A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez (21 page)

The Rangers executives privately fumed about their petulant superstar. In early August, Alex made a clumsy attempt to back-track, telling reporters, “I’m an employee, like everyone else.”

His teammates rolled their eyes at this. Most employees don’t have a personal clubhouse attendant wiping down their shower shoes or preloading their toothbrush. A lot of Rangers were fed up with the diva act. “It was a traveling sideshow. . . . I appreciated the way Alex played the game of baseball,” Crabtree explains, “but I saw right through him as far as how fake he was.”

Alex’s reaction to the tension he had created was to go on a spectacular run. In August, he hit .340 with 15 home runs in just 29 games. No one had approached that mark since Barry Bonds had hit 17 in May 2001. How was he pulling this off? It might have been luck combined with tremendous skill. It might have been some “I’ll show them” anger. Or it might have been just the right time— by August, almost all of the 2003 drug testing had been completed.

Alex Rodriguez rarely got nervous before a game, particularly one in mid-August for a team already planning for next season, but he was fi dgety and bouncing around the dugout while preparing for his August 16 game against the White Sox. He wasn’t worried about the starting pitcher; he was worried about a long-planned— and long-dreaded— reunion his wife had orchestrated. Cynthia had arranged for Alex’s father, Victor, to attend a Rangers game.

“I don’t want to say Alex didn’t have the emotional capacity, but it was diffi cult for him,” Cynthia said of this rapprochement with his father. “There are two sides of every story. Things happen, people get divorced. It’s hard on children. What Alex and I want to do is not rehash the past but move forward.”

For Alex, moving forward meant coming to grips with the past
and then letting go of it, which is why Victor Rodriguez, at age 73, was sitting in the good seats at The Ballpark in Arlington next to another special guest, Alex’s half brother Victor Rodriguez, Jr. It was a double reunion for him. “My father and I hadn’t seen each other in 23 years,” says Victor Jr. It had been that long since he’d seen Alex as well.

Victor Jr. had left Miami in 1980 to serve in the U.S. Air Force. For the next two decades, he had led the military life abroad in Turkey, Egypt, Germany and Italy. He was far removed from the American daily diet of box scores and sports talk shows and knew nothing about the success of his half brother. “I’d come back to the States briefl y, see ‘Alex Rodriguez’ in the paper, but, really, what were the chances?” he recalls. “I didn’t know until my father said, maybe around 1994, ‘Do you know your brother is playing in the major leagues?’ ”

Then, in a nice bit of geographical serendipity, Victor Jr. returned to the United States. In 2003, he was stationed at Dyess Air Force Base in Abilene, Texas, which is less than a three-hour drive from The Ballpark in Arlington. He wanted to see Alex play in person but didn’t want to intrude on his life and had no plans to contact him when he purchased tickets for the Rangers game on August 16. A few weeks later, he got a call from Cynthia. “Alex’s wife got in touch with us and said, ‘Let’s get together,’ ” Victor Jr.

recalls. “She mentioned the date, and I said, ‘Oh, no— that’s too eerie. Because I have tickets for that very same day.’ ”

Victor Sr., his son and his grandchildren met Cynthia at the stadium, and they all watched as Alex, who found it hard not to look into the stands between pitches, went 1 for 3 with two walks, three runs scored and a stolen base. Afterward, they took a tour of the ballpark and then ventured down into the clubhouse to greet Alex. “It was an emotional day,” Victor Jr. says. “Alex, you could tell he was emotional, too, but composed. He’s very refi ned— like my father.”
The similarities between Alex and his father were apparent to anyone who saw them together that day— the way they moved, the thoughtful cadence when they spoke, the wide, easy smile. Sometimes they would smile and tear up, joy overtaking them as they chatted in the Rangers’ parking lot. Alex invited everyone to his home in Highland Park, and whatever awkwardness there might have been dissolved in a night of talking and reminiscing. “Cynthia was so kind that day,” Alex’s father says. “I will always have that day in my heart.”

Alex didn’t want it to be a one-day reunion; he invited Victor Jr. to throw out the fi rst pitch of a game that fall. Victor gleefully took the mound that day, and Alex returned the favor by hitting two home runs during the game.

“That was really something,” Victor Jr. recalls. “I have a son who loves baseball. And Alex took time with him and made him feel special. I really respect Alex, especially his discipline and generosity. He is a great player but an even better person.”

