America’s asterisk pastime
Only a ‘Screwball’ would let A-Rod buy Mets
The Alex Rodriguez Redemption Tour has gone remarkably well. He’s the central figure on ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball broadcast. His admirable TV show, “Back in the Game,” features A-Rod trying to help athletes and other entertainers who blew their fortunes to develop financial literacy in order to get back on track. He’s with J.Lo. Who doesn’t love J.Lo?
Channel surf and you won’t have to wait long for A-Rod and/or J.Lo to pop onto your screen in a flattering way.
Now take that remote, press the “Netflix” button, dial up “Screwball,” watch it from beginning to end, and then ask yourself this question: Should we completely buy the Alex Rodriguez Redemption Tour (ARRT), or suspect that it could be the equivalent of slapping a fresh coat of shiny paint on rotting wood?
“Screwball,” an entertaining, provocative, intelligent documentary directed by Billy Corben in which scenes are reenacted with child actors, takes the viewer on a trip in direct contrast with the ARRT. It’s a tour of the seedy Miami underworld that facilitated Rodriguez’s suspension (reduced from 211 games to 162) from Major League Baseball by supplying him with banned Performance Enhancing Drugs.
It’s worth a watch particularly now, with MLB mired in an electronic sign-stealing scandal that delivered the 2017 World Series title to the unrepentant Astros and has MLB investigating the 2018 Red Sox, also World Series champions. It’s especially worth watching because Rodriguez and fiance Jennifer Lopez have looked into heading a group to purchase the Mets.
But if the time comes when MLB has to decide whether to approve an ownership group put together by A-Rod, know this: The ARRT does not amount to a second chance. Alex already asked for that in a February 2009 clip that was included in “Screwball.”
After denying for years that he ever cheated with steroids, A-Rod finally told the truth after Sports Illustrated broke the story of him having flunked a test in 2003, six years earlier.
“The only thing I can ask for is to judge me from this day forward,” A-Rod said in February 2009.
And well after that day, records from Biogen that MLB got its hands on after one of its investigators handed a man $100,000 in cash in a briefcase at a diner, revealed A-Rod was a regular client of the PED supplier.
A-Rod was one of 13 players suspended because their names were in the records. A-Rod was the only one to fight the suspension and in fact sued MLB. Not just that, he accused MLB of paying PED dealer/fake doctor Anthony Bosch $5 million to fabricate stories about A-Rod purchasing banned substances, a charge denied emphatically by commissioner Rob Manfred. A-Rod, who by the way, according to “Screwball,” had purchased a copy of the Biogen records for $10,000 before MLB got its hands on them, eventually dropped the lawsuit and served the suspension. Sadly, Biogen records revealed numerous high school athletes as clients, which eventually was what landed Bosch in prison.
Bosch first was linked to baseball when Manny Ramirez flunked a PED test while under his care. Manny, Bosch explains, flunked it because he didn’t follow the fake doctor’s orders and injected testosterone on a game day and was tested that day, instead of injecting the juice on an off day.
Interestingly, Bosch said in the documentary that when he roomed with Ramirez on Red Sox road trips, Manny asked him to read him bedtime stories because that helped him get to sleep: Manny being Manny.
A-Rod being A-Rod is more complicated. His history of mendacity ought to give MLB pause about wanting him as the owner of one of its 30 franchises. Owning an MLB team has a public-trust aspect to it. You really do have to act in the best interests of not only yourself, but your community. And if the public can’t trust the owner, what are the chances that it will work out well?
If you’re struggling to answer that question, invest 144 minutes of your time, roughly about how long it takes to watch seven innings, into viewing “Screwball” and you just might find that the answer comes into clearer focus.
Doesn’t baseball have enough to worry about right now with the sign-stealing scandal raging, too-long games, and labor negotiations looming (the agreement expires after 2021) without bringing one of the faces of the steroid scandal back into such a prominent role? It feels too soon. Let’s give the redemption tour more time to breathe.
No fewer than 607 billionaires live in the United States, according to US News & World Report. Surely, one of them would be interested in buying the the Mets, whose humbling beginnings had their first manager answer the question of why he used their first selection of the 1961 expansion draft to select catcher Hobie Landrith thusly: “You have to have a catcher or the ball will roll all the way to the backstop.”