The A-Rod-Yanks Summit: Translating the Communique

Did you catch that statement from the New York Yankees the other day about their sit-down with Alex Rodriguez? It sounded to me less like a PR statement and more like a State Department communique about a summit between, say, Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu—guys supposedly on the same side whose relationship has become visibly, seriously strained. A phrase in the paragraph from the Bombers even echoed diplomatic parlance for “we had an argument.”

Here’s the Yankees’ official description of what transpired: “Today we held a meeting at Yankee Stadium between Hal Steinbrenner, Randy Levine, Brian Cashman, Jean Afterman, Alex Rodriguez and Jim Sharp. Alex initiated the meeting and apologized to the organization for his actions over the past several years. There was an honest and frank discussion on all of the issues. As far as the Yankees are concerned, the next step is to play baseball in spring training."

Whew! More people than you can imagine find it harder to figure this out than, say, T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.”

In their accounts of issues that don’t really get settled, such statements often require translation—heck, full-scale unpacking—for the uninitiated. Think of the following, then, as a form of public service on my part. (Phrases and sentences in italics come from the Yankee statement reproduced in Andrew Marchand’s report of the meeting on ESPN.com. Everything else is my translation, free of charge.)

“Today we held a meeting at Yankee Stadium…” Translation: Notice that this was our time, our place. Not at some neutral site down in Florida between our spring-training camp in Tampa and Alex’s home in Miami. We wanted him to feel the chill in the air even before he stepped into our offices. No attempt to make him comfortable here.

“…between Hal Steinbrenner, Randy Levine, Brian Cashman, Jean Afterman, Alex Rodriguez and Jim Sharp.” Translation: Hank Steinbrenner wanted to sit in. All of us who saw The Godfather didn’t think this was a good idea. You see, he’s got this Sonny Corleone thing going—all impulsive and stuff. He still feels rooked that, when A-Rod was ready to leave the team after the 2007 season, Hank practically threw money at him—that contract with all the incentives for breaking the all-time home run records—without knowing that the guy was taking steroids. So now, Hank thought it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to leave a dead horse in the vacant chair where A-Rod’s supposed to sit! Lucky that Hal is more the Michael Corleone type, saying far more can be accomplished with long silences and cold stares.

Another person who wasn’t there was Joe Girardi. You know the ol’ good-cop, bad-cop routine? Well, Joe’s the good cop in all of this. 

Just about all of us are praying that A-Rod gets injured and retires in spring training, harder than some little kids at Christmas pray for their very own pony. But the chances in both cases are not great. If that’s the case, we need somebody who knows how to motivate, use and get everything out of A-Rod in a season when so many of our veterans are trying to come back from injuries. Despite the make-nice vibe the other day, the only one left in the organization that A-Rod might trust is Joe. As far as A-Rod is concerned, Joe is the only one around here in his corner. Let him go on dreaming.

As for Jim Sharp—well, that’s a great last name for a legal eagle, huh? A damn sight better than that ambulance chaser Joe Tacopina! Matt Lauer really got him good reading that letter on the Today Show from Major League Baseball waiving the confidentiality clause in the joint drug agreement, didn’t he?

"Alex initiated the meeting…” Translation: You think we called this pow-wow? We’re lucky we can stay in the same room with him without throwing up! No, A-Rod’s camp approached us last month about this. Nothing doing, we said then. Why hurry? He was ready to sue everyone here at the drop of a hat a year and a half ago. Now, he can sweat coming back. The list of those who hate his guts is a mile long.

“…and apologized to the organization for his actions over the past several years.” Translation: You should have seen the bum, biting his lips and getting all misty-eyed. Maybe he didn’t see all the eye-rolling going around the room.

We’d heard it all before in 2009, when he promised up and down that he was done with steroids. But as soon as we heard he was palling around again with “Cousin Yuri,” we knew he wasn’t around for the companionship.

Then he had the nerve to sue everyone and his brother when he got caught out with the ‘roids. The papers say all those futile lawsuits were the bad advice he got from Jay Z and his crew. Me, I think it was the influence of his girlfriend these last few years, Torrie Wilson.

