THE END IS NEAR!
May have seen last of A-Rod after year-long suspension
Alex Rodriguez goes down swinging as arbiter bans Yankee for entire 2014 season, plus playoffs, longest PED suspension in MLB history.
HE’S OUT.
Alex Rodriguez, once Major League Baseball’s biggest star, was slammed Saturday with an historic drug suspension that encompasses all of the 2014 season, including the postseason, and will cost the Yankee third baseman $25 million in this year’s salary and possibly the remainder of his starcrossed career.
The ban comes after a year of vicious attacks on Major League Baseball and the Yankees, public denials that he acquired massive amounts of performance-enhancing drugs from a seedy Miami dope den, and millions in legal bills from a team of high-profile lawyers, crisis managers and private investigators.
Arbitrator Fredric Horowitz struck the 14-time All-Star and three-time Most Valuable Player with the 162-game suspension, plus the offseason, in an endorsement of MLB’s accusations that Rodriguez scored an array of PEDs from Biogenesis, a nowshuttered Miami-area anti-aging clinic operated by Anthony Bosch, in clear violation of the game’s collectively bargained drug program.
Rodriguez’s camp announced the suspension — the longest drug ban in the history of the program — Saturday morning in a long statement in which he denied having used performance-enhancing drugs in the period in question and called the ruling an “injustice,” invoking what he called a “threat to guaranteed contracts,” and vowing to take the fight to federal court.
He also threatened to show up for spring training, theoretically a possibility depending on how Horowitz’s ruling is interpreted since the ban encompasses the regular and postseason and doesn’t specifically mention spring training. If he does appear at the Yankees’ Tampa complex, however, the club would likely send him across the street to the minor league camp.
“The number of games sadly comes as no surprise, as the deck has been stacked against me from day one,” said Rodriguez, who will be close to 40 years old when he is eligible to return. “This is one man’s decision, that was not put before a fair and impartial jury, does not involve me having failed a single drug test, is at odds with the facts and is inconsistent with the terms of the Joint Drug Agreement and the Basic Agreement, and relies on testimony and documents that would never have been allowed in any court in the United States because they are false and wholly unreliable.
“I have been clear that I did not use performance enhancing substances as alleged in the notice of discipline, or violate the Basic Agreement or the Joint Drug Agreement in any manner, and in order to prove it I will take this fight to federal court,” he continued. “No player should have to go through what I have been dealing with, and I am exhausting all options to ensure not only that I get justice, but that players’ contracts and rights are protected through the next round of bargaining, and that the MLB investigation and arbitration process cannot be used against others in the future the way it is currently being used to unjustly punish me.”
MLB, the Players’ Association and the Yankees cited their respect for the arbitration process.
“The MLBPA strongly disagrees with the award issued today in the grievance of Alex Rodriguez, even despite the Arbitration Panel’s decision to reduce the duration of Mr. Rodriguez’s unprecedented 211-game suspension,” the union said in a statement. “We recognize that a final and binding decision has been reached, however, and we respect the collectively bargained arbitration process which led to the decision.”
MLB said that while it believed the original 211-game suspension was appropriate, “we respect the decision rendered by the panel and will focus on our continuing efforts on eliminating performance-enhancing substances from our game.” The Yankees said they respect the joint program, the arbi
tration pro-
cess, and “the decision released today by the arbitration panel.”
Bosch said through his spokeswoman that he, too, respects the arbitrator’s decision. “Tony Bosch doesn’t take joy in seeing Alex Rodriguez suspended from baseball, but he believes the arbitrator’s decision was appropriate,” his statement read. “He 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.”
For the 38-year-old Rodriguez, the ruling could represent a death blow to his already PED-tainted career, even though the decision by Horowitz reduces the ban baseball commissioner Bud Selig imposed in August and is based on non-analytical evidence — Rodriguez has not failed a drug test since baseball’s 2003 survey testing year. He clearly will not take that small victory as a sensible stopping point in his legal crusade, however, and will continue his battle despite the odds against a judge interfering with a ruling issued under binding arbitration.
Rodriguez has already commenced a lawsuit against the league and others he claims have conspired to frame him as the most tainted ballplayer since Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens. He may also find himself heavily involved in the federal investigation into Bosch and Biogenesis out of southern Florida, a probe that has already resulted in investigators interviewing players linked to the clinic.
Horow itz’s decision comes about seven weeks after Rodriguez stormed out of his grievance hearing on Nov. 20, professing that he had been treated unfairly. The
walkout saved him at the last minute from going under oath with denials.
The ruling wraps up a tumultuous process that began Aug. 5, the day Selig banned Rodriguez for doping and interfering with MLB’s Biogenesis probe. While Rodriguez immediately elected arbitration, more than a dozen other players implicated in the scandal accepted their bans. Most of them have already served 50-game suspensions (Milwaukee Brewers outfielder Ryan Braun accepted a 65-game ban) and are now free to take the field in spring training.
