In the latest stop of his rehabilitation tour, Alex Rodriguez entered the belly of the beast and met with an old nemesis, The Post has learned.
Earlier this past week, the Yankees’ disgraced, returning slugger convened with commissioner-elect Rob Manfred at Major League Baseball’s midtown Manhattan headquarters, multiple sources confirmed. In an attempted signal of goodwill, A-Rod came unaccompanied by any Players Association representatives or personal attorneys.
And goodwill, according to one source, was A-Rod’s intention when he initiated this get-together. He wanted to clear the air with Manfred and get on the same page with central baseball as he prepares for his reentry.
The last time A-Rod had visited the building, on Nov. 20, 2013, he had exited in fury (or at least pretend fury) after independent arbitrator Fredric Horowitz didn’t allow Rodriguez’s legal team to interrogate commissioner Bud Selig for his 211-game suspension of A-Rod. Rodriguez stood up in the hearing room, looked at Manfred and shouted an expletive — whether it was directed at Manfred specifically or commenting about the situation in general eternally will be open to interpretation, depending on your witness — and left the room and the building.
Because Selig didn’t testify, A-Rod declared, he wouldn’t testify either, although he would have open himself up to further trouble had he lied about the illegal performance-enhancing drug usage to which he later admitted to federal drug agents.
The hearing concluded the next day, and on Jan. 11, 2014, Horowitz decreased the sentence to the entirety of the 2014 season, a clear victory for baseball and Manfred, the architect of the Biogenesis investigation that produced the suspension of 13 players in addition to Rodriguez. Manfred proceeded to win a tense election last August, at the quarterly owners meetings in Baltimore, to succeed Selig, whose 22-plus-year term ends Saturday. Manfred becomes the game’s commissioner on Sunday.
Rodriguez emerged from Horowitz’s ruling with legal guns blazing: He filed a lawsuit against both MLB and the Players Association on top of two other suits — one against MLB and Selig, the other against Yankees team physician Dr. Christopher Ahmad — he had filed during the testimony. However, he dropped the two suits against MLB before the start of spring training, and he gave up the suit against Ahmad last summer.
The 39-year-old Rodriguez scored points with baseball by behaving surprisingly well during his yearlong banishment. He conducted only one interview, a chat with ESPN The Magazine about A-Rod’s retiring frenemy Derek Jeter that produced vanilla quotes, and he was spotted almost exclusively at college and professional football games. This public silence, along with his courtroom surrenders, greased the skids for his return to the field.
From baseball’s legal perspective, Rodriguez is a player in good standing, having served his time. The only way he could face more trouble from Biogenesis is if information emerged that he was involved in distributing the shuttered South Florida clinic’s product to other players. Rodriguez’s controversial cousin, Yuri Sucart, still faces a trial in Florida for conspiracy and distribution of testosterone and human growth hormone, and A-Rod seems likely to be called to testify if the trial comes to fruition.
A meeting with Manfred marked another logical step for A-Rod’s latest comeback.
The Yankees owe Rodriguez $61 million through 2017, plus as much as $30 million for home run bonuses, and managing general partner Hal Steinbrenner has made clear that the team won’t be releasing him. Instead, Rodriguez has been working out, even as the Yankees signed Chase Headley to be the everyday third baseman, in the hopes of helping the team as a righty-hitting designated hitter and occasional infielder.
The Yankees, from Steinbrenner on down, have made it clear they have no idea what to expect from A-Rod, because he has undergone surgeries on both hips.
There have yet to be any sort of icebreaking sessions with Yankees higher-ups. Rodriguez waged war in particular with team president Randy Levine, calling him as a witness in his appeal in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to prove that Levine conspired with MLB to get him out of the game. Common sense says such sessions will be coming soon enough.