A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez (18 page)

It had multiple-personality disorder: the roof porch was like that of the old Tiger Stadium; the white steel frieze surrounding the upper deck resembled that of the original Yankee Stadium; a hand-operated scoreboard mimicked Fenway’s; the arched windows came from Comiskey Park; the red brick veneer was lifted from Camden Yards. It was a patchwork stadium at best, a tacky monstrosity at all other times.

Alex liked it, in all of its artifi ciality, because he loved hitting there.

He hit .323 at home during the 2002 season; he was good almost every night and great on many of them. Unfortunately for Rangers fans, he was the only Texas star who shined. Setting the standard for slow starts, the Rangers were 11 games out of fi rst place before April 23. The team was as bad as it had been the year before, but the farther behind the Rangers slipped in the standings, the more dominant Alex became— and the more irritable. In the fi rst 990 games of his career, he had been ejected from a game only once. In a span of 12 games in June, he was tossed twice.

The rage Alex displayed was born of frustration, but he managed to channel that anger. By July, the Rangers were 16 games out of fi rst place in the AL West, and Alex could not have been more impressive. He hit 12 home runs that month. His torrid hitting, however, did not bring fans to The Ballpark in Arlington. He was not, as Boras had promised in his gilded A-Rod portfolio, a boon to the Rangers’ bottom line.
In July, Hicks told reporters that the Rangers had lost $31 million in the past year and might lose more in the 2002 season. He sounded very much as if he had buyer’s remorse. “I’m not doing it anymore,” Hicks said of his profl igate free-agent purchases. “We’re going to play within our means from now on, at least break even.”

He wasn’t getting a return at the gate from Alex despite his star’s inspired production, and he was getting nothing from the $24 million he had invested in Juan Gonzalez. “Oh, God, Juan never played,” Hicks recalls. “I mean, it was a big contract; he was hurt; he was injured; and in hindsight he probably had things in his body that weren’t healthy.”

Such hindsight is now common in baseball and always comes with a self-serving blind spot. Hicks was new to baseball— the neon sign of steroid use during the Canseco years in Texas had been under the visage of owner George W. Bush— and was hardly educated on the world of performance enhancers.

“I swear, I don’t think he knew about Alex,” says a former Ranger.

Alex was under Hicks’s nose each day. They were constant breakfast partners and dinner companions. At times, in a manipulative attempt to build up his holy image while demolishing others, Alex would whisper names of dopers into Hicks’s ear.

“Alex used to tell me negative things about other players around the league that were suspected [of steroid use],” Hicks says.

As a new owner, Hicks was naive about the prevalence of steroid abuse. But it’s hard to explain GM John Hart’s selective ignorance. Hart knew about Gonzalez’s Canadian fi asco before signing him. But baseball in the steroid era was full of people doing moral backfl ips, professing willful ignorance and embracing contradictions— as in
Steroids are bad for a player . . . unless they are good
for a player
. Increased production on the fi eld made contrarians of almost everyone in the game. Home runs squared the ethics of cheating.
All that mattered to owners and GMs, to the union and agents, was one question: Did the player deliver?

And no one in baseball delivered more in 2002 than Alex Rodriguez did.

The oppressive heat of a 97-degree afternoon fell to a more merciful 91-degree Saturday night at The Ballpark when the Rangers took the fi eld against the Blue Jays on August 17. The day before, he’d gone four for four, with a game-winning home run. Pitches looked as big and slow as soap bubbles to him, and he could see the seams spinning toward him.

Alex had never faced tonight’s Blue Jays’ starter, Steve Parris, but he had scoured the scouting report and was one of the best at reading pitchers from the on-deck circle, taking mock swings, not-ing release points and tics. In the fi rst inning, with the sky darken-ing, Alex belted a 1–0 pitch into the left-fi eld stands for his 40th home run of the year, 404 feet by the measuring tape. Undeterred, Parris was feeling good two innings later when he battled Alex to a 2–2 count. The next pitch turned into Alex’s 41st home run, traveling 416 feet. When Jays reliever Corey Thurman got his shot at Alex in the seventh inning, he was met with a 366-foot blast for home run number 42. “I was possessed by the moment,” Alex explained later.

