by Tim Elfrink
When Rodriguez’s reduced suspension was announced, Bosch’s publicist released a statement in which the narcotics-peddling unlicensed medical practitioner was recast as a benevolent guru. “[Bosch] is glad to have the arbitration behind him and believes he can play a valuable role in the future by educating athletes about the dangers of performance-enhancing drugs,” read the statement.
Bosch’s predecessors in baseball steroid-dealing notoriety managed to turn their name recognition into niche profits. Kirk Radomski’s EPSG Labs peddles supplement pills promising “no crash.” Victor Conte’s SNAC sells a variety of supplements through a website that bills him as “BALCO’s Mastermind” and brags: “ESPN ranks Victor Conte the #1 pioneering sports scientist!” (The ESPN The Magazine article referenced was facetious.)
And Florida state records reveal that, even as Rodriguez was still fighting for his career on Park Avenue, Bosch was already laying the foundation for his new business empire. On November 18, Bosch’s longtime attorney, Julio Ayala, incorporated the Miami-based Biogenesis Supplements Inc.
Sure, like Radomski and Conte, before Bosch can cash in on providing high-profile clients with illegal drugs, he’ll first have to deal with the accompanying criminal fallout. But in a strange way, the catastrophe had accomplished exactly what he’d always wanted. He was famous, every bit as well known as his old cousin Orlando, and his crimes weren’t half as bad as the Cuban terrorist’s. Who’s to say he couldn’t rehabilitate his image and turn that infamy into profit? “He’s going to figure it out,” says Hernan Dominguez of his friend Bosch. “He’ll make lemonade out of lemons.”
Maybe he could turn those pages of handwritten notes about yachts, offshore corporations, and product lines into a reality. Maybe he’ll finally get around to quit smoking. (Not being a doctor, though—that dream’s probably scrapped for good, at least in the United States.)
More turbulence lies ahead, he knows: a possible prison sentence, civil litigation, and those never-ending child support bills. But perhaps also a tell-all memoir, maybe a film treatment where he’s played by a famous movie star, whole new worlds of revenue that he couldn’t have predicted in his most fantastical notebook scribblings.
The world, he knows, won’t soon forget the name Tony Bosch.
EPILOGUE
* * *
The Cost of War
How much money did Major League Baseball spend to unravel the Biogenesis scandal?
Even under oath, the man who personally directed the response to Tony Bosch’s doping ring can’t answer that question. “I couldn’t give you a good estimate,” Rob Manfred admitted when Joe Tacopina grilled him on the stand during Alex Rodriguez’s arbitration hearing.
Some of the numbers are easy enough to add up. Gary Jones pocketed at least $125,000 for his copies of Bosch’s notebooks and for the files stolen from Porter Fischer’s car. Manfred signed off on another $1 million–plus for Bosch’s various lawyers, including at least $700,000 to Bosch’s old friends Susy and Julio Ayala. Bosch’s round-the-clock bodyguards, meanwhile, could have set MLB back to the tune of $2,400 per day for a full calendar year, which adds up to $876,000 to keep their chief witness safe. That’s already a couple million bucks.
Then add in the truly escalating costs: the thousands of billable hours for the squadron of lawyers who prepared the arbitration case against A-Rod, the dozens of freelance investigators hired to scour South Florida, and the travel costs for the DOI’s own private eyes.
Ten million? Twenty million? Enough to pay the Miami Marlins’ starting payroll next year?
“We spent a lot of money on the investigation,” Manfred finally allowed when pushed by Tacopina. “It’s a substantial expenditure.”
• • •
The expense of Biogenesis is relevant because it leads to another question: Was it worth it?
Major League Baseball intimidated potential witnesses. Profits that came from fans buying tickets, jerseys, and Cracker Jack—and, of course, tuning in on television—became cash handed over in diners and the backs of SUVs in return for information and stolen records. The league arguably subverted the civil judicial system in order to threaten destitution against those who resisted. Baseball officials struck a deal to vouch for Anthony Bosch, a medical con man under investigation for dealing narcotics to minors because his cooperation helped baseball “achieve the important public policy goal” of eradicating PEDs from the game. It’s a goal that seemed to mean little to the “Man from Milwaukee,” Bud Selig, in the late 1990s when steroid-jacked home runs were fueling baseball’s comeback from labor strife.
