Well, if Alex Rodriguez won’t ever be the all-time home run champion, he made quite an impact in another department on Friday.
Most litigious ballplayer ever?
We learned plenty during this wacky day, as news broke of two — TWO! — lawsuits that A-Rod filed, all while he attended Day 5 of his appeal against Major League Baseball for his 211-game suspension.
Most of all, we learned this: If A-Rod is going down, he’s taking others down with him.
First, the beleaguered Yankees third baseman sued Major League Baseball for trying to run him out of the game. Then, he sued Yankees team physician Christopher Ahmad (and New York Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center) for trying to get him off the field. Whew!
The suit against Ahmad essentially alleges that the Yankees’ doctor knew that A-Rod had a serious left hip injury during the 2012 playoffs but didn’t tell him and allowed him to keep playing. It’s a bombastic accusation — this means that the Yankees purposely kept playing a compromised A-Rod, at a time when they couldn’t afford to lose games? — yet it’s presented in a relatively cut-and-dry fashion.
The suit against MLB and Commissioner Bud Selig, on the other hand, comes off less like a disciplined airing of grievances and more like a fantastic collection of dirt. It’s catnip for the many baseball fans — more than you realize, I’d bet — who think A-Rod is getting a raw deal from Selig.
It’s put together brilliantly to score some points in the court of public opinion. In actual court, though? Let’s see if these actually clear and get heard, or if the courts decide that these matters demur and declare they should be decided within the confines of baseball and its Basic Agreement.
Really, perhaps by accident, A-Rod’s legal attack on MLB and Selig asks a rather pertinent question: Sure, we all want as “clean” a game as possible, but at what price?
Do we want MLB’s Department of Investigations behaving like a gang of rogue cops in order to hunt down ballplayers who use illegal performance-enhancing drugs? Do we want the league to file lawsuits with questionable motives, all in the name of attaining evidence?
Hey, maybe we do. It’s not like fans are boycotting games because of these tactics. Then again, attendance went up during the height of the purported “Steroid Era.”
Selig, who has announced his retirement effective January 2015, won’t be brought down by A-Rod, although the fate of the 38-year-old player will impact the longtime commissioner’s legacy. Some of Selig’s employees could be in trouble, though, if any of these allegations stick.
For sure, Selig has taken A-Rod’s alleged transgressions very personally, and his inability to hide that hasn’t played well in the public eye.
Sure, it might seem frivolous to mention Selig’s appearance on “Late Show with David Letterman” in a lawsuit, but anyone who saw the interview could see that Selig, trying to appease the playful Letterman as he promoted the All-Star Game, conducted himself in a way unbecoming of a CEO involved in a very serious matter.
For all the noise from these two suits, A-Rod’s biggest headache remains the arbitration case. As long as he’s so engulfed, though, why not inflict headaches upon others?