A-Rod continues to lead baseball’s race to bottom
As you may or may not know, the New York Yankees player, who is the highest paid in his sport of all time, is in the midst of an appeals process against a 211-game ban for his links to a controversial Miami clinic which went by the much too Scientology-sounding name Biogenesis.
Rodriguez was a supremely talented slugger before he became the modern day pin-up for the game’s slowly-evolving battle against performance enhancing drugs. As many have noted, both apologists and detractors, the New York-born Dominican would have cantered into the Hall of Fame without resorting to even so much as a tablet.
It’s all very sad, no matter how dislikeable an individual the man they call A-Rod comes across as at times.
But after he received word of a suspension that would rule him out of playing until 2014, if he ever managed to drag his aging hips back on to a baseball field, he defiantly appealed and faced the camera flashes with an overwrought sense of injustice.
That’s when the real fun started as the mud was slung back and forth between his team and the league on one side and his lawyers and obligatory inner circle on the other.
The plot thickened on Friday when the venerable news and current affairs weekly television institution, CBS’s Sixty Minutes, released information about their scoop that someone from the A-Rod camp had let it be known that star Milwaukee Brewers player Ryan Braun had also been linked with Biogenesis.
Braun was last month banned for the rest of the year, accepting a plea deal that would conveniently coincide with injury worries and his team’s non-existent hopes of achieving anything at all this year. It was a mighty fall from grace for a player who had been voted the best player in his league just 18 months previous.
The reputation of Sixty Minutes pushed the ‘A-Rod as snitch’ line above hearsay and that was enough to send his colleagues across the nation into a rage.
Drug use, the players have finally accepted, is detrimental. But to rat out another professional? Unforgivable.
The timing of this story was impeccable as usual because Rodriguez and his team-mates were on their way to Boston for the first time since the scandal reared its ugly head.
Fenway Park is a hostile place for the Yankees at the best of times and Red Sox fans getting riled up by the mere sight of the Bronx pinstripes is the mark of an age old rivalry.
But the bloodlust for Rodriguez was relentless throughout the sold-out three-game weekend series. It culminated fairly dramatically in the nationally televised Sunday evening game when Boston pitcher Ryan Dempster succeeded on his fourth attempt to hit the batter intentionally.
Given the context of all of this, the home plate umpire would have been well within in his rights to remove the pitcher from the mound but he decided to go with the standard warning to both teams.
That drove the Yankees manager Joe Girardi into an unprecedented rage. In a sport which leans heavily on some fairly contrived manager v umpire tête-à-têtes, it was a thoroughly natural meltdown by Girardi which led to his dismissal and Dempster free to bask in his new found hero status for Red Sox fans who watched the events with intense enjoyment.
And of course it didn’t end there. No one expected it to. Things got even grubbier Monday, an alleged day off for the Yankees, when A-Rod’s legal representative, Joe Tacopina, launched some well planned return fire at the his client’s employers, who are not convincing anyone that their medium term goal is to scrub the third baseman from their books.
Tacopina played on that narrative by making the all too plausible allegation that the Yankees let Rodriguez play during the 2012 play-offs in spite of the fact that an MRI scan, which was conducted by the team doctor Chris Ahmad, had shown that his left hip was injured badly enough to make it unwise to play him. Rodriguez had surgery on the hip in January and only recently returned to action, just in time for the whole mess to hit the fan.
But after Tacopina told The New York Times that the Yankees “rolled Rodriguez out there like an invalid”, Major League Baseball employed a stinging public rebuttal during a live TV interview and blindsided the lawyer with an offer to reveal all the information about their Rodriguez investigation and look past confidentiality agreements.
And on and on it goes, an increasingly sordid dispute which is as depressing as it is intriguing.
* johnwr...@gmail.com
Twitter: JohnWRiordan
