A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez (16 page)

Even if the buddy-ball Alex was playing with a small circle of opposing players only meant a dozen extra hits for him and his pals during a long season—a home run here, an RBI there—that’s a dozen moments when an inning may be extended or a pitcher’s psyche may take a hit.

It was destructive on many levels. So if a small group of Rangers believed Alex was betraying his own guys, why didn’t they do anything about it? Most saw a great risk in confronting Alex. They were certain Alex would go running to owner Tom Hicks to squeal on his accusers.

One Ranger at least questioned Alex.

“I think you’re signaling a little too soon out there,” he said.
“What are you talking about,” Alex replied.

“The batters, they see you.”

The conversation continued, and on the surface, Alex accepted the critique. Behind the scenes, he was enraged at being scrutinized by anyone in
his
clubhouse. He didn’t change his ways.

The Rangers pitching staff struggled mightily during the Alex era in Texas. (There were other factors besides giving up extra hits off an Alex tip, but it did not escape attention when the staff ERA dropped from 5.51 from 2001 to 2003 to 4.53 in 2004—the year Alex left.)

“He talks about how pressure in Texas made him do certain things,” says one former Ranger. “Well, plenty of guys have faced pressure without doing what he did . . . without undermining his own team.”

Often, the pressure on Alex was self-induced. He had only himself to blame for an interview he had done with
Esquire
that ran in its April 2001 issue.

Again, he forgot to pretend to be gracious and revealed his Jeter envy/obsession. “Jeter’s been blessed with great talent around him,” Alex told the
Esquire
writer. “He’s never had to lead. He can just go and play and have fun. And he hits second— that’s totally different than third and fourth in a lineup. You got into New York, you wanna stop Bernie [Williams] and [Paul] O’Neill. You never say, ‘Don’t let Derek beat you.’ He’s never your concern.”

Alex clearly didn’t get it: Jeter had four rings, which in the baseball version of paper-rock- scissors, beats individual stats every time. Alex talked of winning titles, of rolling into Texas in pursuit of a World Series, but Jeter had
done
it fourfold as a Yankee. “It bothered him,” Haselman says. “He wants to win really bad. He really wants a ring. Everybody does. But I think what Alex really, really wants is to be able to
say
he’s a champion.”

Alex had always wanted a World Series title as résumé stuffer,
as a chapter in his autobiography, as an engraved line on his Hall of Fame plaque, as the fi nal validation of his status as The Greatest Ever.

That ring must have seemed very far away during his fi rst month as a Texas Ranger. On April 6, just days before Alex was to visit Seattle for the fi rst time since he had dumped the Mariners, a letter was published in business journals, addressed to offi cials at Boeing, which was contemplating a move of its base operations from Seattle to Chicago or Dallas: “I moved to Dallas-Fort Worth to improve my future,” the letter began, “so should you.” Signed, Alex Rodriguez.

The letter was a clever promotion for the city of Dallas, but it incensed many Seattle fans who didn’t need much to kindle their A-Rod animus. He arrived in Seattle on the Rangers’ jet on tax day, April 15, braced for boos when he went out to dinner that night.

He was greeted graciously— at fi rst. “I don’t care what comes out of their mouths,” Alex said before the game. “I still love them.”

The feeling was not mutual. When Alex walked onto Safeco Field on April 16, its retractable roof was open, open as wide as the cranks and pulleys would allow. “Alex doesn’t like to hit with the roof open,” Mariners president Chuck Armstrong told reporters early in the week. “If we can possibly leave it open, we’ll leave it open.”

Alex had a fi tful night of sleep and talked to Fannin several times that day. In the fi rst inning, as the number three hitter, his name was announced. It was greeted with a cascade of boos . . .

and thousands of counterfeit bills that fl uttered down to the fi eld from the upper balconies. It appeared that every stack of Monopoly game money within 30 miles of Safeco Field had been tossed his way. Signs written in Magic Marker, crayon and craft paint were fl ashed from the seats: alex, buy me a house and who let the dog in? and a-fraud.

As Alex approached the on-deck circle, he kept his head down,
which may be why he didn’t see a spectator, Jeff Heckman, who was sitting near the fi eld, raise a fi shing pole. On the end of the line he had hooked a dollar bill, and it was now dangling over Alex’s head. “I didn’t even get a nibble,” Heckman said later. “Maybe the denomination wasn’t up there for him.”

