RODRIGUEZ SUSPENDED THRU 2014 SEASON.HIS EXPECTED APPEAL WILL LIKELY ALLOW HIM TO PLAY REST OF SEASON.

N.Y. TIMES


Alex Rodriguez was among 13 players suspended by Major League Baseball on Monday for violating the league’s antidoping rules, the biggest single-day drug action in the sport’s history.

Rodriguez is planning to appeal his ban, which would begin Thursday and would be for 211 games, through the 2014 season — by far the longest levied by the league for a doping violation. The league cited his “use and possession of numerous forms of prohibited, performance-enhancing substances” over many years.

Once considered among the best players in the game, Rodriguez received a far stiffer penalty than the others cited by baseball on Monday, who all accepted 50-game suspensions, effectively ending their 2013 seasons. Among the others were three 2013 All-Stars — Nelson Cruz of the Texas Rangers, Everth Cabrera of the San Diego Padres and Jhonny Peralta of the Detroit Tigers — as well as Francisco Cervelli of the Yankees.

Rodriguez is the only player planning to appeal, and the executive director of the players union, Michael Weiner, called his suspension “way too harsh.”

“We’ve never had a 200-plus penalty for a player who may have used drugs, and you know, among other things, I just think that is way out of line,” Weiner said in a call with reporters.

 

Bud Selig, the Major League Baseball commissioner, was criticized for his initial ambivalence to the issue of doping during the first part of his reign. He is keenly aware of his legacy.

 

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 Weiner said a ruling on the appeal was not likely before November, which means Rodriguez can presumably play through the rest of the season.

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In 2011, Rodriguez played in only 99 games, hitting 16 home runs. In 2012, he hit 18 homers and missed six weeks with a broken hand. In the playoffs, he was benched for poor play.

 

In recent months, the continuing investigation and Rodriguez’s injury have prompted a back-and-forth between Rodriguez and the Yankees amounting to a public fight.       

On Monday, the Yankees said they felt compelled to address several recent accusations, including Rodriguez’s saying Friday during his rehabilitation assignment that he believed the Yankees and baseball were conspiring against his return.

A statement by the Yankees read, “The New York Yankees in no way instituted and/or assisted MLB in the direction of this investigation; or used the investigation as an attempt to avoid its responsibilities under a player contract; or did its medical staff fail to provide the appropriate standard of care to Alex Rodriguez.”

 

TYLER KEPNER N.Y. TIMES

 

But despite this mutual antagonism, the Yankees can use any help Rodriguez can provide. Even as he returned to the lineup, Jeter, the team captain, was going back on the disabled list for a third time with more leg troubles. He has been unable to stay on the field this season, and now he will watch as Rodriguez tries to play, one more twist in a bizarre and nightmarish season no Yankee could have anticipated.

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....in a pregame news conference with more than 100 members of the news media [Rodriguez] declined to directly answer questions about drug use but said he was intent on sticking up for his rights and playing baseball.       

“I’m fighting for my life,” he said. “I have to defend myself. If I don’t defend myself, no one will.”

Still, while he was composed in the clubhouse, there were times in his measured opening statement when he seemed to put on a display of emotions.

 

He called the last seven months of his life, since reports first tied him to the clinic, a nightmare. And yet, in another part of the news conference, he said he felt like a teenager because of the sheer joy of being able to get back on the field.

“I am thrilled and humbled to have the opportunity to put this uniform on again and play major league baseball again,” he said. “I feel like I was 18 years old, back in Fenway Park in 1994 when I went in to face the Red Sox for the very first time. It’s been 20 years and I’m just very excited to have the opportunity to go out there and play baseball and help my team win.”

 

[In the game,] He went 1 for 4, and by the time he came to bat in the eighth, the boos had transformed into chants of “A-Roid, A-Roid.”

 

The $4,000 Deal Gone Sour Behind the Doping Scandal

Oscar Hidalgo for The New York Times

The former home of Biogenesis, a defunct anti-aging clinic in Coral Gables, Fla., that counted ballplayers among its clients.

N.Y. TIMES

In October, Anthony P. Bosch, a troubled businessman who had a permanent suntan and a white lab coat with his name embroidered on it — though he had no medical license — clashed with an investor in his small anti-aging clinic in Coral Gables, Fla.

Bosch’s modest business, Biogenesis, promised to make Floridians feel stronger and younger. But Porter Fischer, a former client turned partner, felt spurned over a $4,000 investment gone sour, and he wanted to embarrass Bosch, “to take him out.”

What began as a small-time dispute on the fringes of the medical world has become a major doping scandal, ensnaring some of the biggest figures in Major League Baseball, including Alex Rodriguez of the Yankees.

Ryan Braun, a Milwaukee Brewers outfielder, recently accepted a season-ending ban stemming from his ties to the clinic, and this week baseball officials are expected to suspend at least eight players, Rodriguez among them, because of their relationship with Biogenesis.

The scandal has already badly damaged the reputation of the league and some of its iconic teams, and it has further tarnished a sport long troubled by doping violations.

