A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez (27 page)

As a publicist of Alex once said, “He doesn’t listen to us. He listens to his friends.” “The Boys” as everyone, including Cynthia, called them, was the traveling pack of pals at Alex’s beck and call: Pepe Gomez, Gui Socarras, Yuri Sucart and, later, Ray Corona.

They were loyal to Alex— and sycophantic.

“He doesn’t have friends who aren’t on the payroll,” Dodd Romero told a
Sports Illustrated
reporter in the summer of 2008. “He’s got errand boys that go for this and go for that and travel with him.

They unpack his luggage, pack his luggage, they get his food.”

This loyalty extended to Alex’s choice of personal role models.

To a man, “The Boys” liked Barry Bonds because Alex loved Barry Bonds. The two baseball stars were disparate in public personas— the sweet Alex versus the sour Barry— but they had more in common than any fan imagined. Both were obsessed with fame. Both were enamored of their power. Both were insecure about their place
in history. Both would do anything to be known as the best ever.

They had friends in common— including Bonds’s trainer Greg Anderson, who would be convicted of steroid distribution. “All [three]

of them were close,” says one relative of Anderson’s.

In December 2004, with Bonds’s role in the BALCO scandal all over the news, Alex stood by his friend in a joint business venture— The Ultimate Experience—

that lowered the bar for

cheesy. It was a VIP, meet-and- greet, Christmas spectacular at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. Alex and Bonds charged fans $10,000 per couple— $7,500 for singles— for the chance to con-verse with the game’s greatest hitters. “The perfect holiday fl eece,”

the
New York Times
said.

The merrily fl eeced could ask Bonds and Alex about anything— except steroids. Attendees departed with gift bags and photos and perhaps-priceless conversational memories; Bonds and Alex each left with $750,000 for three hours of “work.” Whereas Bonds kept his dough, Eileen Thompson, a publicist for Alex, said her client intended to give the money to two charities: UNICEF

and the Boys & Girls Clubs of Miami. UNICEF records indicate that Alex donated $50,000 to early-childhood education programs in 2005. Offi cials from the Boys & Girls Clubs did not disclose the amount of his donation.

No charitable donation, no matter how large, could alter the fact that this was dirty money. A-Rod and Bonds, the game’s most prodigious hitters, were both pulling gawkers into the tent with their infl ated numbers and their artifi cially infl ated bodies. It was a circus, and they were the freaks. Alex once wanted to grow up to be just like Barry Bonds. And he had. In the aftermath of BALCO, as Bonds’s use of performance enhancers became more obvious based on the work of Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams in the book
Game of Shadows
, Alex kept repeating the innocent-until-proven-guilty defense.

Prove it, Alex seemed to be saying.

Chapter Ten

THE “FUCK YOU” TOUR

The 2006 season was very likely Alex’s cleanest as a Yankee— and his worst.

It was a disappointing year by his standards— a .290 average, with 35 homers and 121 RBIs— topped off by a humiliating playoff series against Detroit. His season was marred by errors, clutch strikeouts and unmerciful boos. “Rip away. Rip away,” Alex said in the middle of a June slump. “If I was a writer, I’d probably be writing some nasty things. If I was a fan, I’d be booing me, too.”

He was a victim of adulation whiplash. How could Alex have been so lauded for his greatness in 2005 and elicit such venom with his foggy play in 2006? If Alex had used performance enhancers to earn his second MVP, why hadn’t he used them in 2006? There was a very obvious reason: players had more to fear in 2006 after MLB pushed the union to toughen penalties for steroid cheats: a
positive test would now draw a 50-game suspension for a fi rst offense, 100 games for a second and a lifetime ban for a third.

There was also another wrinkle: Players competing in the World Baseball Classic that March in 2006 were subject to the more rigorous Olympic-style drug testing both before and during the event.

As his dismal season ground on, the fans and the press got nastier. One tabloid headline aimed at Alex read do you hate this man? Hitting coach Don Mattingly worked with him on his swing fl aws. His wife counseled him to turn to God. But his circle of friends kept telling him, “You’re still the best.”

That’s what Alex wanted to hear. He started to rationalize— the pop fl y that landed between third and shortstop with no one calling for it was
defi nitely
Jeter’s fault. He told himself his sliding statistics— his batting average was south of .260 for three months in the summer— were just an aberration.

