Bosch on Alex: He was juiced to hit 800 HRs
DESPERATE TO regain the lofty status he once held as the game’s best player, Alex Rodriguez turned to a shady Miami drug dealer in 2010 and the two began a doping program that would include clandestine meetings, complicated regimens and injections of steroids, insulin and supplements, and ultimately, a historic suspension from the game he sought to rule.
The CBS news program “60 Minutes” will air the results of its ninemonth i nve s t igation into the Biogenesis doping scandal Sunday night, including interviews with the chief witness against Rodriguez, Anthony Bosch, and MLB’s chief operating officer, Rob Manfred.
Among the bombshell revelations in the report is an exchange between Bosch and reporter Scott Pelley in which Bosch helps shed light on the motives of the player once considered a lock for Cooperstown and a challenger to the game’s most hallowed statistic, the all-time home run record of 762, currently owned by Barry Bonds.
BOSCH: “Alex cared. Alex wanted to know. He would study the product. He would study the substances. He would study the dosages, because he wanted to achieve all his human performance or in this case, sports performance, objectives. And the most important one was the 800 home run club.”
PELLEY: “The 800 home run club?”
BOSCH: “Which was only going to have one member. Alex Rodriguez.”
The “60 Minutes” report will also delve into the relationship between Rodriguez and Bosch, whose validation of as many as 500 Blackberry messages between the men was the linchpin of MLB’s case and a large basis of arbitrator Fredric Horowitz’s ruling. Bosch knew Rodriguez’s proclivities, his habits, his behavior, his desire to win — and not get caught.
The Daily News has also obtained text messages that describe a secretive Rodriguez and an accommodating Bosch, who often delivered the substances to Rodriguez at his home or his hotel.
“Try to use service elevators. Careful. Tons of eyes,” Rodriguez told Bosch in one Blackberry BBM message the day before he hit his 23rd grand slam, tying Lou Gehrig’s record in June 2012 in Atlanta.
In a spring training game in April 2012, in which he drove in three runs, A-Rod texted Bosch with what they both appeared to believe was good news.
A-ROD: “Really good. Explosive.”
BOSCH: “Go with same protocol.”
The “60 Minutes” segment also reveals how much it cost Rodriguez to do business with Bosch — $12,000 a month, according to the report — and says that Bosch personally injected Rodriguez because “Alex is scared of needles, so at times, he would ask me to inject.”
Pelley and the show’s investigative team also delve into the shadowy underworld surrounding Bosch, including the cast of characters who sold Biogenesis documents to Rodriguez and, ultimately, Major League Baseball.
In Pelley’s interview, Bosch says Rodriguez’s associates intimidated him to try to prevent him from cooperating with MLB in its investigation, a claim Manfred took seriously.
“The concerns seemed credible, particularly given that he identified individuals that we had our own concerns about,” Manfred told Pelley, who pressed Manfred about the arrangement MLB made with Bosch to pay his legal fees and provide him with security in exchange for truthful information. “The credibility of any witness is determined by… looking the individual in the eye, listening to the story he tells and then lining it up with the other evidence. And frankly, nobody came in and contradicted what Mr. Bosch said.”