1. Baseball's Big Mudfight Ft. A-Rod
The Red Sox won the World Series on Halloween eve, delighting beard enthusiasts and those annoying Northeasterners, but the baseball drama will continue to escalate. This isn't the try-and-fail-to-get-out-Big-Papi type baseball drama that plays out on the baseball diamond. No, this baseball drama involves lawyerin', investigatin', investigator sex, performance-enhancing drug allegations and, of course, money and legacy. This is high-profile, high-stakes, 'screw you – NO SCREW YOU!' drama.
Some quick context, all from The New YorkTimes' Sunday piece on Alex Rodriguez, because, you know, On Fire is all about highbrow journalism. Last summer Major League Baseball handed out hefty bans to more than a dozen major leaguers for their relationship to an "anti-aging clinic" that allegedly distributed performance enhancing drugs. Most got 50-game bans, Ryan Braun got a 65-gamer, and all agreed to their penalties.
Everyone, that is, except A-Rod, who got smacked with a 211 game ban. A-Rod is due to make $25 million next year and $21 million in 2015. The guy is pushing 40, so sitting out 211 games will not only cost him 30 million-plus in salary, but he might not be physically able to return after sitting out the suspension, jeopardizing the entirety of the $94 million still left on his contract.
In a nutshell, MLB is trying to nail one of its marquee but lame and over-the-hill stars for performance-enhancing drug use extending beyond the Biogenesis allegations, while A-Rod is disputing the allegations while crying foul over MLB's investigative process.
MLB hired former NYPD bro Daniel T. Mullin to lead its investigations unit back in 2007. In February, MLB investigators visited the home of a nurse who worked at Biogenesis. According to the Times, Mullin sent flowers to the nurse on Valentine's Day to thank her for her cooperation. She called him to thank him for the flowers, he asked her out to dinner and more cooperation was had at her Miami home in the following weeks. Welcome to Miami!
Team A-Rod paid the nurse $100,000 for the flower card signed by Mr. Mullin, and access to her text messages, and his lawyers are using allegations of an inappropriate relationship in his New York lawsuit against MLB. Hard tactics all around.
Team MLB has also been dropping dough to acquire helpful records themselves. They paid a guy $125,000 for two sets of Biogenesis files. The records had previously been straight up stolen, some say by Biogenesis employees, some say from a car that had been broken into. Shady.
That's not to say there aren't signs of dirtiness from A-Rod's band of lawyers and private investigators. The star witness for MLB is a Mr. Bosch, who headed Biogenesis. He denies receiving cash payments from MLB in exchange for his cooperation. MLB filed a Florida lawsuit against Bosch in March, and he capitulated shortly thereafter. In exchange, MLB would drop their suit against Bosch, cover his legal and travel expenses, indemnify him from lawsuits by players and pay thousands a day in full-time personal security.
Team A-Rod has been throwing major shade on MLB's investigative methods. The proof of PED use seems ironclad though, seeing as how Ryan Braun, Nelson Cruz and Antonio Bastardo quickly and quietly agreed to their suspensions. No one is calling A-Rod a stand-up guy however. Jason Varitek should have smacked that unsavory prima donna a little harder when he had the chance.
His 211-game ban does seem exorbitant relative to his fellow players. How can MLB tack on extra suspension length for PED use "over the course of multiple years?" Oh, you mean the years he bashed the Yankees to World Series glory in 2009?
Or even further back, in the early 2000s and mid-1990s when A-Rod was a 40-40 shortstop for the Mariners? Now that he's helped MLB grow as a professional league, (read: enriching the franchise owners), now that he's an aging third baseman with a balky hip, MLB and its owners have decided to turn on the moral crusade switch and gun for A-Rod. Yeah, his contract is an albatross, yeah, A-Rod is a cheating snake – but MLB is exploiting, then discarding, the help on this one.