All of this to punish fifteen professional baseball players who used banned substances in order to resurrect fading careers, achieve their dreams of a lasting tenure in the big leagues, recovery quickly from injury, and—in the case of one player in particular—hammer his way into the record books as the greatest slugger who ever lived.
More than any of the others, Alex Rodriguez’s saga explains, oddly enough, both why the Biogenesis suspensions are important and why they may have little effect. The suspensions mean a lot to the press, to the fans, and to Selig’s legacy. They’ve destroyed players’ reputations, in some cases permanently. But, when it comes to what might be most important to a player, his salary, and his future? They often mean very little. Rodriguez’s suspension through 2014 will cost him $22,131,147 in salary. Only his tax man knows exactly how much he spent on Joe Tacopina and scads of other attorneys, as well as private investigators and crisis management flaks. Then there were the purchases, such as the six figures he dropped to buy the text messages and Valentine Dan Mullin exchanged with Lorraine Delgadillo, evidence of a love tryst that ended up playing no role in arbitrator Fredric Horowitz’s decision.
Nobody sets aflame more than $30 million without feeling the loss. Not even Rodriguez, who flipped his Miami Beach mansion for a $15 million profit in the midst of the investigation. But in the financial equation involving steroids, Rodriguez probably came out ahead.
His record-breaking contracts were a direct result of supreme power numbers in a career in which steroids were an omnipresent crutch. This is particularly true in the case of the contract extension he signed following his 2007 MVP season, when his agent “hijacked” the World Series broadcast with news of his opt-out, and the New York Yankees rewarded him with a new deal worth at least $275 million.
That’s a deal only a three-time MVP would receive. And though the sports world didn’t know it at the time, at least two of those times were tainted by PEDs. In 2003, he had used a steroid provided by his cousin. In 2007, immediately before receiving the contract extension, he had been permitted by the league to use the “mother of all anabolics,” as Manfred put it: testosterone.
The math is straightforward. Rodriguez would have been paid $81 million to play through the remaining three years of his original contract. Instead, the extension locked him in for an additional $194 million. If he can hit six more career home runs following his potential return in 2015, tying Willie Mays at 660 and triggering the first of his $6 million milestone bonuses, that number will be exactly $200 million.
Subtract $35 million for the estimated lost salary and expenses that Rodriguez blew battling his suspension, and the profit from the extension he signed on the strength of steroid-fueled statistics is still $165 million.
Until they build a steroid exhibit in Cooperstown, A-Rod will never be in the Hall of Fame. Surely that hurts a thirty-eight-year-old kid whose love of baseball has never been questioned. But it doesn’t take his good friend Warren Buffett to figure that, financially, juicing was likely a good deal for Rodriguez. No MLB suspension will strip him of those massive profits made from steroid-fueled power production.
On a relatively smaller scale, the same equation has proven true for many of the players linked to Biogenesis.
Ryan Braun signed his own five-year, $105 million extension to his existing eight-year, $45 million deal early in April 2011. At the time, he was
baseball’s squeaky-clean superstar. That was the season in which Braun won an MVP award and also failed a PED test. After the twenty-one-month battle in which he lied, smeared an innocent MLB subcontractor, and exploited a loophole that caused an arbitrator to be fired, Braun’s decision to finally accept a sixty-five-game suspension was a financial no-brainer. He lost just over $3 million. But he had signed contracts worth $150 million since college.
Call it the 2 percent steroid tax. Even Mitt Romney can’t get that rate.