I’ve never understood what women at a certain level see in him. His ex, Cynthia? Lovely lady. Psych major. He had already seen at least three therapists for his issues, but maybe he collects them for security, the way he collects lawyers, publicists and financial guys. Oh, and women—which is why his marriage broke up. (Madonna. You know, the Mayor of Cougartown, USA.)

Kate Hudson? I can’t remember him smiling so much as the year he dated her, after the collapse of his marriage. I’m convinced she helped him survive that first steroid scandal until he was able to have that monster postseason. But the season he got his World Series ring—the reason he came to the Yankees in the first place? After that, it was finis for her. If you want to know the truth, I think he was really cursed from then on.

Cameron Diaz? You can do a LOT worse than rebounding with a girlfriend like that. You hear a lot of stories on people in this business, but everyone who ever met her going to see A-Rod at his building always said you couldn’t find a sweeter person. (They didn’t mind looking at her either.) Of course she didn’t last.

You wanna know what I think of Torrie Wilson? I’m not even going to mention the fact that any woman who would date A-Rod for more than a few years, as she did before their breakup, needs to have her head examined.

No, what got me about her WWE “career” was the type of stuff she did to opponents: kneeing, eye-gouging, struttin’ around. Nothing is beneath you in professional wrestling. I think some of that attitude rubbed off on A-Rod when he decided to sue everyone around here.

Oh, and how could I forget about the acting they do in those matches? Or should I say, bad acting? Like the time he staged that walkout from his hearing with the arbitrator about the suspension because Bud Selig refused to testify, even though he and Tacopina knew all along it wasn’t going to happen? Maybe A-Rod thought this was his chance to transition into a new career: acting. But it wouldn’t be an Oscar he’d get for this, but a Razzie. You know, the award for horrible acting that Sylvester Stallone’s won, like, 10 times.

If he’s going to apologize to anyone, I think his teammates would be the best place to start. They stood behind him back in ’09. So what did he do to say thanks? He and his lawyers threw one of them, Francisco Cervelli, under the bus, by leaking his name in connection with the Biogenesis scandal in an attempt to throw the scent off himself.

Even in the best of times, it’s been one distraction after another, and we’re talking not just “over the last several years,” but since he came here in ’04. A damn good thing his suspension took place during the Derek Jeter goodbye tour; the story would not have been about the guy who played the game right, but the one who, we’re more and more sure of it, always played it wrong. (By the way, The Captain always had only one objective: Win. That’s why, even when he fell out with A-Rod, he never said a nasty thing to the press about him, publicly or privately.)

“There was an honest and frank discussion on all of the issues.” Translation:  We told him to keep dreaming about becoming the starting third-baseman again, barring an injury to Chase Headley (which would be a disaster all around). With all that rust from a full year away from the game, not to mention hip surgery, he'll be lucky to get his bat on the ball, never mind fielding "the hot corner."

We also let him have it with both barrels about his incentives contract. No way, we told him and Sharp, that we would pay another $6 million each time his career home run total passed Mays, Ruth, Aaron and Bonds. Another $30 million that we’d be on the hook for? Not going to happen!

A-Rod and Sharp just sat there and didn’t say anything. We’re under no illusions that they’re going to take this lying down. Maybe we will lose if they take us to court, but we figure we have at least an even chance. And before the case is decided, we’ll have a lot more opportunities to show what an out-and-out liar the guy is. So even if he wins, he loses.

“As far as the Yankees are concerned, the next step is to play baseball in spring training." Translation: They asked us for advice about how to deal with the media on this. Our first reaction was, hey, what are all your crisis managers there for? But as we thought about it a bit more, it occurred to us that we needed to get it over with ASAP. So now we want him to take care of it before the pitchers and catchers report to spring training. Yankee Stadium will do. Again, we'll be thrilled to have him come over on a cold day.

This is like a bad, bad marriage where the couple is only sticking together for the children, only in this case it’s worse: three years and $60 million. We can’t unload a 39-year-old guy with severe injuries, an extensive steroid history and a whole season of not having played.  We’d have to pay someone to take him off our hands. 

