A-rod gets an A for doping, greed, and self-delusion
WHEN New York Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez was banned for 211 games for contravening baseball’s rules against performance-enhancing drugs this week, the only people springing to his defence were his own highly paid lawyers.
A-Rod’s story is a complex tale, not only of greed and venality (though the figures involved are mind-boggling), but of wasted talent, selfdelusion and the absence of ethics.
On Monday, baseball commissioner Bud Selig announced that 13 players would be suspended in connection with the Biogenesis Clinic investigation. A dozen of those received 50-game bans.
The 13th, matching the number he wears on his Yankees jersey, was Rodriguez. His ban, which will take in the rest of this season and all of 2014, was harsher because, as they say, he has previous.
Rodriguez first hit the headlines as a supremely gifted teenage shortstop. He was the first 18-year-old to play in the big leagues for 35 years. There has been none since.
A move to the Texas Rangers made him among the highest-paid players in baseball, with a contract worth $252-million. But not even A-Rod’s sublime natural skills — or the steroids he later admitted to using during this period — could make up for the lack of talent around him.
The Yankees, going through a rare World Series drought, offered to take him off the Rangers’ hands in 2004. In an example of bad business sense that was later mirrored in their stewardship of Liverpool, Rangers owners Tom Hicks and George Gillett offloaded A-Rod, but not his contract. They continued to pay up to a million dollars a week to the player for years as he played for an opponent.
In 2007, Rodriguez signed a $275million deal with the Yankees, taking him to age 42. The two contracts remain baseball’s biggest yet.
And he seemed worth it. He was on track to become the greatest player the game had ever seen, with records for home-runs, number of hits and runs batted in seemingly his to achieve.
Since that second 10-year deal was signed, Rodriguez has admitted to doping while at Texas; he’s persisted in having in his personal entourage a man banned from baseball for carrying around a bag of steroids; he’s allegedly been involved in illegal poker games and he’s spent more time on the entertainment pages than the sports ones with flings with Madonna, Kate Hudson and Cameron Diaz.
The Yankees — who last year sued to protect their copyright to call
Whatever drugs — allegedly steroids and human growth hormone — he might have been given, they could not overcome the effects of ageing and hubris
themselves “the Evil Empire” — might have been willing to turn a blind eye to these excesses had Rodriguez been any good on the field.
But he has been awful, with statistics across all categories plummeting on those occasions he’s been fit enough to take the field.
Whatever drugs he might have received from Biogenesis — steroids and human growth hormone are the ones alleged by clinic founder Anthony Bosch — they could not overcome the effects of ageing and hubris.
When dropped for poor performances during last year’s post-season, Rodriguez spent his time on the bench writing his phone number on bats and handing them out to attractive Australian tourists at a game.
His other misdemeanours include being called a slumlord for the woeful maintenance record at housing complexes he owns and making several onfield plays that come close to breaking baseball’s unwritten behaviour code.
His insistence on returning to the club this year after hip surgery and despite poor performances in warmup games infuriated the Yankees to the extent that their normally unflappable GM Brian Cashman tweeted that he wanted A-Rod to just “shut the f*ck up”.
After Yankee doctors delayed his return by another few weeks for a thigh injury, Rodriguez found another doctor — one he had never met and who recently had been fined $40 000 for allowing a staffer to illegally distribute steroids — to refute the club’s diagnosis.
In deciding to fight the 211-game ban, Rodriguez has made several counter-claims. He says the bigger ban is intrinsically unfair, that commissioner Selig, who is due to step down soon, is making a scapegoat of him after having ignored doping for decades and that the Yankees are trying to void the $80-million they still owe on his contract.
But it’s a measure of how far Alex Rodriguez has moved from reality, that he says he is the “pink elephant in the room”.
Doping might be an issue baseball is not willing to confront, but only ARod sees pink elephants.