Alex Rodriguez is no mere ballplayer. He’s a chip off baseball’s Mount Olympus, the 18-year-old top draft pick who appeared all but destined to take his place alongside Babe Ruth, Ted Williams and other immortals of the game when he broke into the majors in 1994. And while Rodriguez distinguished himself as a Willie Mays-grade offensive demon and one of the best infielders who ever lived, he played under the stress of the game’s richest contract (infamously, he signed for a record $252m in the year 2000) and under the harsh glare of the New York media spotlight after joining the Yankees in 2004; to meet the pressure, he turned to performance-enhancing drugs – a cardinal sin in the sport – and was ultimately banished from baseball’s hallowed pantheon.
Worse, Rodriguez lied about doping after getting caught twice (the first time before there was an explicit major league policy against PEDs), shattering trust with baseball fans who eventually came to see him as a classic narcissist – albeit one who has been linked to Madonna and JLo and was alleged to have a painting of himself as a centaur hanging over his bed. (He can deny that, but not the Details magazine photo of him kissing his mirror image.) Sadly, Rodriguez’s present-day reinvention at age 50 into a Bloomberg TV thought leader and part-owner of the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves has done little to sway an American public that still feels badly burnt by him.
