Alex Rodriguez is at odds with his union again — this time over whether both his lawsuits against Major League Baseball should be grouped together in order to cut court costs and save taxpayers money.
Two days after Rodriguez turned on the Major League Baseball Players Association by naming it — along with MLB — in a lawsuit seeking to vacate his 162-game doping suspension, the league and union joined forces on Wednesday.
They filed legal papers petitioning that both the new litigation and A-Rod’s October suit accusing MLB and Commissioner Bud Selig of being on a “witch hunt” to ruin his faded career be deemed “related” cases, so they could be overseen by a single judge and avoid “a substantial duplication of effort and expense, delay, or undue burden on the court, parties or witnesses.”
However, Team A-Rod — which is still battling to move the first suit back to state court — filed papers objecting to enjoining both cases, adding they deal with “different factual circumstances and legal issues.”
“Plaintiff does not believe that the two actions are related because each action involves different facts,” wrote Jordan Siev, a lawyer for Rodriguez.
Siev said the latest suit “seeks to vacate an arbitration award that was recently rendered based on, among other things, the arbitrator’s failure to render an arbitration award that derives its essence from the collectively bargained agreements between the parties, and his evident partiality, and also asserts that MLBPA breached its duty of fair representation” to Rodriguez.
The earlier suit, Siev added, concerns conduct by MLB and Selig that “occurred outside the arbitration process and interfered” with Rodriguez’s “actual and prospective contracts/business relationships.”
Daniel Engelstein, the MLBPA’s lawyer, disagreed, saying in his filing that both cases are similar because they “principally concern Mr. Rodriguez’s allegations that MLB acted improperly in pursuing and imposing discipline against him, and issues concerning the suitability of the collectively bargaining grievance and arbitration procedures for resolving those allegations.
“The parties could be subjected to conflicting orders to the extent factual findings are made in either case that pertain to the overlapping factual allegations or to the extent a judicial construction of the parties’ agreements is required in both cases,” he added.
MLB lawyer Howard Gantz agreed, saying that even though different parties are listed as defendants in each suit – Selig was sued with MLB in the first filing while Rodriguez went after both the union and the league in the second –“we believe that the actions concern the same or substantially similar parties, property, transactions or events.”
Rodriguez filed his first suit in October when he was in the middle of appealing a then-211-game suspension by MLB, which alleges Rodriguez used illegal performance-enhancing drugs multiple times and obstructed the league’s doping investigation.
Judge Lorna Schoefield was randomly assigned the first Rodriguez suit while Judge Edgardo Ramos was randomly picked to take the second.
The filings of “related case statements” by all parties was requested by both judges in response to a new Manhattan federal court rule enacted this month to help ensure selection of judges on cases remains random and transparent.
The new rule quietly came following recent public debate over how Judge Shira Scheindlin was tapped in 2008 to oversee a controversial lawsuit challenging the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk tactics.