A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez (28 page)

Alex invited everyone but didn’t expect a full house. His relationship with some teammates remained strained, and his bond with Torre had been tested through his batting-order demotion in the 2006 playoffs. Alex was buoyed by his season but undeniably fragile.

He wanted Torre to show up—he just couldn’t be sure if he would.

The party began in the afternoon at Alex’s house on the Long Island Sound. In walked a dozen or so teammates, and then, with his daughter by his side, Torre came to the door.

“He made a big to-do about it,” Torre recalls. “He couldn’t do enough when people got there. He went around and spent time with every group. He made sure I got a cigar and he bent over backwards to make sure everyone was comfortable. To be honest, I was happy that
he
looked so happy.”
It didn’t matter that Jeter skipped the BBQ—“He didn’t want to be a hypocrite,” says one person close to the Yankees—Alex enjoyed what he perceived as a breakthrough with Torre.

“Joe was the last guy there,” Alex explained. “We almost had to push him out the door. I was really touched by that gesture. He didn’t have to spend four hours at my barbecue.”

Alex’s ebullient reaction to Torre’s presence was a refl ection of his need to be embraced even as he slipped into more of a rebel’s persona. “I didn’t realize at the time how much of an impact my being at [his BBQ] had on him,” Torre says. “I stayed because I had a good time.”

Perhaps Alex fi nally felt accepted as a Yankee, and yet as a nagging paradox, he seemed to be daring himself to fall.

Feeling suddenly bulletproof, Alex all but dared gossip snoops to catch him merrily debauching from coast to coast. A year earlier, he had met Joslyn Morse— a buxom exotic dancer at the Scores men’s club in Las Vegas— on a boy’s night out. Other strippers had also caught his eye. Friend says Cynthia knew what her husband was up to, and tried to set boundaries for him, if only to keep his indiscretions from public view.

Alex was getting increasingly careless. That summer, nude pictures of Morse became a popular download after she was photographed on Alex’s arm during a team road trip to Toronto. These Morse sightings brought on the fi rst visible fi ssure in the A-Rod/C-Rod power couple, and the tabloids delighted in exposing Alex’s dalliances. Despite this, Cynthia protected and defended Alex.

She defi antly took her seat at Yankee Stadium one summer night wearing a T-shirt that read fuck you, her response to the scandal-mongers.

The circus didn’t distract Alex. In fact, it seemed to sharpen his focus. He liked the cat and mouse with the papers. He liked being all over the tabloids. He liked being talked about, and whispered about. He had his best season ever, hitting .314, with 54
home runs and a career-high 156 RBIs. He took his third MVP

award in a rout. And now, he was ready to cash in, and get an even bigger deal. With the Yankees, if possible, but elsewhere, if they wouldn’t pay his asking price.

There was an odd push-pull element to his phenomenal season.

He wanted to prove he belonged in the Yankee clubhouse and show every New York fan what they would be missing if he left. Casting himself as a fl ight risk was, however, a ruse. He longed to play out his career in New York, live forever as a Yankee, enter Cooperstown in pinstripes and feed Gotham’s bottomless appetite for celebrity.

His 2007 season of personal and professional rebellion was an attempt to stay, not escape. “There was no way he was going to leave the Yankees or play for any other team,” recalls Romero. “That was the pinnacle of where he could go in baseball.”

And, Alex believed, the pinnacle of where he could go outside baseball. He shopped on Madison Avenue because anybody who was somebody shopped there. He ran up $2,000 bills at exclusive Manhattan restaurants such as Daniel, lounged at Jay-Z’s 40/40 Club and purchased overpriced art from SoHo galleries. He was bigger than baseball, and he believed New York City was his destiny.

He nearly fumbled his fate, though, with one of the most vili-fi ed contract maneuvers in baseball history. On October 28, 2007, in the middle of game four of the World Series, with the Red Sox primed to sweep the Rockies, Jon Heyman on SI.com broke news that threatened to eclipse baseball’s fall classic: A-Rod was opting out of the fi nal three years of his Yankees contract. FOX interrupted the game with the bulletin, turning attention from the Red Sox and Colorado Rockies. And newspaper websites began posting headlines about A-Rod above World Series features on the players.

The blowback was immediate. Minutes after Red Sox closer Jonathan Papelbon tossed his glove into the chilly air at Coors Field to celebrate Boston’s sweep— its second World Series title in
four seasons— Red Sox fans behind the visitors’ dugout chanted toward Boston GM Theo Epstein: “Don’t sign A-Rod! Don’t sign A-Rod!”