The only consolation in this whole thing is that other teams continue to make the same type of mistake we did with his contract in ’07. I’m not even thinking of Albert Pujols, though you can be sure that he’ll never again have with the Angels the kind of monster years he did with the Cardinals. No, look at Ryan Howard—just like A-Rod, three years and $60 million left to go along with a body that’s breaking down—or Giancarlo Stanton signing that 13-year, $325 million contract with the Marlins.

Nobody can convince me that stupidity isn’t contagious. Too bad you can't get rid of it with an antibiotic. That's why I think A-Rod comes down with it all the time!

Lucky for A-Rod that Hal and Hank's dad wasn't in charge anymore when he started pulling all these shenanigans. Ol' George called Dave Winfield "Mr. May" just for one really bad World Series, then sicced that lowlife Howie Spira on him when they got into a dispute over a foundation. Even with Jeter, for God's sake, The Boss wondered if he was spending too much time partying! What do you think he'd make of A-Rod? The Old Man would have thought that even "Mr. Spring Training" would have been too good to call him. "A-Fraud" or "Shame of the Yankees" might have been more appropriate, he'd say. And for once, nobody here would have had the slightest reason to disagree with him!

(The photo shows Alex Rodriguez at Ameriquest Field on May 22, 2004, toward the start of his usually tortured tenure with the Yankees.)

Quote of the Day (Wall Street Journal, Comparing Nelson Cruz and Babe Ruth)

“In 37 career postseason games, [Nelson] Cruz’s production is largely comparable to what [Babe] Ruth did through the first 37 of his 41 career postseason games. Cruz has more home runs (16 to 13), more hits (41 to 37) and more RBI (32 to 27) in only two more plate appearances than Ruth had over the same span.”—Brian Costa, “The Count: Babe Ruth or Nelson Cruz? Not an Easy Choice,” The Wall Street Journal, October 7, 2014

Few articles in The Wall Street Journal—even those editorials that sound like bad leftover musings of Gilded Age plutocrats—have left me sputtering with rage quite as much as the one quoted above. Oh, yes, Costa allows that Babe Ruth was a pretty fair pitcher during the postseason—an accomplishment that Nelson Cruz (pictured) can never hope to duplicate—and, if the writer wanted to explore defense a bit further, he could note that The Bambino, unlike Cruz, not only played the outfield on a regular basis but also that, early in his career, Ruth’s arm made him one of the better corner outfielders in the game.

But no—Costa is leaving out something far more fundamental. The only things that Ruth put into his body that could be considered outside the norm were gargantuan portions of hot dogs and beer. In contrast, Cruz, as every baseball writer knows, was suspended for 50 games in 2013 as part of the Biogenesis performance-enhancing drugs (PED) scandal.

Every baseball writer knows this, but you’d be surprised how few are inclined to bring it up this time of year—in fact, this year at all. The only notable exception I can think of was back in early July. At that point, John Lackey, then still with the Boston Red Sox, and smarting after a pasting (a homer, a double, and a single) given him by the Baltimore Orioles “slugger,” made one of those no-comments-that-say-everything: "I've got nothing to say about him. There are some things I'd like to say, but I'm not going to. You guys forget pretty conveniently about stuff."

The media love a controversy as much as anything else, and they couldn’t have been happier when O’s skipper Buck Showalter retaliated with one of his own no-comments-that-say-everything: “Everybody needs to make sure that their own backyard is clean."

Now, sensing a feud, reporters were happy to provide a bit of context: Lackey was making a veiled reference to Cruz’s enforced sitdown, while Showalter had in mind the failed (and mysteriously unexplained and undisciplined) 2003 drug test by Bosox designated hitter David Ortiz.

I’m not a fan of Lackey, who showed class neither in downing fried chicken and beer as his old team choked in manager Terry Francona's last season nor in calling the resulting controversy about it “retarded.” But his sullen no-comment about Cruz was entirely warranted—especially the part about how “You guys forget pretty conveniently about stuff." 

