguez and his juicing ilk have often been accused of ruining the sport, nobody can imbue a no-account dog-days-of-summer ballgame with a carnival atmosphere quite like an embattled A-Rod. The Yankees were a mediocre team and the White Sox were worse, but seemingly all of South Side Chicago streamed into the stadium in
order to rain boos on Rodriguez’s every at-bat. A cadre of Yankee fans—calling themselves “A-Rod Army”—waved signs featuring drawings of syringes and the slogan: “A-Roid’s better than no ’roids!”
He singled once in four at-bats. The Yankees lost 8–1 in a game where almost nothing interesting occurred on the field.
At war with Major League Baseball and the Yankees, Rodriguez seemed to be adding enemies to his shit list daily. The players union was next on the docket.
• • •
Confined to a wheelchair with a voice made raspy and weak by the brain tumor that was killing him, MLBPA chief Michael Weiner went on Sirius/XM’s Mad Dog Sports Radio to talk A-Rod the day after his comeback in Chicago.
Weiner called the 211-game punishment “far too much,” but then revealed that he had told Rodriguez to accept a suspension for a lesser amount of games if Selig had offered it. “I don’t want to give a number,” said Weiner, “but there was a number that I gave A-Rod that we advised him to take. He was never given that number.”
Host Chris Russo wondered: Wouldn’t that be an admission that Rodriguez took PEDs?
“It’s a question of evidence,” Weiner responded. “Each player has to make his own decision as to whether he used or not. Based on the evidence that we saw, we made a recommendation. The commissioner’s office didn’t meet it.”
Though Rodriguez refused to answer reporters’ questions about Weiner’s comments after another game in Chicago, privately he was fuming. Rodriguez’s public stance was always that he was completely innocent and undeserving of one day—“one inning,” as he liked to say—of suspension. And Don Fehr and Gene Orza would never have spoken of accepting suspensions. During the heyday of the Steroid Era, the former union bosses had been too busy railing against the league and claiming that baseball had no doping problem to worry about. Now, Weiner, who by virtue of his position was responsible for defending Rodriguez in his appeal, appeared to be undermining him.