He read every searing word in the papers about himself but seemed impervious to the chatter. He walked without a burden, a man in denial. “He never acted like he had a bad game,” ex–Yankee teammate Gary Sheffi eld says. “He didn’t carry an oh-for- four around like someone else would.”

Alex soldiered on with what Yankee teammate Jason Giambi described in
Sports Illustrated
as “false confi dence.” In the same article, Giambi recounted a revealing exchange he’d had with Alex.

“We’re all rooting for you, and we’re behind you 100 percent,”

Giambi had told Alex, “but you’ve got to get the big hit.”

“What do you mean?” Alex responded. “I’ve had fi ve hits in Boston.”

“You fucking call those hits?” Giambi said. “You had two fucking dinkers to right fi eld and a ball that bounced over the third baseman! Look at how many pitches you missed!”

Giambi was right— Alex had lost his confi dence, even though he didn’t seem to know it. He was guessing on pitches, whiffi ng on
fat fastballs and struggling to hit even batting practice pitches over the fence.

Alex’s malaise didn’t seem to faze him, but it affected his teammates. The tension between Jeter and Rodriguez escalated to the point where the clubhouse— and management— began to take sides. Torre leaned toward Jeter, the player who had been with him from the beginning; GM Brian Cashman supported Alex— after all, acquiring him had been the bold move that had proved Cashman’s genius. In the middle was a team that, Sheffi eld says, “didn’t know what to think about the soap opera.”

The 2006 drama bubbled over when Torre called Alex into his offi ce inside the visitors’ clubhouse in Seattle on August 24.

Safeco Field was no paradise for Alex. He had been mocked there since leaving the Mariners in 2001 for Texas. Now, as he battled a sore throat and achiness and endured the steady booing from Seattle fans, his manager challenged him to be accountable for his slump— a word Alex would never use.

“This is all about honesty,” Torre told him in a conversation he later recounted for
Sports Illustrated
’s Tom Verducci. “And it’s not about anyone else but you. You can’t pretend everything is OK

when it’s not.”

That night, Alex came to the plate as a pinch hitter. There were two outs in the ninth; the Yankees were behind 4–2. With fans on his back, two antibiotics coursing through his veins and closer J. J. Putz in front of him, Alex struck out swinging to end the game. He then stunned stadium attendants— many of whom had known Alex as the perfect and proper Mariner in the late 1990s— by throwing a chair across the clubhouse fl oor. Alex was angry because he was embarrassed.

Where had his confi dence gone? Steroids had supplied Alex with an edge in the past. For many players, the “strut” steroids provided was as important as the extra strength they delivered. On steroids, Alex felt invincible; off them, he felt vulnerable.
His worst indignity was still to come. When the lineups for game one of the Yankees fi rst-round playoff series against Detroit were announced, Torre had Alex batting sixth, the lowest spot he’d hit in since his fi rst full season in the majors, 1996. “It crushed him,” says a confi dant of Alex’s. “Nothing after that surprised him.

Torre lost him. No question.”

He played with zombie eyes for three games. And in game four, Torre dropped him to eighth. The Tigers won the series and Alex had just one hit in four games. “[Alex] was a head case,” Charles Zabransky, the longtime Yankee clubhouse guard, recalled. “He wasn’t ever settled. He didn’t know what he was doing at times.”

Alex knew one thing after 2006: Never again would he endure a season like that one. Never again would he be so fragile. So vulnerable.

Alex went into the off-season resolved to change everything— including his look and his attitude— but he also sought out someone familiar: Angel Presinal. The trainer to the stars of the D.R.

had been by Alex’s side in Texas and had worked with him before the 2005 season.

Alex was determined to reinvent himself for the 2007 season.

In front of teammates, he worked out with Romero, who showed up about every fi fth day. Behind the scenes, he relied on Presinal, who was still banned by Major League Baseball for his role as Juan Gonzalez’s steroid bagman in the incident with Toronto authorities in 2001, but was ubiquitous on Yankee road trips. He didn’t sign in on log sheets at stadiums, but he was usually waiting for Alex at the team’s hotel.

Alex never tested positive for steroids in 2007, but one baseball source says it’s possible Presinal administered a low-dose cycle of steroids with HGH to jump-start his regular season.

