Thanks to baseball’s Steroid Era, we’ve learned there are two kinds of athletes who find themselves trapped in illegal performance-enhancing drug storms:
1. Those who deny, deny and deny until they risk severe punishment — at which time they flip and tell the truth.
2. Those who deny all the way, even at the risk of imprisonment.
Alex Rodriguez, it now appears, is Type 1, joining such folks as Jason Giambi and, to a lesser degree, Andy Pettitte; Group 2 can boast of charter members Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens. A-Rod told the feds privately that he used illegal PEDs. And the government clearly has the expectation that A-Rod will say the same thing publicly, in the trial of his cousin Yuri Sucart, should it be necessary.
The Miami Herald came out Wednesday morning with an explosive, if unsurprising, report that A-Rod — during a January meeting with federal agents and prosecutors — confessed to his involvement with Biogenesis founder Anthony Bosch. Yes, he purchased illegal PEDs from Bosch and used them, and yes, Bosch drew his blood. And yes, Sucart was the intermediary, introducing A-Rod to Bosch, until the two men had a falling out.
In other words, essentially 100 percent of what Bosch testified to Major League Baseball, in the hearing that led to A-Rod getting suspended for the entire 2014 season, was accurate. It’s all the more hilarious that we got a good sense of Bosch’s testimony only because A-Rod’s legal team publicly released the report of independent arbitrator Fredric Horowitz when Team A-Rod sued MLB and the Players Association in January. That was the arbitrator whom Team A-Rod asserted couldn’t possibly be objective, because he didn’t want MLB to fire him.
So A-Rod looks very silly after denying the Bosch allegations for so long. At some level, perhaps a twisted one, you have to admire the lengths he went to try to back up his lies — spending millions on attorneys and investigators and even bringing about significant change to MLB’s Department of Investigations thanks to some of the dirt Team A-Rod acquired.
But to those who still get offended by dishonesty, even when the person lying knows that you know he is lying, this constitutes a big victory. And a big loss for A-Rod.
Will this prompt him to apologize publicly, now that it’s confirmed he lied? It would seem to push him in that direction, as opposed to going the “I served my time, it’s over, let’s move on” route.
Yet in the bigger picture, this revelation underlines some more important truths: A-Rod has been a good boy to the government. He is in no danger of getting indicted. Sure, he would risk further trouble by committing perjury on the witness stand, but that’s like saying, “You can walk inside a bank, but you’d better not think about robbing it!” A-Rod might behave spectacularly stupidly at times, but even he couldn’t contradict himself when the government already has his testimony. At least, I think not.
The idea of A-Rod moving on quietly was always a pipe dream. This story will cause more headaches for the Yankees and MLB — especially the tidbit about A-Rod using “petty cash” from the Yankees to purchase some of the drugs from Bosch.
It also shows, though, this situation could be even worse for everyone involved. Well, besides Cousin Yuri.