by Tim Elfrink
The “Farce”
Those twelve men who had gathered outside of MLB’s Park Avenue headquarters with signs bearing slogans like BOSCH LIAR! after the last game of the Yankees’ season had transformed into a noisy daily horde by mid-October as Rodriguez’s arbitration proceeding entered its second week. The hearing upstairs ultimately stretched for eleven calendar weeks, or thirteen actual days of the court-like proceeding.
The number of protesters topped one hundred. They were men and women, young and old, all of them apparently Hispanic, some of them waving Dominican flags. Rodriguez could have slipped in through a side door each morning undetected. But that’s not his style.
He developed a daily routine. Around nine A.M., an Escalade zoomed up to the curb and a natty Rodriguez hopped out, his attorneys stiff-arming their way through a crowd of whistling and nonsense-yelling reporters and photographers, as their superstar charged toward the crowded corral of protesters.
He never spoke to the reporters, only cooed sweet nothings to the protesters as he signed photos, baseballs, and T-shirts with the text SUPPORT A-ROD arced over his number thirteen.
Then he bounded up the stairs and into the building. He exited again at five, six, or seven P.M., after a day spent listening to Anthony Bosch detail his drug regimen or watching Joe Tacopina spar with Rob Manfred. Rodriguez looked markedly more harried during these exits, rushing straight into the backseat of the waiting Cadillac SUV.
The slogans on the supporters’ placards—often written in the same hand—tended to resemble something unloaded directly from Rodriguez’s increasingly paranoid brain, referencing disputes that had not yet been made public.
For example, RANDY LEVINE IS THE DEVIL was a popular sign slogan in the protest pit during the arbitration hearing, a reference to the Yankees president, who Rodriguez was certain had betrayed him to MLB. A newsperson asked the protesters carrying the signs if they knew who Randy Levine was, and they confessed they had no idea. BUD SELIG IS A CHILD KILLER, read another sign, a reference to the commissioner being weak on mandating steroid testing for young prospects in the Dominican Republic. TONY BOSCH IS A DRUG DEALER FOR MINORS. The signs were like a daily diary for Rodriguez’s most bitter musings.
One of the protesters tweeted: “Getting paid, breakfast and lunch is on the house just to support my favorite player A-Rod hell yeah.” (The man later said he was not getting paid after all.) Another protester wrote on Twitter: “I’m Dominican for today lol.” At lunchtime, pizza was delivered to the protest pit via a mystery benefactor.
The protesters were led by a squat, dark-browed bald man named Fernando Mateo, the founder of the Manhattan-based charity Hispanics Across America. Years earlier, he had hand-delivered caskets to MLB headquarters in a stunt to urge the league to test Dominican prospects for performance-enhancing drugs. Now, as Rodriguez hustled into the building one morning, Mateo jostled with a stern female security guard in a pantsuit.
She spilled coffee on him. The next morning, Mateo was again outside the building—in a neck brace—vowing to press charges concerning the java assault.
“Their key witness,” Mateo then said of Bosch, “is a guy you can’t trust. He’s a liar! He’s a drug dealer! He injected kids with steroids!”
“I have a lot of good Jewish friends who agree with me!” Mateo suddenly declared. Up stepped a man in a yarmulke—who later gave his name as Jona Rechnitz—to announce that he too supported Alex Rodriguez.
Mateo later acknowledged that his non-profit received $100,000 from an anonymous donor with the stipulation that the money be spent on supporting Alex Rodriguez. The superstar’s camp denies that he was behind the donation.
In mid-October, Hispanics Across America took out a full-page ad in the New York Times with a photo of Bud Selig next to banner reading, WHO IS PUBLIC ENEMY NO. 1 IN BASEBALL?
“We remember Selig sitting in the front rows watching Slamming Sammy Sosa and Mark McGuire hitting crazy home runs while using performance enhancing drugs,” read a line of the accompanying open letter signed by Mateo. (The ad cost $106,000, according to the newspaper, although apparently very little was spent on copyediting.)
New York State lawmakers showed up to join the fray: Assemblywoman Gabriela Rosa, Senator Adriano Espaillat, and Senator Ruben Diaz, best known for his virulent opposition to gay marriage.