This tape of performance set off the steroid alarms. In the dog days of the season, when players are wilting, A-Rod had fresh legs and a fresher bat. “It’s that stuff that makes you say no fuckin’

way,” said one Rangers teammate.

The Rangers won their third straight that night but still trailed fi rst-place Oakland by 20 games. Evan Grant of the
Dallas Morning News
wrote, “He is stuck on a team going nowhere, so Alex Rodriguez passes the hottest, most tedious part of the summer with a game of ‘Can you top this?’ He plays against himself.”

And against ghosts. Alex knew of those who had gone before him and counted the game’s living legends, such Cal Ripken,
Jr., and Pete Rose, as intimate advisers. He often declared that his mission was to compete with the record books. He loathed the Rangers’ deadbeat existence because he didn’t want to be associated with a loser. How would history judge him if he never won a World Series? Or, worse yet, never even made it to the playoffs as a Ranger?

He muscled out a league-high 57 home runs and 142 RBIs in a season that started a hot debate: Can the MVP trophy go to a player on a bad team? As the votes were tallied, Presinal was anxious— he had a big bonus riding on this vote.

Alex placed second in the balloting for the second time in his career, with the AL MVP going to Oakland’s Miguel Tejada, another Dominican player who would be linked to performance enhancers. Another Presinal client.

Alex Rodriguez had a strong ally in Rangers Manager Jerry Narron, who recognized that the game’s best player was happiest when allowed to create his own work environment. He knew that Alex— like his boyhood idol, Cal Ripken, Jr.— valued routine and structure and was wary of change. Narron was an amiable man who would stay up with Alex until 1 a.m. talking baseball in his offi ce.

Narron was also happy to accommodate the special perks A-Rod demanded. He was even allowed to pick his own clubhouse attendant, Tommy Bolin, a friend from Miami who had worked in the Anaheim clubhouse. Bolin was much older than his coattendants in the Rangers clubhouse— generally 18-year- olds on an $8,000

salary, plus tips— and he was virtually Alex’s personal valet.

Narron was fi red after the 2002 season, when the $100 million payroll yielded a worse record (72–90) than the team had posted in 2001. Hicks and Hart turned to a no-nonsense manager with plenty of baseball gravitas: Buck Showalter.

“Alex and I had a healthy respect for each other,” says Showalter. “Some of my best times were sitting down and talking baseball with him.”

Showalter was the son of a high school principal from a small mill town in Florida who valued discipline and authority. After three strong years managing the Yankees, he joined the long line of capable managers who had butted heads with the Yankees’ owner, George Steinbrenner, and were quickly shown the door.

It was obvious to even casual fans that the Rangers needed a mental makeover, and Alex said little about the change. He had other issues on his mind. He was fi nally getting married. A year earlier, he had proposed to Cynthia Scurtis in a romantic Art Deco South Beach restaurant with the elegant ambiance of Sinatra-era Miami.

She had said yes, but her Greek family wasn’t completely on board. Alex was viewed as a bit of an outsider to their faith, but, as the November 2 wedding date approached, Cynthia’s 82-year- old grandfather, the respected Demosthenes Mekras, who had founded the fi rst Greek Orthodox cathedral in Miami, agreed to preside over the ceremony.

Alex had actively prowled Dallas’s club scene as a bachelor while dating Cynthia, but he relied on her for structure. She planned his days, oversaw his philanthropy and helped him formulate a corporate allure. “She was the rock in the relationship,” Hicks recalls. “I think she helped him be a man.”

Cynthia had left her job as a high school teacher and was working as a pretrial counselor, championing hardship cases, trying to keep the poor and underrepresented out of prison. “She was dealing with bottom-of- the-barrel people, but she loved doing it,”

Cynthia’s sister told the
New York Post.
“Cynthia is intelligent and eager— she can read you up and down after your fi rst conversation.”

She grew up among the affl uent near Miami’s tony Coconut Grove. Her father, John, was an importer/exporter, while her
mother, Evangeline, did volunteer work at local hospitals. She was serious but popular, a sorority girl and an ambitious woman.

Hicks hosted the rehearsal dinner at his home; he was famed for throwing lavish parties, having once hired Whoopi Goldberg to perform at an investors’ retreat at the Ritz-Carlton near Palm Springs, and he spared no expense for Alex and Cynthia. A band played at his mansion. Champagne fl owed all night. “It was a pretty grand evening,” Hicks recalls. “All her family are Greeks, his family are all Dominicans, and we had Cal Ripken and Michael Young and my family there. And after everybody left, Alex and Cal and my son and I— and Boras— stayed up and talked baseball till about three in the morning.”