This time of year, on the air and in print, it’s all about how Cruz is killing the ball. Players, front offices, and broadcast booths all have vested interests in accepting retiring Major League Baseball (MLB) Commissioner Bud Selig’s belief that everything is fine on the Good Ship Lollipop, and that nobody would even think of trying to circumvent the sport’s PED ban.

It is unpleasant to think and write this, but who is to say that Cruz is not resorting to PEDs again? Two prominent similar cases of this phenomenon have already occurred, involving Manny Ramirez and Alex Rodriguez. In the case of A-Rod, the discovery of his continuing involvement with PEDs came not from a positive drug test but because of a lengthy and damning paper trail.

In fact, many of the players detected by the drug program have been minor-leaguers—i.e., too young and stupid to realize that human growth hormone rather than steroids is more likely to boost performance without triggering a positive identification.

You would think, then, given this background, that Costa might have learned the importance of avoiding categorical statements by looking at a past headline from his own paper, back in 2012: “Earth to Tigers: Stop Pitching to Nelson Cruz.”  That was printed at a time when, it is reasonable to believe now, Cruz's blazing postseason performance resulted from a steroid regimen.

When the Texas Rangers decided to part ways with their longtime player following his 2013 suspension, Cruz signed a one-year deal with the Orioles worth $8 million. As a free-agent following a monster year, he can now expect a sizable increase in his contract no matter what team he signs with—a nice bit of change for a player entering his mid-30s. All the more reason, then, why he might choose to go with the odds and try to resort to PEDs again.

Two weeks ago, Costa’s Journal colleague Daniel Barbarisi wrote about the icy treatment he received from Derek Jeter after a tweet that joked about meeting the Yankee icon and his latest glamorous girlfriend, Sports Illustrated swimsuit model Hannah Davis, in an elevator.  Perhaps Costa dreads a similarly wintry reception from the entire Orioles clubhouse.

But Jeter’s annoyance, however seemingly petty, had a point: his private conduct, unless it was illegal, had no bearing on his on-field performance. The same cannot be said for Cruz: Almost certainly, the past PED use of  “Mohamad” (the nickname for the player on a July 2012 client list kept by Biogenesis head Anthony Bosch) meant that pennants had been decided, careers made or unmade, because of an unfair advantage he possessed.

So, with the Orioles having moved on now to the American League Championship Series against the Kansas City Royals, instead of the media launching the same, boring questions (e.g., “What was on your mind when you stepped to the plate late in the game with guys on base?”), let’s see Cruz answer these questions instead:

*If you are swinging the bat so well now, why did you feel the need to use PEDs in the first place?

*How long had you been using steroids before you were suspended?

*Do you retain ties to anyone who helped you get around the drug-testing program before, as Alex Rodriguez did with his "Cousin Yuri"?

*Did you use steroids in prior playoff appearances? If so, how can we be sure that you aren’t doing it again?

So, back to that article’s question: “Babe Ruth or Nelson Cruz? Not an Easy Choice.” Really? I mean, you’re kidding, right?

‘Bad Business’: A-Rod, Stranger to Truth

“As you can imagine, I’m feeling left out, I can’t be with the team at spring training and this leaves an empty hole in my life. And on top of that I’m dealing with the backlash of all these ugly rumors and false stories. […] Of course I am very concerned about these rumors and about what the team is doing and saying about me. … People have been telling me that you have an 8% bounty on my contract.[…] Maybe all of this is coming from my cousin […], who knows. He claims he met with the Yankees and that you are after me and it has me concerned. I hope this [e-mail] is the start of us clearing the air between us. I don’t want us to be enemies. I am loyal to the team. I only want the best for the Yankees organization. But I do need reassurance from you and I need to know what is going on. It is bad business for everyone.”—New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez, e-mail message of February 28, 2013 to team president Randy Levine, quoted in Steve Fishman, “The A-Rod E-Mails—The Slugger and the Suit: A Baseball BromanticTragedy,” New York Magazine, January 6-13, 2014

Ten years ago this winter, the New York Yankees, faced with a major decision about one of their heroes, reacted the way they usually do: unsentimentally, some would say even heartlessly. Aaron Boone—already known to hundreds of thousands of bitterly disappointed Red Sox fans as “F-----g  Boone” for his walkoff homer beating their team in the American league championship series—had phoned the Bronx Bomber brass with the news that he had wrecked his knee in a pickup basketball game.