The arbitration process was a slow-motion disaster for Rodriguez, the best-paid player in baseball and once its biggest star. Evidence in the case suggests Rodriguez continued using steroids and human growth hormone long after he vowed he was clean — even after his relationship with Canadian HGH guru Anthony Galea embroiled Rodriguez in the federal grand jury probe that made Galea a felon.
The voluminous text messages and detailed descriptions of an extremely close relationship between Rodriguez and Bosch were apparently too persuasive to allow Horowitz to significantly reduce the suspension. “The 211 games made sense when Selig issued it,” said one source of MLB’s original suspension, “because they wanted him out of the game in 2013, too. But this is validation of their program. Of all the guys that were suspended, he was the biggest violator.”
Rodriguez’s involvement with Bosch and Biogenesis also destroyed his relationship with the Yankees — he has sued Yankee team doctor Christopher Ahmad, accusing him of misdiagnosing a hip injury that led to surgery last January — and may have tor pedoed any lingering hope Rodriguez had of getting into the Hall of Fame.
“He would have been better off admitting he got drugs from Bosch and (if he had) tried to make a case for 50 games as a first-time violator,” said a baseball source who has closely followed the case.
Instead, Rodriguez publicly denied a relationship with Bosch, at one point describing him as a “consultant,” and escalated his attacks on the arbitration process.
By Nov. 20, after claiming to be outraged that Selig wouldn’t be forced by Horowitz to testify, A-Rod walked out of the negotiating session, hopped into a waiting car and headed straight to the studio of radio host Mike Francesa, where Rodriguez adamantly denied doping beyond the years in which he has already confessed to using steroids (2001-03, when he was with Texas).
Those claims contradicted voluminous evidence of drug use, including a stream of electronic communication between Rodriguez and Bosch, who authenticated the messages while testifying at MLB’s behest during the arbitration and is believed to have provided detailed descriptions of injections gone awry, schemes to avoid the drug testers and records of payments for drugs.
That testimony was in contrast to claims by Joe Tacopina, the bombastic attorney A-Rod hired to lead an army of lawyers to fight the ban, that Rodriguez didn’t deserve a single inning of suspension. Tacopina worked hard to reframe the Biogenesis scandal as a story about MLB’s anti-doping enforcement tactics even as Rodriguez’s team put on a limited defense of their client in the arbitration room.
Meanwhile, MLB was presenting the results of the most intense investigation in the history of its drug program. The Biogenesis scandal had erupted in the summer of 2012, soon after MLB banned former Yankee Melky Cabrera, who tested positive for testosterone and then orchestrated a bizarre cover-up scheme that involved a fake website. Cabrera was also a Biogenesis customer.
MLB’s Department of Investigations deployed numerous agents and resources during its monthslong probe, and ultimately 14 professional baseball players were suspended in the case. Among them was Braun, the Brewers star who successfully appealed a 50-game ban after testing positive for synthetic testosterone in 2011 but later confessed when his name surfaced in media reports as a Biogenesis client. He accepted a 65-game ban.
Bosch was only faintly familiar in baseball circles when the Daily News first reported A-Rod’s association with Bosch and MLB’s interest in him on Jan. 26, 2013, three days before a Miami New Times report linked Rodriguez and numerous other baseball players to doping through Bosch and his Biogenesis anti-aging clinic.
When the New Times report was published, Rodriguez’s name was the biggest in the litter, and it came on the heels of the slugger’s second hip surgery in four years. Enmeshed in the most extensive doping scandal since BALCO, Rodriguez was banished from his team while he rehabbed the hip and dealt with the fallout from Biogenesis. His PR flack at the time issued a statement saying the documents published in the New Times were “not legitimate.”
The Biogenesis investigation represented an unprecedented step by Selig, who had been accused of turning a blind eye to steroid use during the 1990s and early 2000s, to clean up a game that has been hit hard by performance-enhancing drugs.
MLB used every means at its disposal to bring the players it believed were using PEDs to justice, filing what was considered to be a longshot lawsuit against Bosch and others involved in Biogenesis, and purchasing damaging Biogenesis documents from Bosch’s associates. Without subpoena power, MLB faced an uphill battle in convincing witnesses to cooperate — but once the lawsuit was filed, and the defendants’ lawyers’ fees began to pile up, the wall of silence crumbled.
Bosch became a cooperating witness after MLB agreed to drop him from the lawsuit, pick up his legal bills and indemnify him as long as he provided them with credible evidence and information.
Now it looks likely that the 38-year-old third baseman will be near 40 by the time he is allowed back on the field, assuming his health allows him to return. The Yankees still owe him about $60 million on a contract that expires in 2017 but Rodriguez has endured two hip surgeries in the last five years, including one last January, and is markedly diminished as a player.
If he heads to court, as he says he will, Rodriguez faces millions more in legal fees and the prospect of having to testify. As one source told The News last week: “It’s great to feign outrage and file something. But once the ball starts rolling, you could lead yourself into criminal exposure. Is he going to testify that he never got performanceenhancing drugs?”