Commissioner Bud Selig was livid because Alex’s contract ploy had diverted attention away from baseball’s biggest event. The leak was blamed on Scott Boras, but friends say Alex pushed to get the news out. Boras took the fall— that was his duty— and no one found it hard to believe he was behind this move. Boras was famous for the pleasure he took in tweaking the baseball establishment— or kicking it in the crotch— when it served his purposes.

The Yankees were as furious as Selig at the move. Yankee GM

Brian Cashman refused to negotiate further with Boras. In the run-up to Alex’s opt-out, the Yankees had repeatedly called Alex to ask if he could be more reasonable than the $350 million “request”

Boras had given them. He never called them back.

Alex was immediately branded a toxic asset.
New York Post
columnist Mike Vaccaro wrote the night the opt-out news was released, “If this is indeed his fi nal dash out the side door— and if we are to take the Yankees at their word, it is absolutely that— then it comes as part of a perfect A-Rod opera, a me-fi rst symphony that would be appalling if it weren’t so predictable.”

Alex feigned surprise at the leak, even though he knew Boras had e-mailed Cashman’s BlackBerry earlier that day to tell him they wanted out. “I can’t believe this bullshit,” Alex told a friend.

“This was not the way it was supposed to go down.”

A day later, the Yankees reiterated that they would not try to resign him. “No chance,” said Hank Steinbrenner, who, with his brother Hal, was now running their father’s storied franchise.

Boras had insisted that deep-pocketed suitors would line up to greet Alex, but no one believed him. “No one was going to come close to $300 million— no one,” says a major-league general manager. “There were no other Yankees out there.”
That meant Boras and his client had just one potential candidate with the ability to pay Alex the kind of salary he deemed his natural right: the Yankees. And they had slammed the door on him.

Alex had one piece of good timing on his side, though. The Steinbrenner brothers didn’t want to look dim-witted twice, and just a month earlier, they, along with team president Randy Levine, had stumbled as they pushed Torre out the door.

Given the city’s almost unconditional love for Torre, the fi ring had been an epic public relations failure. Torre had, with grace and dignity and many cups of green tea, won four championships with the Yankees in 12 years.

Torre was gone by the end of October. This was just fi ne with Alex. It played into his opt-out strategy. The Yankees couldn’t afford another PR quagmire, especially since they were building a new $1.3 billion stadium that would be ready for Opening Day, 2009.

But what could Alex possibly do to make nice with the Yankees? He called the Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffett. The two had talked at Berkshire Hathaway three years earlier and discussed the responsibilities of wealth. Alex had Warren B. on speed dial.

Buffett displayed an autographed jersey of Alex’s in his offi ce.

When Alex got Buffett on the phone, he told him how badly he had botched his relationship with the Yankees hierarchy. Buffett’s advice: Separate yourself from Boras. Call the Yankees yourself.

Make your own deal.

On November 7, at around 7 p.m., Levine was weaving through midtown Manhattan foot traffi c when his cell phone vibrated. It was Gerald Cardinale, a director at Goldman Sachs, who had a personal message to relay from Alex: He wanted to make amends.

He was crawling back to the Yankees.

When Levine told Cashman, the Yankee G.M. said he wasn’t
interested. “Cashman was thinking, No way, we’re done with Alex,”

one person close to Cashman says. “He knew it was time to move on. There was an Alex fatigue.” The better minds of the Yankees brass agreed. Some also believed that Alex was The Cooler, a tag he’d fi rst picked up in Texas. They pointed out that in his four years in pinstripes, Alex had won two MVP titles and zero rings.

Even worse, the Yankees had been eclipsed by the Red Sox, who had captured two World Series titles in that time. “I don’t think anyone thought Alex was coming back,” says one Yankee source.

“He was done. It was over.”

And that’s how the “ ‘Fuck You’ Tour” evolved into the ‘ “I Fucked Up’ Tour.” Alex was going to have to prostrate himself if he hoped to return to the Yankees, but that was fi ne, because he was prepared to do some major-league groveling.

It was a clear mid-November night like so many others in Tampa. A drought had left the normally lush landscapes in the richest, oldest area of town with patches of brown. Cynthia and Alex Rodriguez looked radiant amongst all those thirsty palms, dressed fashionably but casually as they walked into Hal Steinbrenner’s home.