After the game, Alex tried to laugh off the boos, but they seemed to have tied him up at the plate. In that three-game series in Seattle, he went 3 for 12 with 2 strikeouts and 1 RBI. The Mariners won two of three and led the AL West with an 11–4 record.

The Rangers were second at 8–8, but they went on to lose 20 of their next 26 games.

Not even A-Rod could lure people to watch a team this bad.

Texas sports fans turned their attention to the upcoming Cowboys season, local TV ratings slid and the Rangers’ team ERA ballooned to a league-worst 6.38. Johnny Oates resigned as manager after the fi rst month when the team that had been touted as a pennant winner.

Alex shook off his slow start in mid-May and got his average up to .308, but skeptics delighted in pointing out that it was only .260 with runners in scoring position. Such shortcomings in his team stats didn’t go unnoticed. On a tour of the Hall of Fame, the legendary Minnesota Twins slugger Kirby Puckett said of Alex, “He can’t get in here with $252 million. We won’t let him in. You can’t buy into this team here. You have to earn it.”

On June 8 the Rangers were 27 games behind the fi rst-place Mariners and getting pounded on the fi eld and in the papers.

Thomas Boswell of the
Washington Post
called the Rangers’ lone-star plan built around A-Rod “idiocy.” Jack Curry, of the
New York
Times
, wrote, “This is the home of the Texas Rangers, the team that can’t. Can’t win, can’t pitch and can’t fathom how a season that they thought would be exciting, perhaps memorable, has been a disaster. Can’t believe this debacle happened after they signed Alex Rodriguez for 10 years, for $252 million.”
Alex internalized every word of almost every article that depicted him as the fool’s-gold purchase of the Rangers.

Years later, he would say that this burden of expectation had driven him to inject a steroid he referred to as “Boli” in secret from 2001 through 2003, though teammates say his use was not entirely discreet. In the D.R., “Boli” was short for at least three steroids: Dianabol, Deca-Durabolin and Primobolan, which was the one steroid not sold in Dominican Republic pharmacies. However, it was easily obtained through the D.R.’s underground drug trade.

Alex knew the differences between the steroids and was capable of using them expertly. In 2001, Alex was believed to be taking a combination of Winstrol and Deca-Durabolin with a low dose of testosterone under the guidance of the Dominican trainer Angel “Nao” Presinal. In other words, as one player put it, Alex was stacking steroids like a pro. He was ensuring that his stats would stand up to the Texas heat— and all other forms of fi re.

Alex Rodriguez is blessed with an angler’s snap of the wrist on his throws, a museum worthy swing and an impeccable instinct for damage control. He needed all three of those special attributes to survive his return to Seattle for the 72nd All-Star Game in 2001.

He deftly defused hostilities with a heartfelt— but also

ingenious— plan he had hatched a week earlier. Alex told American League Manager Joe Torre about it, but few others. In the fi rst inning, as Safeco Field fans were getting comfortable in their seats, the “home team” AL players jogged out to take their posi-tions. Alex was the starting shortstop for the AL, and beside him, at third, was Cal Ripken, Jr. This was his fi nal All-Star Game— his 19th in his 20-year career— but his selection to the All-Star team this year had been based more on sentiment than on merit. One of the greatest shortstops in baseball history, he had switched to
third base this season to accommodate a changing of the guard in Baltimore. Ripken was stirring the dirt around third with his cleats when Rodriguez walked over and nudged Ripken ever so gently toward his old shortstop position.

“Here, this is yours,” he told Ripken. “Why don’t you go play an inning at short?”

Ripken looked at Torre in the dugout waving him over, saw the Seattle fans snapping photos, felt Rodriguez’s glove on his back, knew the TV crews were onto the scene— and had one searing thought: “I didn’t want to play short,” he recalls. “There was a realization that I was mic’ed and he was mic’ed. I really wanted to tell him get out of here and stop bothering me with this.”

He was more fl ustered than fl attered by the offer. He had prepared himself to play third that night, not short, in front of millions of people. Cal and Alex were alike in their polish and poise and had another major thing in common: Neither man ever wanted to look bad. “It’s the focus; and no player wants to go out there, be unprepared, and potentially be embarrassed,” Ripken says. Cal had added length to his shortstop’s glove when he moved to third to fl ag hot grounders to his right or left. And he knew the roomy webbing would make any fast-twitch double-play attempt from shortstop feel as if he were reaching into a mailbox for the ball.