One early afternoon Diaz, wearing a cowboy hat, led a vigil of about fifty Hispanic ministers outside the Park Avenue building. In the broad daylight as businesspeople hustled around them to lunch appointments, Diaz and the ministers lit candles and prayed quietly for A-Rod’s safe return to baseball.
• • •
If the scene downstairs was bizarre, a circus of a different breed was developing on the sixth floor of the building, over green tea muffins, Greek yogurt, and lattes in a conference room in MLB offices.
Though arbitration hearings are required to be kept confidential, a procession of media leaks kept arbitrator Fredric Horowitz constantly agitated, forcing him on a near-daily basis to admonish both MLB lawyers and Rodriguez’s legal team to stop gabbing to reporters. Attorneys representing Rodriguez and Bosch nearly came to blows during a bathroom break. Rodriguez was scolded for grimacing and muttering during the proceedings. Tacopina and Manfred got into heated under-oath battles as Rodriguez’s attorney accused the baseball executive of helping to shield a man who dealt narcotics to minors, in proceedings detailed for the first time by these authors. And ultimately, the defendant in this de facto prosecution stormed out of the proceeding in a cursing rage.
Ten years before Rodriguez’s arbitration, Horowitz, a Berkeley graduate and Santa Monica–based professional arbitrator between union workers and their employers, was hearing cases like that of a $65,000-per-year professor who was fired for letting his students out of class early. He worked his way to bigger-money disputes, like those between Delta Air Lines and its pilots as a strike loomed, and arbitrated National Hockey League union disputes. By 2008, the Los Angeles Dodgers fan had made it to the “Transactions” small print of newspaper sports pages, deciding the salaries of baseball players who hadn’t vested enough time in the bigs to be declared free agents.
Being an MLB arbitrator is a well-compensated part-time gig for a specially licensed attorney. Horowitz had taken over as baseball’s lead arbitrator, putting him in charge of suspension appeals, in early 2012 after Shyam Das was canned by Selig for overturning Ryan Braun’s punishment. Horowitz received $69,141 from the Players Association for his work in 2013, according to publicly released union financials. The league paid him at least $62,000 as well, their share of his pay for arbitrations. The bulk of Horowitz’s year of baseball work was the case of Alex Rodriguez.
But Horowitz’s first drug suspension appeal hearing showed that he was no pushover for players, even if there was evidence that the athlete had committed the infraction accidentally. In mid-2012, pitcher Guillermo Mota—before Rodriguez, the harshest-punished ballplayer for performance-enhancing drugs—appealed a hundred-game suspension for testing positive for the banned substance Clenbuterol, his second such failed test.
Mota claimed he had accidentally drunk the substance in his kid’s cold medicine. Horowitz upheld the hundred-game ban “despite finding Mota’s ingestion of a [PED] contained in a cough syrup taken to treat a cold was unintentional,” according to an arbitration document made public following Rodriguez’s hearing.
The sixty-three-year-old had never arbitrated a hearing like that of Rodriguez’s. Then again, nobody had.
Held in a conference room past corporate baseball’s strangely decorated hallways featuring thirty life-size figures in MLB uniforms with televisions for heads, the hearing resembled a lax court proceeding.
Technically, Horowitz was only one of a three-person panel deciding Rodriguez’s fate. But the other two panel members were partial by design. MLBPA counsel David M. Prouty, who had taken the union’s reins during Michael Weiner’s illness, represented the Players Association. R
ob Manfred, baseball’s hard-nosed chief operating officer, represented the league. The rubber vote, and thus the only one that mattered, belonged to panel chair Horowitz.
The proceeding was transcribed, and all testimony was under oath. There were opening statements. Witnesses were called and cross-examined, documents were entered into evidence, and there were closing statements.
Rodriguez had eleven of his attorneys and legal associates in the arbitration room with him. Major League Baseball had a rotating cast of more than a dozen of its own attorneys. Between transcribing and other personnel, according to a source at the hearing, the room was packed with as many as thirty-five individuals.
Despite having enough legal defenders to field a baseball team and keep two on the bench, Rodriguez was technically defended by Prouty, as the representative of the union. This was much to the chagrin of the embattled superstar, who had tried in vain to appoint his own arbitrator. “The MLBPA-appointed arbitrator consistently advised Mr. Rodriguez that he represented the interests of the union as a whole, and not Mr. Rodriguez individually, and had to act accordingly,” Team A-Rod complained in a later lawsuit.