This attempt at a kiss-and- makeup had been Hal’s call. His father, George Steinbrenner, was only nominally The Boss these days. Friends whispered that he was struggling with dementia, and his boys were running the team now. He was 77 years old, his skin was chalky and his words were often repetitive. He padded around in slippers, wore a World Series ring and still liked to call up friends to ask if they’d heard any good jokes. On good days, he pored over the Yankee games and box scores with the close attention of a watchmaker. On bad days, he had trouble remembering the names of his players. Almost all signs of his trademark bombast appeared
only on paper in the form of press releases from Steinbrenner’s longtime PR man, Howard Rubenstein.

Control of the team had quietly been passed on to Hal and his brother, Hank, this season. Hal, 38, was the trim, responsible brother. He had his father’s perfect, wind-resistant hair and almost always wore a suit with pressed creases. Hank, 57, was the walking equivalent of a messy teen boy’s room in both appearance and demeanor— disheveled and somewhat dark. In private, he battled depression; in public, he made headlines with rants his father might have envied. “Red Sox Nation? What a bunch of bullshit that is,”

he once said, pissing on the warm-and- fuzzy feelings in Boston after the team’s 2007 World Series win.

The Steinbrenner Boys were an odd couple, and they were both at Hal’s house this evening, ready to talk to a decidedly more dysfunctional couple, the Rodriguezes. Hank and Hal presumed they would be negotiating from a position of great strength and that Alex was ready to take any deal they offered him. They also fi gured they could get him at a steep discount and use his return as a way to bury the Torre fi asco. They were about to get played.

For more than an hour, Alex chipped away at the residual hostility in the air. He looked each brother in the eye and apologized for his opt-out ploy in every way imaginable. With the pregnant Cynthia by his side, Alex gave an MVP-worthy performance, ooz-ing sincerity, humility and goodwill as he asked the brothers to give him another chance.

At the end of the evening, Hank and Hal were in love— again.

They wanted Alex back. Besides, there were no third basemen available to the Yankees who would even approach what Alex could provide. They certainly couldn’t fi nd another marquee player to help open a stadium in 2009 where fi eld-level seats would be topping out at $2,500 per game.

Alex’s mea culpa worked. Somehow, some way, he snagged
the $300 million deal he had wanted all along. “It was dumb and dumber,” says one American League executive. “Alex played them for fools.”

Boras, never far away during the proceedings, quickly worked out the contract language and issued a statement on November 15: “Alex and Cynthia visited with the Steinbrenners and Yankees of-fi cials and following the meeting, Alex instructed me to discuss the contract terms with the Yankees.”

Alex didn’t give up a penny for his transgressions. He agreed to his second career record-breaking deal: 10 years, $275 million, which would balloon to $300 million if and when he became Major League Baseball’s new home-run king. Each time he lapped a baseball legend on his journey, he would put another $6 million into his account. With 518 total homers at the end of 2007— after becoming the youngest player ever to 500— Alex Rodriguez would receive a bonus for passing Willie Mays (660), Babe Ruth (714), Hank Aaron (755) and Barry Bonds (762).

“These are not incentive bonuses,” Hank explained. “For lack of a better term, they really are historic bonuses. It’s a horse of a different color.”

With that bamboozle completed, Alex then launched an image makeover. Behind it was yet another handler who’d recently entered his life, Guy Oseary. During a workout in the winter of 2007, Alex surprised his trainer, Dodd Romero, with a question about the world balance of fame: “Who do you think is more popular?” he asked, “Lenny Kravitz or Derek Jeter?”

The question underscored the insecurity Alex still had about Jeter, but it also set up his second question for Romero, who also trained Kravitz: “Who handles Lenny’s PR?” Alex wanted to have “people,” loads of “people,” just as the Hollywood elite did. Alex had Boras, and he’d signed with the William Morris Agency to aid him in his goal of transcending baseball, but he needed more
“people” to get to where he knew he should be. “Lenny is cool,” he told Romero. “Who is his agent?”

Romero gave him Lenny’s number. Soon, Alex had Oseary, the whiz behind Maverick Records, on his team. Oseary was the PR manager for not only Kravitz but also Madonna. It was Oseary who suggested that the quickest way to change Alex’s image from greedy opt-out klutz to apologetic prince was to do a prime-time interview.