Melky Cabrera resurrected his career on Bosch’s regimen. In 2010, the former top Yankees prospect had been released by the Atlanta Braves. That’s when he started working out with Rodriguez in Miami, and soon afterward met Bosch. He was on Major League Baseball’s fringe, signing a relatively middling $1.25 million deal with the Kansas City Royals the next season. Then he broke out that season and the next for the Royals and the San Francisco Giants, signing a $6 million deal in 2012 and being named MVP of that season’s All-Star Game. His suspension in August of that year cost him $1.85 million in salary. He still made more money that year than he had in any season in his career. (Additionally, despite not playing in the World Series, he still received a $300,000-plus share from the Giants’ championship win.) Following the aborted season, he signed a $16 million, two-year deal with the Toronto Blue Jays.
Jhonny Peralta, whose annual pay was $6 million, forfeited $1.6 million due to his suspension in 2013, the only season in his career in which he batted over .300. He returned to play the hero in the postseason, including belting a three-run home run to lead his Detroit Tigers to a pivotal Game Four victory over the Oakland Athletics in the Division Series. At thirty-one years old, he then signed the monster contract of his career, with the St. Louis Cardinals agreeing to pay him $53 million over four years.
It’s the biggest contract ever awarded to a player previously punished for PED use, and it sparked immediate backlash among players like relief pitcher David Aardsma, who vented on Twitter. “Nothing pisses me off more than guys that cheat and get raises for doing so,” Aardsma wrote.
Bartolo Colon more than tripled his salary post-Biogenesis, signing a $20 million, two-year contract with the New York Mets at age forty following the 2013 season. After a career full of injuries, Nelson Cruz finally stayed healthy for the Texas Rangers in 2012 and 2013 after hooking up with Bosch. He was suspended in the latter year, but then signed an $8 million deal with the Baltimore Orioles for 2014.
The list goes on. For established millionaires like Rodriguez, Braun, Cabrera, Peralta, and Colon, new contracts spawned by improved production through PEDs mean only more zeros in already-burgeoning bank accounts. But for younger players, especially those from Third World countries, that extra edge as MLB scouts study their performance can mean escape from a life in poverty.
Bosch told MLB officials he didn’t give PEDs to Ricardo Cespedes, the then–fifteen-year-old Dominican prospect whose name shows up in his notebooks, in particular his angry note to Juan Carlos Nunez. Perhaps Bosch’s reticence stems from his not wanting to implicate himself in dealing to a minor. Either way, the $725,000 bonus the Mets gave Cespedes in August 2013, on his sixteenth birthday, was enough to enable the teenager to provide his family with a whole new way of life.
There is one tactic that might derail the financial equation driving players to juice: teams being allowed to cancel lucrative contracts if those players are caught using PEDs. But, as the Yankees are aware in the case of Rodriguez, the league’s drug policy with the union bars that. “All authority to discipline Players for violations of the Program shall repose with the Commissioner’s Office,” reads the agreement. “No Club may take any disciplinary or adverse action against a Player (including, but not limited to, a fine, suspension, or any adverse action pursuant to a Uniform Player’s Contract) because of a Player’s violation of the Program.”
Player contracts sometimes include “morals clauses,” allowing teams to void the deals in certain circumstances, but the language is often vague. The union is known to fight any contract broken due to such a clause.
Rodriguez referred to potential changes in the way that the agreement between the league and the union allows teams to handle PED punishment when he said, after his unsuccessful arbitration, that he was fighting so “that players’ contracts and rights are protected through the next round of bargaining.”
But despite the fact that Biogenesis-linked players have signed big-money contracts after the suspensions, there’s no question that the scandal did represent a seismic change in MLB’s attitude. For the first time in a history stretching from the Pittsburgh drug trials to Jose Canseco to Mark McGwire, MLB attacked rather than ignored a mass drug ring in its midst. It did so with a mostly unified front. The union didn’t balk at the bulk of the suspensions handed down. The owners didn’t pressure the commissioner to ignore the problem. The Department of Investigations, created based on explicit recommendations by Senator George Mitchell, got the evidence needed to suspend the players involved. And when one of the targets went ballistic and attacked the system itself, the arbitration process ultimately upheld the commissioner’s judgment.