Alex seldom drank, but on the night before his wedding, Hicks says that they all did a couple of tequila shots. The groom-to- be was buzzed and happy. “Just hearing Cal give big-brother kind of advice to Alex about what would lie ahead of him in baseball was a special treat for me,” Hicks recalls.

A few hours later, they were all pressed, polished and ready to await the bride at the altar in a ceremony performed at Alex’s Highland Park home. Cynthia looked beautiful and, as always, fi t. She had just begun training with the pro bodybuilder Jenny Worth, who was a Fitness Olympia contestant in Miami, working under the celebrity trainer Dodd Romero.

Cynthia looked sculpted in an Amsale gown sparkling with Swarovski crystals sewn into the fabric. The vows were exchanged, and Alex was now a married man.

“He came to me after the wedding and asked, ‘What do married people do?’ ” a former teammate recalls. “And I’m like, ‘Wow, this guy needs someone to tell him how to be in every way.’ ”

What did it mean to love someone else more than himself?

What sacrifi ce did that require?

“I think there was love,” says a friend, “but there was also need.
Alex needed her to ground him from what I guess you’d call a dark side.”

In the winter of 2003, at the start of spring training at baseball facilities in Arizona and Florida, major-league players were greeted by lab technicians with plastic cups. Drug testing in baseball had offi cially begun.

Major League Baseball and the Players Association were forced to do it. In the summer of 2002, politicians alarmed by Ken Caminiti’s sordid steroid confessions in
Sports Illustrated
had dragged baseball offi cials before a Senate subcommittee and brow-beat them into adopting a testing policy.

The union balked. As one former Rangers player says, “Why would the union sign off on a test that would kill the golden goose— steroids? Guys were making a killing with it.”

Money meant power for the union.

“The union knew about [steroids] for quite some time, there’s no question in my mind,” says former Ranger Tim Crabtree, who was a union rep in Texas. “And because of the numbers people were putting up, putting more people in the seats, better for the game overall, better for bargaining, and all that . . . it was just kind of, ‘Look the other way.’ ”

And as Canseco once wrote, “The [Players Association] never lifted a fi nger to stop it.”

Two players who would end up being named in the Mitchell Report in 2007 say the union kept telling superstars the same thing: Don’t worry about the testing; we’ll take care of it.

Players Association Executive Director Donald Fehr didn’t want testing but knew he had no choice but to deliver some reasonable facsimile of a plan to dislodge politicians from his back.

The compromise agreement he made with MLB stipulated that
every player on the 40-man rosters would be tested at least once, and throughout the season 240 players would be tested again. All results would be anonymous, and if fewer than 5 percent of the results were positive, no mandatory, punitive testing program would be imposed. The anonymity, of course, was considered a joke. Players were asked by administrators of the test to sign their names next to the code that corresponded to their specimen containers.

“The idea [behind the testing] was to get a feel for how many people were doing it,” says Crabtree. “Yet every test had a name attached to it. So in that regard did the union screw up? Yeah, I’d say they did, because I don’t know how you can attach a name to a sample if it’s truly anonymous.”

The union never imagined that the players would need the anonymity. Offi cials did everything they could to diminish the potential number of positive tests and keep them from reaching the 5 percent threshold that would trigger mandatory testing with punitive measures for cheaters. Keep the number below 5 percent— and the ’roid life would go on as it had. Players were told they’d be tested in spring training, so it would be easy for them to cycle off steroids to avoid detection. The handful of others tested in-season was given a heads-up because doping offi cials had to apply for parking passes and clubhouse credentials in advance. Drug-testing offi cials believe that teams used that gap to serve notice of the of-fi cials’ arrival. That gave cheaters time to fl ush their system.

Players also became students of trickery. Some would disappear from the stadium when lab techies arrived. Others were known to use a device called a Whizzinator— a faux penis in fi ve different shades of skin color that players kept tucked in their boxer briefs. The device contained a heat pack that kept a substitute urine stream at a temperature meant to fool the test administrators and ultimately dupe the lab tests.