Around his family, in front of Cynthia, Alex could be vulnerable, sweet and completely unselfi sh.
This
Alex didn’t have to compete with anyone

On September 3, 2003 as the Rangers were getting ready to play the equally horrifi c Kansas City Royals, a phalanx of federal agents, narcotics detectives and Olympic antidoping offi cials zipped down Mahler Road in Burlingame, California. Their target was the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative— or BALCO— located in an industrial park building next to Highway 101.

Just after 12:20 p.m. on the West Coast, Jeff Novitzky, a sinewy, bald federal agent, emerged from an unmarked Buick and led his fellow investigators through BALCO’s front door, past the reception desk and the walls decorated with autographed photos of athletes such as Marion Jones and Barry Bonds. The Giants’ slugger was a prime endorser of the BALCO supplement ZMA Fuel, pedaled by the owner, Victor Conte, who was the supplement supplier to Olympians and pro athletes.

Two days later, federal agents kicked down the door at the home of Greg Anderson, Bonds’s personal trainer, and confi scated fi les and computer discs. Scott Boras, who had become Bonds’s agent in early 2001, after brokering Alex’s historic deal in Texas, told reporters that the BALCO case “really doesn’t involve Bonds”

and that he had no knowledge of any request for Bonds to testify before the grand jury investigating the company suspected of being an outlet for steroid distribution.

Boras erred in his prediction. Soon Bonds, along with Jones and Yankees fi rst baseman Jason Giambi, were asked to testify in San Francisco in December 2003 on a scandal that mushroomed into a national debate on steroid use in sports. The questions about the authenticity of Bonds’s infl atable stats were particularly heated because he had been voted the National League MVP a little more than a month after the raid on BALCO.

The AL MVP was Alex Rodriguez, which some considered more of a lifetime achievement award, since the Rangers were a dismal team that had lost 91 games that year.

A picture snapped a few days later shows Alex, wearing a pink shirt and tie, celebrating his MVP while throwing his arm around the shoulders of a muscular middle-aged trainer. In a note to Angel “Nao” Presinal, Alex wrote, “To Nao, the best trainer in the world.”

Emboldened by his MVP award, Alex turned on the Rangers, dropping strong hints that he wanted to be traded to a championship-caliber team. He decided he’d had enough of losing. He refused to return calls from Showalter and Hart and would speak only to Hicks, one of many examples of why the
Dallas Morning News
columnist Gerry Fraley referred to Alex as the “assistant owner.”

Boras jumped into the mix as well, declaring that if Hicks slashed his payroll for 2004 it would betray a promise he had made to Alex to spend whatever it took to turn the Rangers into winners.

The same day Alex was named MVP, a story in the
Fort Worth
Star-Telegram
detailed the rift between Alex and Showalter, which included the team’s decision to fi re Tommy Bolin, Alex’s clubhouse valet. Showalter hadn’t pulled that trigger, team offi cials did. Not only was Bolin the man who detailed Alex’s car, but he was one of the few confi dants Alex had in a clubhouse full of young players like Hank Blalock and Mark Teixeira.

Alex didn’t want Bolin going anywhere. He fumed for days.

He was always high drama. “In our clubhouse back then,” Hicks says, “Alex kind of sucked the air out of the room and didn’t leave air for other people.”

This marriage was over, and the Rangers were eager to trade the best player in baseball. They moved quickly.

On December 17, reports surfaced of a pending deal between the Rangers and the Boston Red Sox. Commissioner Bud Selig, hoping A-Rod would help Boston compete with the mighty Yankees, granted a 72-hour window for the Red Sox and Rangers to restructure the shortstop’s $252 million deal. Alex’s potential exit from Texas was greeted with relief from the Rangers, who were sick of A-Rod’s diva ways. “There’s no doubt you have to question whether that’s somebody you want in a foxhole with you on the day-to- day battle,” Rangers outfi elder Rusty Greer said.

The Rangers, Red Sox and Boras agreed on a plan to restructure Alex’s deal, but the players’ union nixed it because it didn’t want to set a precedent of a player— even the highest-paid player in baseball history— giving back
any
money. “We had an oral understanding of what we were going to do, and at the last minute that changed,” says Hicks. “I think it changed because [Boston] made some assumptions about what the union would allow, but from my
point of view, all I know is the deal we had discussed, they changed the terms; and I don’t do that in business, so I withdrew.”