Ripken looked at Alex in disbelief but knew what he had to do. As he walked over to the shortstop position, Ripken turned to AL starting pitcher Roger Clemens and yelled, “Okay, looks like you gotta strike everybody out.”

Ripken wasn’t tested at shortstop that inning, and he moved back to third base the next time the AL players took the fi eld. “The deeper meaning was that it was a wonderful gesture,” Ripken says.

And, as he would later acknowledge, the switcheroo played well with the audience. Everyone got what they needed: Ripken was rightly honored; the crowd got to savor an emotional moment; and Alex was feted for his generous spirit.
The Rangers were a toxic dump on the fi eld and going nowhere fast, so Alex had plenty of time to fi ll his depressed spirits with spending sprees. He housed buddies such as Yuri “Judy” Sucart and Gui Socarras in style. He would eventually buy a 7,500-square- foot neoclassical-style home in one of Dallas’s most exclusive neighborhoods, Highland Park. The two-story house had a beautiful red-tile roof, gracious arches on the front porch, a 52-inch television in a spacious family room, a semicircular drive to welcome an elite guest list of politicians and business tycoons, and a Chagall above the bedroom fi replace. Alex prized his studio-sized, custom closet, which contained rows of charcoal gray suits that were separated from black suits that were divided from cream suits, most purchased through New York’s Bergdorf Goodman. Polo shirts were folded into rectangles and placed on shelves. A motorized tie rack kept his Versace silks neat. Each pair of Ferragamo shoes had its own cubbyhole.

“Alex was getting his stats and living the life,” says one ex-Ranger. “He was in a different universe, like he was above what was going on.”

The Rangers were losing ugly and often. Veterans such as Ken Caminiti broke down physically, a weak pitching staff became laughably bad and rifts started to form over who was in Alex’s posh camp and who was not. “I think that we would all recognize that things like that can stir up within us jealousy,” says Chad Curtis, a Rangers teammate of Alex’s. “Unfortunately, we all probably battled with that a little bit, saying, ‘Aw, Alex, he’s got his own private plane.’ Well, that’s a by-product of who he is and what he’s done, so, way to go, Alex. Now if he chooses to take a few guys with him and go do something, good for them. If he chooses to not invite others, they may feel a little put out.”
Alex did have friends among his teammates. He knew Pudge and Palmeiro from their off-seasons spent around one another in Miami. He formed a bond with Michael Young, a promising second baseman. Other players, though, took their cue from his cool attitude and distanced themselves from him, irritated by their prima donna. A clubhouse attendant was required to place tooth-paste on Alex’s toothbrush after every game. A hotel suite had to be outfi tted with a basket of Alex’s favorite foods when he arrived for road games. It was to some Rangers— as Mets GM Steve Phillips had predicted— a 24-plus- 1 clubhouse. In previous years, the Rangers had been a close team, back when Will Clark had held them together. “If [Will] told a player to jump off a cliff, there’s a good chance he’d jump off,” Crabtree recalls. “If Alex Rodriguez told me to jump off a cliff, I’d say, ‘You fi rst.’ ”

The Texas baseball fans never seemed to take to A-Rod either.

They were mostly of the boot-wearing, truck-driving culture that loved Troy Aikman’s toughness in the pocket as a Dallas Cowboy and Nolan Ryan’s gunslinger snarl on the mound. They sensed that Alex Rodriguez wasn’t a player’s player, that he held himself above the tobacco chewing, the jock scratching and the daily ribbing that bonded a team.

Even Hicks knew that his big investment wasn’t paying full dividends. “Alex, he’s a strong personality,” the owner says now.

“I think he’s been coached along the way, and he’s very smooth in how he handles the media. And I think when you compare him to hometown heroes, like Pudge Rodriguez or Nolan Ryan, they’re just not that way. They’re much more direct and just talk like an athlete. I think at least in our case our fans warmed up to that style more than Alex’s.”

Alex never seemed aware of his sliding Q rating. As one friend explains it, Alex equates his popularity to All-Star and MVP

votes— status markers. As his debut season in Texas ground on, he
felt pressure to keep his voting bloc happy by retaining their awe with big numbers. “What changes is, the expectations keep getting higher,” Alex said upon his arrival in Texas. “People expect you to be superhuman.”