From 2008-2014, veteran Boston police officer Eddie Dominguez served as a member of the Department of Investigations (DOI) for Major League Baseball, a supposedly independent unit charged with cleaning up the sport in the wake of its performance-enhancing drug (PED) scandals. But in his new book “Baseball Cop: The Dark Side of America’s National Pastime,” (Hachette Books), out Tuesday, Dominguez tells how the sport’s powers-that-be, including former commissioner Bud Selig and his successor, current MLB head Rob Manfred, interfered with his efforts while pressing for Yankee superstar Alex Rodriguez to be taken down. This adapted excerpt shows how nasty and vindictive the battle between Manfred and A-Rod became, and how PEDs are likely being used as frequently as ever by MLB players today.
In 2012, the DOI presented the DEA with evidence against Tony Bosch, the founder of Biogenesis, which provided performance enhancing drugs. By January 2013, the connection of certain players, including A-Rod, to Biogenesis had gone public thanks to an explosive article in the Miami New Times. Manfred and Selig targeted A-Rod — possibly, says Dominguez, because he’s “very similar to Pete Rose — he would get the most publicity” — and wanted him and agents Seth and Sam Levinson, who also represented PED-user Melky Cabrera, taken down.
Several weeks of conference calls directed by Manfred followed, punctuated by orders to “Get A-Rod and the Levinsons. ” A-Rod, by then, was baseball’s public enemy number one.
Manfred would often put “Al from Milwaukee” — his name for Selig — on the line.
“Al from Milwaukee” would then repeat all the threats Manfred had already hit us with, and then he would say, “Gentlemen, I want A-Rod and the Levinsons and I want them now. I don’t want to wait 30, 60, or 90 days, I want this solved now! I don’t want to hear stories about it’s going to take time because of the DEA investigations. We are Major League Baseball, and we want results now. If you can’t get us those results, we will find someone who can.”
As Dominguez depicts it, MLB would stop at nothing to take down A-Rod, even if it meant intimidating witnesses. Such was the case with former University of Miami coach Lazer Collazo, who received a visit from Pat Houlihan, an MLB lawyer, and Neil Boland, an IT guy from MLB who had become “one of Manfred’s right-hand men.”
Years later, Collazo, who is Cuban American, would recall how Boland and [Houlihan] appeared at his suburban Miami home “around 10” on the night of April 4 to pepper him with questions about Alex Rodriguez and Biogenesis.
“They asked me about Alex, about Tony Bosch,” Collazo said. “They wanted more, and what I mean by wanting more, they kept saying, We feel you know a lot more than what you’re saying. You know more. We’re going to take this to the newspaper.”
Collazo said he feared for his family. “They said if you don’t give us more, we’re going to embarrass your family on their visas,” he said. “Not only was my wife there, but Daniella, my youngest child, was about nine or 10 and she heard all this. She got pretty emotional. She heard about jail, because they mentioned to jail. You know, they were trying to scare me.”
Collazo, who happened to have had jury duty the next day, said that MLB “kept calling me, calling me. We had to break for jury duty, so I called them back. They were getting after me. ‘We know that you have more information on Alex. We know you’ve met with Alex. We know, we know, we know.’ Threats, that’s the right word to use.”
A-Rod didn’t take these aggressive efforts lightly, firing back with intimidating tactics of his own.
A-Rod’s scorched-earth defense involved tailing several MLB officials. One of them was Rob Manfred, who took no chances with his own safety and immediately arranged for 24/7 security.
We in the DOI all knew what type of person A-Rod was, and that type of action came as no surprise. We weren’t too concerned about the threats, either,because in our line of work, threats were a common occurrence. But Manfred and his boys had a different reaction: they put MLB’s security department on high alert. Someone would accompany Manfred wherever he went.
Manfred made a trip to Fenway Park during that time, and I was asked to keep an eye on him from a distance, to make sure no one was following him and his security detail. At one point he spotted me and came over to ask if I was all right. I told him yes and asked how he was doing. “I’m okay,” he said. “Hopefully this will all be over soon.” Nothing ever came of the threats, but they did cause some agita.
For all this reckless animosity, the big names came out fine. A-Rod, of course, was suspended in 2014, but is now a successful broadcaster. Manfred still rules the sport, with hopes to expand MLB into new cities. Dominguez writes that the two have even become chummy in recent years, to the point where they’ve been seen hugging on the field. Dominguez says the efforts to make Rodriguez the fall guy, and A-Rod’s subsequent defensive moves may have all boiled down to public posturing and self-preservation. “It’s in both of their interests to make nice,” Dominguez said in an email, adding that: “I don’t believe for one second it was about the PEDs. It was about public image.”
During the 2015 World Series assignment for Fox, A-Rod was seem embracing Manfred behind the batting cage at Citi Field before Game 3 between the Mets and the Royals, and during All-Star Week in A-Rod’s hometown of Miami in 2017, Rodriguez posted a photo of himself and Jennifer Lopez in between Manfred and Manfred’s wife, Colleen, everyone with their arms wrapped around one another and the grinning Manfred parked next to J-Lo. One big happy family.
‘I would say 70 percent of players who have been in the league a year are using upper-echelon PEDs that can’t be detected.’
As for PEDs, the scourge that led to all this bitterness? Still as widely used as ever, alleges Dominguez, who — especially after MLB set a record in 2017 for most home runs hit in one season — initially guessed that 20 percent of current players use them until he was convinced the real number is much higher.
Three trusted baseball sources Dominguez talked to in 2017 — one an informant close to the game, one a baseball coach who had been part of the Biogenesis investigation, the third a doctor who had done time in prison for PED distribution — all said the game remains as dirty as ever. Their estimates were wildly disparate based on their individual experience, but each of them was unequivocal in their judgment that baseball remains affected by performance-enhancing drugs. The coach guessed that at least 30 to 35 percent are on some type of performance enhancer; the doctor said that in his professional opinion, 70 percent of players today who’ve been in the majors for at least a year are using performance enhancers of some type; the informant, who regularly deals with professional athletes, estimated that 90 percent of current baseball players “use something.” The doctor, who has done research on the use of peptides, a popular banned substance among athletes that is a building block for protein, also pointed to the 2017 season total for home runs, which had broken a 17-year-old record.
“Think about it, how would so many guys [have been] using anabolic steroids and now they beat the home run record, beat the pants off of it?” the doctor asked. “How does that happen? Did they change the trajectory of the ball? Did they do something to the inside of the ball? There’s definitely something going on. I would say 70 percent of players who have been in the league a year are using upper-echelon PEDs that can’t be detected. The word has floated downstream, and they’re on them.”
Adapted from Baseball Cop: The Dark Side of America’s National Pastime by Eddie Dominguez with Christian Red and Teri Thompson. Copyright © 2018. Available from Hachette Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.