The deal to renegotiate Alex’s contract downward broke up when the Red Sox refused to come up with $12 million over seven years. It was nothing to Boston, but GM Theo Epstein wouldn’t budge.

Alex was crushed. Returning to Texas after sniping at the team all winter was an extremely unpleasant prospect. He knew that his home fans would boo him, his teammates would shun him and Showalter would challenge him. What could save him now?

Salvation arrived by a circuitous route a month later in a tipping point for the Yankee organization. In and of itself, the fateful moment created only a small problem, but it would end up being the loose pebble that starts an avalanche.

That fall, the Yankees’ third baseman, Aaron Boone, had become a Yankees hero for the ages. On a cool autumn night, he entered the team’s pantheon when, in the 11th inning of the seventh game in the 2003 ALCS against the Red Sox, Boone lifted a fl uttering pitch by Tim Wakefi eld into the left-fi eld stands of Yankee Stadium. With one swing he triggered a euphoric explosion, perpetuated Boston’s Ruthian curse and led the Yankees to a date to play in their 39th World Series (the Yankees lost in six games to the Florida Marlins).

Boone prepared for spring training in 2004 with lots of weight training. “The crazy thing about it is, I never play basketball,”

Boone said. Playing hoops is a risk many ballplayers take, even though MLB contracts usually forbid participation in any sports riskier than Ping-Pong or golf. Just three minutes into a Friday-night pickup basketball game with buddies, a loose ball on a re-bound was tipped over Boone’s head. Another player clipped him from the side. “It wasn’t like I was hustling for the ball,” Boone said.
His left knee collapsed, and he instantly knew he’d torn an an-terior cruciate ligament (ACL). He had suffered the same injury on a baseball fi eld in the 2000 season, so he knew his 2004 season was over before it had begun. He immediately notifi ed the Yankees.

Three days later, Yankees general manager Brian Cashman, who was in Anguilla on vacation with his family, received a call from team president Randy Levine, who told him about Boone’s injury. At fi rst, Cashman and Levine couldn’t think of a decent replacement.

But on January 25, Alex, seated at the Baseball Writers’ Association of America dinner to receive his MVP Award in New York, began voicing his dismay over the collapse of the Rangers–Red Sox deal to Cashman. Days later, the Yankees GM wondered if Alex would switch to third. Boras would take credit for this brainstorm, but it was, in fact, good old Yankee ingenuity. Baseball sources say Cashman brokered confi dential talks with the Rangers. They say Cashman realized the Yankees couldn’t be the ones to ask Alex to move to third. It was too delicate a situation—and too fl ammable if it were leaked to the media. The question had to be posed by the Rangers. It was. And Alex said, “Yes.”

He would do anything to get out of Texas. He’d give up shortstop and the glamour and power that came with the position.

He’d also give up the ability to tip buddies. Third base was the hot corner—too tight of an angle to see and relay a catcher’s sign.

So much for Alex being named the Rangers’ team captain as a public makeup kiss for his near departure to the Red Sox. The trade to the Yankees was done two weeks later. The Rangers received Alfonso Soriano in exchange and agreed to pay $67 million of the $179 million left on Alex’s 10-year, $252 million deal. “[Alex] was no longer right for Texas,” Hicks says now. “I was relieved.”

The news was greeted with hand-wringing by Yankee haters and outrage by most of the media. A-Rod’s contract, even though
it would be partially offset by the Rangers, pushed the Yankees’

payroll to nearly $190 million. “I am very concerned about the large amount of cash consideration involved and the length of time over which the cash is being paid,” Commissioner Bud Selig said after approving the deal. “I want to make it abundantly clear to all clubs that I will not allow cash transfers of this magnitude to become the norm.”

Not that there was much danger of that. What team other than the Yankees, and which owner other than Tom Hicks, were rich enough and desperate enough to make such a deal? It was the deal of all deals— “The Beatles just got Elvis,” one writer joked.

The intriguing catch here was that Alex Rodriguez— whom many people, himself included, considered the greatest shortstop of all time— had agreed to play third base in deference to the Yankees’

incumbent shortstop, Derek Jeter. Adding to the intrigue: the two men had once professed to be best friends but were clearly far less than that now. Alex’s swat at Jeter’s leadership skills in
Esquire
three years earlier had fi xed that.