Boone could have done what hundreds of pro athletes would have done in the age of the lucrative contract and lie. Instead, he admitted to doing something forbidden by his contract.

For their part, the Bronx Bombers could have waited a year for their recent hero to rehab the knee while they filled his hole in the lineup with temporary and/or low-priced talent. Nothing doing. The team reacted to the disclosure by their third baseman—already, in less than half a season, hugely liked by teammates—by voiding his contract, releasing him, and trading for the man many regarded as the best player in the game: Alex Rodriguez.

After all this time, can we really be sure that the Yankees aren’t sorry that they pulled the trigger on one of the true blockbuster trades in their history?  True, Boone was never again the player he was before his injury, and he was forced to retire five years ago following open heart surgery. But nobody could deny his heart on the diamond, nor his clubhouse chemistry.

The latter was precisely what was missing once A-Rod came aboard. For all his gaudy stats, he lifted the Bombers to only two pennants and one World Series win during his 10 years with the team. It hardly justifies his mammoth contracts. Worse, he became a flashpoint and symbol of futility in the Yankees' pennant races with the Boston Red Sox--contests that the Bombers increasingly came to lose (three World Series championships for the Bosox during that time, one for the Yankees).

Seattle Times columnist Les Carpenter displayed more foresight than he ever could have realized 10 years ago when, summing up Boone's departure and A-Rod's arrival at the Yankees, he wrote: "In this spring of Yankees chaos, Alex Rodriguez and steroid suspicion, the best story has been lost. Aaron Boone told the truth when it really would have paid to lie."

As it did for A-Rod--till now, when only his legal team is profiting.

As we witness the start of A-Rod’s season-long suspension from baseball—and, very likely, the end of his career—the e-mails between him and Randy Levine take on particular interest as points in the road in the estrangement between player and team. To be sure, Levine hardly comes off as a saint with his odd attempts at what he must have conceived as jock humor (e.g., wondering when Robinson Cano’s “steroids” would kick in), stroking the ego of his insecure slugger, and final descent into PR lingo, as relations between player and team grew tense. But he certainly appears in a better light than the Yankees’ decade-long albatross.

The above quote from A-Rod continues the same tone of wounded disbelief as his most recent statements to the press involving Bud Selig, the Yankees, arbitrator Fredric Horowitz, the players’ union—everyone but Barack Obama. He remains supremely oblivious to the thin legal ledge on which he finds himself—and, more important, to the realization that his own choices in life placed him there.

“Steinbrenner would roll in his grave if he knew what was happening!” A-Rod was complaining to Levine by last summer. Not so. If history is any guide, the late principal Yankee owner would have been at least engaging in a public spitting match with his cleanup hitter, and very likely doing everything up to (and, likely, beyond) the legal limit to abrogate their contract. (After all, The Boss paid lowlife Howie Spira $40,000 for any dirt he could dig up on Dave Winfield—whose only offense was not helping the Yanks win the World Series.)

About that “bad business” A-Rod bemoaned:  He is solely responsible for his troubles stemming from Biogenesis founder Anthony Bosch. If Rodriguez felt an “empty hole” in his life over not being able to attend spring training a year ago, imagine how he must feel now. A team trying to turn over a new leaf from a disastrous season would make him feel about as welcome as a skunk in a perfume factory.

The Yankees want the story of their spring training to be Jacoby Ellsbury and Brian McCann joining the team, and Derek Jeter coming back from his injury. They do not want it to be about the man who, according to Anti-Doping commission Doping Agency CEO Travis Tygart, had taken “the most potent and sophisticated drug program developed for an athlete that we've ever seen”—even exceeding that of Lance Armstrong.

A-Rod’s legal team is correct: ‘Roid-runner Bosch is hardly a model citizen. All the more reason, then, to wonder why Rodriguez, already outed as a juicer in 2009, would pursue a business relationship with a man who could only remind people of A-Rod’s greatest disgrace.