Rodriguez argued that Bosch had provided him only with nonbanned nutritional supplements, including amino acids, vitamins, BioEFA, alpha lipoic acid, cider vinegar, ginseng, and fish oil.
The greatest evidence that Rodriguez hadn’t used a banned substance in the three years he was purportedly a Bosch client, his side argued in the hearing, was science itself. Since 2010, Rodriguez had been tested by MLB for banned drugs twelve times. On none of those instances had he tested positive.
Team A-Rod also railed that he was being unfairly punished in comparison to the suspensions levied against Bosch’s other clients—an argument Rodriguez quickly lost. Since the other Biogenesis clients had all negotiated “nonprecedential” settlements with MLB, Horowitz said the length of their suspensions couldn’t be considered.
As the opening statements wrapped up, in the afternoon of the first day of the hearing, Anthony Bosch strolled in. With his hair neatly trimmed and stubble scoured from his cheeks, the steroid dealer cleaned up nice. Bosch was the star witness for MLB and ultimately the only witness of much significance to the arbitrator’s ruling.
As MLB attorney Howard Ganz asked questions, Bosch told the story of his Belizean education, his pseudomedical work in Texas and Florida, and his aspirations, through Biogenesis, to “build a nutritional consulting practice with an emphasis on clinical nutrition, research, education, and product development.” His testimony was his grandiose notebook scrawlings come to life.
Then he told how, through Bosch’s clients Oggi Velazquez and then Yuri Sucart, Alex Rodriguez had tried one of his testosterone troches and fallen in love with its “explosive effect.”
In explicit detail, Bosch described his three-year dalliance with the Yankees’ third baseman, one of meeting in a bathroom at a Miami Starbucks and using a service elevator in an Atlanta hotel room and supplying Rodriguez with HGH and peptides during his dismal Detroit playoff series.
As MLB attorneys painstakingly entered notebook pages, doping protocols, and BlackBerry and text messages into evidence, Bosch verified and explained the materials. He described to Horowitz his and Rodriguez’s bumbling virtual spy game of transparent codes and text-messaged questions as to “pink” and piss tests.
As Bosch’s testimony wore on, the former hockey brawler Tacopina got agitated. During a bathroom break, according to a person who was at the hearing, Tacopina asked Ganz how much longer Bosch was expected to monopolize the witness stand.
Probably another day and a half, Tacopina was told. “We’ll have to recall him in October, then,” Tacopina said of Bosch, before taking a jab at the fact that a grand jury in Florida was reportedly investigating Bosch. “That’s if he’s still at liberty.”
“Yeah, well, if he goes down, everyone’s going down!” shot back Julio Ayala, Bosch’s attorney and longtime friend. They jawed at each other some more, and suddenly Tacopina and Ayala were in each other’s faces. “Keep talking, tough guy!” the source says Tacopina yelled. Only senior citizen Ganz saved the conference room full of attorneys from turning into a brawl, jumping between Tacopina and Ayala, with his hair wild and tie askew.
More attorneys restrained the men before any blows were thrown.
Bosch and Rodriguez missed the scuffle because they were—not for the first time, according to Bosch’s testimony—in the bathroom together.
• • •
Each night, Tony Bosch returned to the New York hotel room where he was holed up for weeks. He was scared to leave and too stressed out to talk to anyone.
When the arbitration began, Bosch was a conflicted mess, says his longtime friend Hernan Dominguez, who traveled to New York to stay with Bosch during parts of the process: “He felt like he was doing something wrong by testifying against this guy.”
At first, Bosch felt no anger toward his former client Rodriguez and blamed only Porter Fischer and others for putting him in a situation where he had to snitch. “He has a lot of guilt because he feels he didn’t bring this down on himself,” says Dominguez. “This was brought on by his disgruntled business partners.”
But then it was Rodriguez’s turn to cross-examine Bosch. That lasted two full days. Rodriguez’s attorneys grilled him about the deal he had struck with MLB, with the league protecting him and his family from civil litigation, vouching for him to criminal prosecutors, and rewarding him with financial remuneration including a $2,400-a-day security retainer.