Part of the reason the MLBPA didn’t bring a ferocious fight to the league concerning Biogenesis punishment may be because the union was attempting to stem the bleeding of its power. The union showed in its blocking of Alex Rodriguez’s 2003 trade to the Red Sox that a reduced contract is the one thing that must never happen.
Players losing seasons or portions of seasons of salary due to negotiated and arbitrated suspensions is one matter. Teams claiming ignorance of players’ PED proclivities and then canceling contracts when it’s convenient—as in the case with Rodriguez and the Yankees—is quite another.
New MLPBA executive director Tony Clark, who took over for the deceased Michael Weiner in December 2013, has said “we will never end up in a world where player contracts are voided as a result” of PED violations.
• • •
It’s hard to avoid cynicism about the Biogenesis affair, with MLB spending millions to force fifteen ballplayers to miss games—just in time for Selig’s 2014 retirement tour—while changing nothing about the basic incentives that drove them to dope in the first place.
But for all the flaws and troubling developments surrounding MLB’s response to the scandal, its import as a historic turning point is undeniable. League officials are emphatic that they chased down every scrap of evidence surrounding Biogenesis, and punished every player against whom they could build a case that would hold up in arbitration. There were no free passes given out in return for cooperation, officials maintain.
Ninety-two years earlier, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, named as the game’s first commissioner partly to deal with the crisis, suspended eight players for their role in the rigged 1919 World Series. The league hadn’t completely cleansed itself of association with gamblers—just ask Pete Rose—but the message was decisive. In his response to Biogenesis, Selig was attempting a similar coda to the game’s freewheeling love affair with PEDs.
Only seven years before the baseball season that was rocked by Biogenesis, PEDs remained rampant in baseball. On April 18, 2006, PED-specializing IRS agent Jeff Novitzky followed a package of HGH through the mail to the Scottsdale doorstep of Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher Jason Grimsley. The resulting two-hour interview was just a footnote in MLB’s struggle with PEDs, but it was also the beginning of the end of a chapter. Grimsley was a client of both Brian McNamee and Kirk Radomski, whose testimonies formed the crux of the Mitchell Report, the damning investigatory document making it impossible for Selig and other league officials to ignore steroids.
Novitzky’s affidavit from his interview with Grimsley suggests that while some aspects of PED use in baseball—chief among them, the league’s official reaction—have changed, players’ dependency on the drugs and ease with which they can be purchased remains a red flag.
Grimsley talked of coffeepots in major league clubhouses being labeled “
unleaded” or “leaded,” indicating which had been spiked by amphetamines. He said former MLB player David Segui had “told him of a doctor in Florida that he was using at a ‘wellness center’ to obtain human growth hormone,” according to the affidavit. “Segui told Grimsley that he has had blood work done with this doctor.”
Grimsley told Novitzky about several players who he knew were using PEDs, and remarked that “boatloads” of major leaguers used the same source.
These days, players appear to have replaced amphetamines—or “greenies”—with legal speed. In 2013, a record 119 players were granted drug exemptions for attention deficit disorder. These exemptions, allowing players to use drugs that are otherwise banned, are of the same sort Rodriguez once received to use testosterone and clomiphene citrate. That number of ADD exemptions shows that just short of 10 percent of all major league players use Adderall, a figure that is more than double the national adult average.
Manfred has already attempted to downplay the surging ADD numbers just as league officials once attempted to downplay baseball’s steroid problem, saying that most MLB players are younger than the average American and “there’s no question attention is a key part of what these athletes do.”
The exposure of Anthony Bosch’s client rolls showed that “wellness” or “anti-aging” clinics in Florida certainly remain a draw for baseball players seeking HGH. Since HGH is extremely hard to test for, remaining detectable in the blood for only a matter of hours, and Florida’s permissive medical culture and Governor Rick Scott’s regulation-averse reign have made it the nation’s capital of the booming gray-market anti-aging industry, the state is likely to draw cheating ballplayers for years. And it’s not just baseball. Florida produced the second-most current players in the NFL in 2013, behind only California. Baseball was Bosch’s specialty, but it seems likely that Florida is home to HGH-providing clinics specializing in football and basketball as well.