In the Dominican Republic, Presinal has a reputation as a
healer who salvages baseball careers from the scrap heap. He had access to the Dominican pharmacies that sold steroids, and baseball sources familiar with his activities in the D.R. say Presinal was a student of performance enhancers, known for rubbing injured players with creams believed to contain steroids. Former Rangers strength and conditioning coach Fernando Montes knew Presinal well from his days working in Cleveland, where Presinal trained Juan Gonzalez in 2001. “He would just take what workouts he saw others do and mimic them,” Montes says. “So you have to ask, What does he do that’s so special?”

Presinal keeps players’ use quiet, or undetectable. One proven trick is to stack testosterone at a low level with HGH. “I absolutely think Alex is using HGH . . . probably a combination of growth and steroids,” Canseco says.

Two players close to A-Rod say he has used HGH while with the Yankees based on side effects they’ve seen and that he likely procured it the same way many major leaguers do—through doctors who have ties to antiaging clinics. According to one Yankee, players often turn to Dr. Brian Wolstein, a Tampa-area chiro-practor who is a self-described antiaging specialist. A former Mr.

Tampa, Wolstein founded Infi nite Vitality, which, according to its website, legally prescribes patients HGH. Wolstein says he does not prescribe HGH to pro athletes because it’s banned by MLB, but has offered “nutritional advice” to a number of major leaguers, including ex-Yankees Carl Pavano and David Wells. He says Alex is not a client. “I met him in Las Vegas, but he didn’t come to me,”

says Wolstein. “I know he’s got his own deals.”

Until 2007, Infi nite Vitality was less than two miles from the Yankees spring training stadium, George M. Steinbrenner Field.

Now based in Clearwater, Infi nite Vitality operates out of a one-story brick building that sits among car dealerships and industrial offi ce parks on US-19. It is less than a 30-minute drive from the Yankees’ complex.
A former teammate says Alex viewed 2007 as his “ ‘Fuck You’

Tour.” He was sick of being the fall guy in New York. He was tired of not being coddled by Torre. And he had an opt-out clause in his contract that would allow him to become a free agent after the season— and let Scott Boras grab him an even richer deal.

He showed up for spring training in Tampa determined to leave every vestige of 2006 behind. He even came clean on the subject that had always left his pinstriped pants on fi re: his relationship with Jeter. All the gossip was true, he told reporters— they weren’t best friends anymore. They were long past the days of slumber-party pillow talk, dissecting baseball strategy well into the night. They hadn’t been close for a while. “Let’s make a contract,”

Rodriguez told the writers. “You don’t ask about Derek anymore, and I promise I’ll stop lying to you.”

“That felt good,” Alex said later.

His Jeter cleansing moment actually helped him with teammates. They were happy to hear— for once— what was in Alex’s heart instead of the bullshit that was in his script.

Alex seemed more natural now; he wasn’t trying so hard to please anymore. He didn’t oblige every query from reporters and occasionally snapped off a curt reply to a question he didn’t like.

He started plugging iPod headphones into his ears when he was in the clubhouse as a built-in buffer to reporters’ questions. “Can’t hear you,” he’d say as he walked by, bobbing his head to his tunes.

On opening day, he missed a windblown pop-up— and didn’t care.

In fact, he poked fun at himself in the dugout. He was totally relaxed at the plate in the eighth when he atoned for his botched catch with a home run.

It was the fi rst of 14 home runs he would hit in April— no player in history had ever hit more homers in the month.
All spring and into summer, he had an edgy attitude, a mean swing and a secret weapon: Presinal, who was always nearby, but in the shadows. Alex had learned his lesson in Texas— he was now discreet when he took Presinal on road trips. The trainer would usually share a room with one of The Boys, Pepe Gomez or Yuri Sucart. Several Yankee players knew Presinal was around constantly and knew he had been banned, but no one said a word.

They respected the code about not ratting out a teammate. Besides, Alex was hitting like an MVP.

Alex was feeling so good that he dared try something he would have considered unthinkable just six months before: he hosted a summer barbecue for the team at his suburban home in Rye, New York. “Hell no, never in a million years would I have had people at my house,” Alex said. “Again, it’s part of the whole thing. People look at [my] numbers— runners in scoring position and fewer errors. But it’s the overall comfort level to have a barbecue, to have all my teammates over and enjoy ourselves. I think that’s part of being more comfortable in your skin and being more comfortable in New York.”