 

Anthony P. Bosch, the clinic's operator, is suspected of supplying ballplayers with banned drugs.

 

Baseball investigators think Bosch provided performance-enhancing drugs to Braun, Rodriguez and others. Some of the players’ names appeared in Biogenesis documents that Fischer provided to Miami New Times, a weekly newspaper, after his falling out with Bosch.

“I wanted Bosch, his reputation and his cocky attitude taken down,” Fischer wrote in a sworn statement to the Florida Department of Health in April. “I knew I had the information to take him out, so I began working with the paper on a story about him.”

Soon after Fischer wrote his statement, state health officials fined Bosch $5,000 for impersonating “a medical doctor by diagnosing and treating patients” at Biogenesis and elsewhere.

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As the sports world braces for the expected flurry of suspensions, which have been the subject of speculation for months, the story of Tony Bosch, the quasi doctor, and Porter Fischer, his client turned investor turned whistle-blower, reveals an underbelly of shady business practices and dubious drug deals that extend from a Coral Gables office park to Yankee Stadium.       

It features a cast of superstar athletes who drive Maybachs and help sell out ballparks; high-priced baseball investigators, including F.B.I. agents and a former Secret Service official; and Florida personalities who could be extras in a Carl Hiaasen novel.

Bosch, 49, with his black hair greased back and dress shirts untucked, was a familiar figure on the Miami scene. People who know him said he could often be spotted at the hottest restaurants or at the bar at the Ritz-Carlton Key Biscayne. His ground-floor clinic sat near the University of Miami and its baseball stadium, Alex Rodriguez Park.

       

Fischer, 49, was a regular at the Boca Tanning Club in Coral Gables who had cycled through a series of marketing jobs. He had struggled with his cholesterol and wanted to lose weight, so he sought the advice of Bosch, who for $375 a month prescribed him a cocktail of HCG, a hormone, along with testosterone and vitamin B12. He later added Anavar, a steroid, which Bosch called “the stuff Lance Armstrong takes,” Fischer said.

Bosch had also begun working with some of the biggest names in baseball, earning their trust and supplying them with banned substances like human growth hormone, according to baseball officials. In 2009, baseball investigators found evidence that the 12-time All-Star Manny Ramirez had received a banned drug from Bosch’s facility.

Fischer said he and Bosch quickly connected — they had attended the same high school, graduating a year apart. At first, Fischer was impressed with Bosch, and said that with his treatments, “the weight started falling off.”

 

Porter Fischer, a former partner of Bosch, helped expose him.

 

Bosch treated Fischer through 2011 and 2012, even as Bosch cycled through business partners and clinic locations. Fischer, who was looking to leave the “impersonal and spotty” corporate world, saw Bosch’s clinic as a business opportunity and in October invested $4,000.

Bosch told him the money would help the clinic get through a “slight cash-flow issue,” Fischer recalled. Bosch said finances were tight because “a lot of ballplayers were on hold because of the Melky thing” — a reference to baseball’s suspension last summer of Melky Cabrera, then an outfielder with the San Francisco Giants. Cabrera was suspended for 50 games last year after testing positive for an elevated level of testosterone.

As part of the $4,000 deal, Fischer joined Biogenesis as the marketing director and was given keys and alarm codes — “full access to the facilities.”

 

The partnership of Bosch and Fischer soured almost as soon as it began. Bosch rarely went to work and failed to pay employees, Fischer said. The clinic’s rent payments were late, and Bosch had stopped paying Fischer the money he owed him.

At one point, when Bosch could not be found and had stopped returning calls, another clinic employee said Bosch had gone to the American League Championship Series “to collect money.”

“Bosch was a classic con man, charming at first, a great talker and fantastic at painting a beautiful picture, but in the end unable to deliver the results or back up any of the big talk he pitched,” Fischer wrote. “I fell for it, hook line and sinker.”

Fischer soon confronted Bosch, who he said refused to back down. “He stood up and walked right up to me and said, ‘I’m Dr. Tony Bosch, what are you going to do about it?’ ”

Fischer wrote: “I saw red. I had two choices — cave his face in,” or, he continued, “crumble his little world.”

He chose the latter.

 

On Oct. 30, Fischer went to the office after hours and took a stack of boxes filled with Bosch’s files.

The documents included details of Bosch’s apparent dealings with major league players, like Braun and Rodriguez. Miami New Times published an article nearly three months later that did not identify Fischer by name. But in subsequent articles, he acknowledged that he was the source of the documents.

Soon after their fallout, Biogenesis went out of business. Initially, Bosch vehemently denied any relationship with Rodriguez and other major leaguers. He has since cooperated with baseball officials, apparently offering them enough evidence for the league to suspend Braun, and probably several other players.

Today, with the focus on Rodriguez’s fate, there are no physical signs of the former Biogenesis clinic at the three-story office building where it rented space....  A maritime law firm next door recently expanded, erasing the last trace of Biogenesis from the office park, if not from the baseball record books.