It was the same argument most any defendant makes in court when confronted by a snitch: suggesting that the witness has enough at stake to fabricate testimony.
Then Team A-Rod attempted to attack Bosch’s character. The attorneys asked Bosch about his use of forged prescriptions. They asked him who was his wholesale source for the banned and illegal substances. They tried to snare Bosch into talking about the high school students he supplied, those clients in the notebooks with “HS” written next to their names.
He asked about Bosch’s alleged cocaine habit. He wondered whether Bosch had declared all that income he’d received from Rodriguez and other cash clients. Team A-Rod was trying to drive home a point: How could Horowitz trust a man who made his living selling banned and illegal substances?
Bosch’s guilt began to fade. Whatever happened, he thought to himself, Alex Rodriguez would still be one of the richest athletes in the world. He’d still have beautiful women throwing themselves at his feet. Bosch was penniless and facing jail time, all for helping him out. And now Rodriguez was sliming his name in attacks that were leaking out to tabloids?
“By the third or the fourth or the fifth day when they’d been treating him so badly, he started to think, ‘Why am I taking the hit here?’” Dominguez says. “A-Rod is still going to his mansion. And Tony is left with lawsuits and a criminal grand jury.”
He actually started to enjoy himself. Four little words became his best friend: I plead the Fifth.
• • •
Rodriguez’s attorneys were furious. Bosch had readily answered all of Manfred’s interrogatories. Now he refused to respond to any questions they posed, hiding behind the Fifth Amendment.
It was clearly a premeditated strategy. Team A-Rod argued that all of Bosch’s testimony should be stricken if he pleaded the Fifth to any question. Horowitz rejected that argument.
By October 4, when Bosch’s testimony finally ended on the fifth day of arbitration, Rodriguez felt he was being thwarted at every turn. He believed the arbitrator was in MLB’s pocket, afraid to receive the same payback termination as Shyam Das.
His vociferous legal team felt confined even by the flimsy gag order, which kept them from openly airing their grievances with the press and Rodriguez’s fans. Team A-Rod had so many complaints to share with the world.
That night, Alex Rodriguez filed two lawsuits. The first, in Bronx County, was against Yankees doctor Christopher Ahmad and New York�
��Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center. The ongoing case (as of April 2014) accuses Ahmad of hiding the results of the October 2012 MRI, as Rodriguez struggled in the playoffs, without informing him of the labral tear in his left hip. Ahmad “knowingly cleared [Rodriguez] to resume playing as a third baseman for the New York Yankees during the . . . playoffs, thus allowing [Rodriguez] to further injure himself and the necessity for additional surgeries,” according to the legal complaint.
The lawsuit goes to the edge of conspiracy. His e-mails with Randy Levine, and his claim that the Yankees president had said that the team “would rather Alex never step on the baseball field” after the hip injury, leaped over that precipice. Rodriguez is convinced that the Yankees had purposely attempted to injure him.
The second legal action, this one initially filed in a Manhattan courthouse, was against Bud Selig and Major League Baseball. It accused baseball of filing a “sham” lawsuit in Miami-Dade County; attempting to breach his attorney-client privilege by probing whether Michael Sitrick leaked the Braun documents to Yahoo! Sports; leaking negative stories in violation of union rules; and buying, harassing, intimidating, and pressuring its way through Florida in order to bury A-Rod.
This lawsuit was A-Rod’s Ginsbergian “Howl,” his poetic recitation of the injustices inflicted on him as a result of baseball’s malice since the Biogenesis news story broke.
He had been dropped from the Yankees-themed animated film Henry & Me, even though “he had already performed his own voice work for his character as the team’s hero,” the suit lamented. Nike and Toyota had ended sponsorship negotiations. In one claim, Alex Rodriguez made the case that he was a wronged small-business owner, MLB’s leaks and premature allegations ruining “his good name and reputation” and interfering with his construction company and Houston-area Mercedes-Benz dealership.
One section of the complaint was titled “The Disastrous Tenure of Commissioner Selig.” With admirable narrative tension, Rodriguez’s attorneys dug back thirty years, from villain Bud Selig’s “scheme to collude” as an owner to his “contentious and damaging failures” as a commissioner, including overseeing the Steroid Era.