In addition to Bosch, there was A-Rod’s “cousin” Yuri Sucart, who, he admitted upon being exposed as a juicer five years ago, had procured PEDs for him; Canadian HGH advocate Anthony Galea, about whom A-Rod testified to a grand jury a year or two ago; Angel Presinal, a banned baseball trainer; and, perhaps most sinister, Jorge “Oggi” Velazquez, a former liquor store owner and  proprietor of a now-defunct anti-aging clinic, a guy with a 20-year rap sheet for grand theft, drug offenses,  burglary, and, most recently, domestic violence. “Oggi” is the kind of character that major-league baseball has feared since the “Black Sox” scandal of 1919, a criminal with the potential to affect the outcome of games—and, investigators believe in this instance, the transmitter of threats to Bosch if he didn’t help cover up A-Rod’s use of PEDs.

Say goodbye, then, to “A-fraud”—the teammate the Yankees strongly (and probably correctly) suspected of using performance-enhancing drugs as far back as 2005…the teammate they still turned out to support at a 2009 press conference where he owned up to steroid use with the Texas Rangers...a teammate who spoke so often of his "band of brothers" in the locker room, yet so anxious to avoid detection again last year that he threw fellow Yankee Francisco Cervelli under the bus to investigators, in a desperate attempt to deflect attention from himself.

Say goodbye to pointless friction with the clubhouse and front office—with managers Joe Torre and Joe Girardi walking on eggshells about dropping him in the batting order in the playoffs, despite unbelievable futility at the plate; with Levine telling him he needed to “put up or shut up”; with general manager Brian Cashman, in the only instance of this that I can recall in his years with the team, calling a player (A-Rod) a liar.

Say goodbye to a man addicted to the spotlight and its perks (enumerated by then-agent Scott Boras in A-Rod's first go at free agency, in 2000)-- a private office at Shea Stadium, his own marketing staff, his own merchandise tent at spring training, a luxury box, the use of a private jet, and billboards galore—amenities that former Mets GM Steve Phillips rightly said would lead to a roster of “24-plus-1.”

Say goodbye to a world-class narcissist: a guy stupid enough to have a list made about his “13 Most Hilariously Embarrassing Moments” on the blog Total Pro Sports that many will find woefully incomplete; a guy photographed kissing himself in the mirror for a Details Magazine photoshoot, having agent Scott Boras announce that he was opting out of his first Yankee contract in the middle of the Red Sox' clinching game in the 2007 World Series, and flirting with swimsuit models during a Yankee playoff loss.

Say goodbye to someone who, by all accounts, was hopelessly messed up by his father’s abandonment of his family, yet managed to do the same thing when his wife divorced him because of one extramarital affair after another (including with that long-in-the-tooth cougar, Madonna).

Say goodbye to an entire lingo associated with A-Rod and PEDs: testosterone creams and lozenges, pregnenolone, clomiphene, “gummies,” "boli," “cohete” (Spanish for “rocket”), HGH, IGF DHEA, and GHRP 2/6.

Say goodbye to pitiful postseason performances (really, only two series over 10 years when he made a difference—both against the Minnesota Twins), despite the sophisticated PED regimen discussed above.

Say goodbye to warnings and sitdowns in Bud Selig’s office with the slugger—about his penchant for high-stakes gambling, about trips to Canada to visit Galea, about his involvement with Bosch.

Say goodbye to a player who, after admitting to using PEDs while with the Texas Rangers and banned because of overwhelming evidence of having done so from 2010 through 2012, can no longer credibly argue against the rumor reported by Selena Roberts that he has been using PEDs since high school.

Say goodbye, then, to the man who succeeded the honorable Aaron Boone at third base for the Yankees: someone who’ll never fulfill his ambition to hit 800 career home runs, but who runs a fair chance of being baseball’s all-time liar and cheat.

(The photo shows Alex Rodriguez on at Ameriquest Field on May 22, 2004, toward the start of his usually tortured tenure with the Yankees.)