Alex Rodriguez (c.) outside of Major League Baseball's Park Avenue offices during his 2013 ... [+]
Alex Rodriguez appeared on ESPN’s “First Take” program in January 2019, after three of his former baseball teammates — Mike Mussina, Mariano Rivera and Edgar Martinez — had just been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.
During the interview, Rodriguez was grilled by host Max Kellerman about the performance-enhancing drug issue, which has, so far, kept players like Roger Clemens and home run king Barry Bonds from entry into Cooperstown, and which is an issue certain to cloud Rodriguez’s own Hall of Fame chances, as he appears on the ballot for the first time this year.
“I’ve taken the approach that, I think, talking about it is best,” Rodriguez said during the 2019 ESPN interview. “I understand that I made my own bed. If I don’t make it to the Hall of Fame, I can live with that. I would be bummed. It would suck. I can’t believe that I put myself in this situation. But if that happens, I have no one to blame but myself.”
Rodriguez’s checkered baseball past will be at the forefront of the baseball writers’ minds when they consider A-Rod’s Hall of Fame candidacy. Rodriguez, 46, may have appeared contrite in that 2019 interview, but his past steroid mea culpas have been all over the spectrum, and his PED links make for a complicated layer to his baseball arc.
Unlike Clemens and Bonds, Rodriguez was suspended during his MLB-playing days, and his discipline came as a result of violating both the Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program and the Basic Agreement. But even before he served that season-long ban in 2014, Rodriguez had already admitted to PED use during another stretch of his career.
Former Senator George Mitchell’s report on Major League Baseball’s doping history had just been released publicly only days earlier when journalist Katie Couric interviewed Rodriguez for “60 Minutes” in December 2007. Of the dozens of players named in the Mitchell Report with PED links — including Clemens and Andy Pettitte — Rodriguez’s name was nowhere to be found.
“For the record, have you ever used steroids, human growth hormone or any other performance-enhancing substance?” Couric asked Rodriguez during the interview.
“No,” said Rodriguez, who was playing for the Yankees then.
“Have you ever been tempted to use any of those things?” Couric asked Rodriguez.
“No... I’ve never felt overmatched on the baseball field,” said Rodriguez.
To say those remarks on camera did not age well would be an understatement. An explosive 2009 Sports Illustrated report detailed Rodriguez’s positive drug test in 2003 — baseball’s survey testing year to determine if a drug-testing policy would be implemented — for synthetic testosterone and the anabolic steroid Primobolan.
Rodriguez subsequently told ESPN’s Peter Gammons, and then a media throng in Tampa during spring training that year, that he used “a banned substance” during the three seasons he played for the Texas Rangers, 2001-03, and that his cousin, Yuri Sucart, had personally injected him.
“It was such a loosey-goosey era... To be quite honest, I don’t know exactly what substance I was guilty of using,” Rodriguez told Gammons.
But it would be crystal clear what banned substances Rodriguez was taking during another stretch of his career — 2010 to 2012 — when he was getting drugs from Anthony Bosch, the Biogenesis mastermind.
Although then baseball commissioner Bud Selig originally hit Rodriguez with an historic 211-game ban in August 2013, A-Rod famously fought the suspension through an arbitration hearing, and also filed a flurry of lawsuits in 2013 and early 2014. After he stormed out of his hearing on the second to last day in November 2013, Rodriguez went on WFAN radio personality Mike Francesa’s show and proclaimed he shouldn’t serve “one inning” of a suspension.
“Let’s get that on the record. You say you did not do these PEDs that they are accusing you of doing?” Francesa asked Rodriguez.
“You’re correct, Mike,” said Rodriguez, who also referred to Selig derisively as “the man from Milwaukee” during the interview.
Those PED denials proved hollow in January 2014, when Rodriguez filed a lawsuit in Manhattan federal court and named MLB, Selig and the Players Association (of which Rodriguez was a member) as defendants, as he continued his fight against the suspension.
Attached to that lawsuit, in an ironic twist, was independent arbitrator Fredric Horowitz’s ruling on Rodriguez, where Horowitz reduced the 211-game ban to 162 games plus the 2014 postseason. More importantly, however, the arbitration ruling document contained all of the findings from the MLB investigation into Rodriguez’s association with Bosch and the south Florida Biogenesis anti-aging clinic, as well as Rodriguez’s specific doping violations and the extent of his PED use.
What was supposed to be a confidential document and information was now public for anyone to review. Rodriguez would eventually drop the lawsuit and accept his suspension, and in late January 2014, Rodriguez signed a partial immunity agreement with federal authorities who were investigating Biogenesis in a separate probe.
“Based on the entire record from the arbitration, MLB has demonstrated with clear and convincing evidence there is just cause to suspend Rodriguez for the 2014 season and 2014 postseason for having violated the JDA (Joint Drug Agreement) by the use and/or possession of testosterone, IGF-1 (insulin growth factor) and hGH (human growth hormone) over the course of three years, and for the two attempts to obstruct MLB’s investigation described above...” reads the conclusion in the arbitration ruling. “While this length of suspension may be unprecedented for a MLB player, so is the misconduct he committed.”
“Unprecedented misconduct” is only one part of the Rodriguez baseball profile — he has 696 career home runs and over 3,000 hits — but it could be the part that writers find too important to push aside when they consider whether to check the box next to Rodriguez’s name on the Hall of Fame ballot.
