Since being suspended for the entire 2014 season, Alex Rodriguez has been unusually reticent. It’s a stark departure from the stark, raving mad third baseman that was doing the media car wash raking MLB and Commissioner Bud Selig through the coals.
However, he hasn’t gone fully into reclusion. Actually, A-Rod’s kept himself busy. A recent New Yorker profile of the exiled Yankees slugger opened up the public to his current baseball limbo. There were no insights from the subject himself, but his wife Cynthia and unidentified friends filled in the blanks as to what A-Rod has been up to since his temporary banishment began. The most revealing comments pertain to A-Rod’s foray into business and Wall Street.
It’s unlikely that A-Rod is going to leave three years and $70 million behind, but once his career is over, it doesn’t mean A-Rod is going to ride off into the sunset and rest on his lucrative laurels.
Some athletes crack when they're thrust into a life without thee sport that dominated their lives for decades. He's turned into the Billy Beane of small business.
It sounds like A-Rod isn’t swinging for the fences w/ his biz portfolio. Didn’t end well for him in MLB pic.twitter.com/LpO6uXa8is
— DJ Meta Dunson (@CerebralSportex) May 15, 2014
Rodriguez has three more years left on his contract with the Yankees — worth $75 million or more with bonuses — and he is training regularly and recently dropped ten pounds.
Presumably, in muscle.
But some close to him believe his heart is in building new business connections rather than reestablishing himself as an athlete. “He used to be a sports junkie,” said a friend, “Now he’s a deal junkie.”
In between that he was a PED and HGH junkie. Maybe, we’ve been wrong about A-Rod all along. Instead of thinking about him as a narcissistic who believed he could beat a system designed to catch recidivists like himself, he just has a problem like Justin Blackmon’s with alcohol or Tiger Woods’ addiction to sex with white women.
When I spoke with him several months ago, he explained his approach: “Very slow, very methodical, very boring, one step at a time. There’s nothing wrong with a 6 percent yield when you’re making good W-2 income.”
There’s also nothing wrong with an additional five pounds of lean muscle to a powerful frame when you’re swing is one of the most flawless on this planet. It does matter if you stat illegally juicing to make those advancements.
He recently set up a private session with the New York hedge-fund manager Michael Karsch to learn how he goes about his day.
Can we agree it's a good idea to keep the man who funded an anti-aging clinic which was the cover for an elaborate doping program away from billionaire hedge fund managers. He already pulled the wool over the Yankees for another $200 million, we don’t need his deceptive nature being lured of Wall Street’s dark side.
A-Rod's love of mingling with business celebrities has extended to those with reputation problems of their own. Last week, he flew to California to attend the Milken Institute Global Conference — sponsored by a group founded by Michael Milken, the onetime junk-bond king who spent time in prison for securities fraud — where he had a drink with billionaire hedgie Steven A. Cohen, whose firm was indicted last July on fraud charges.
I can’t believe I’m thinking this, but let’s get A-Rod back in baseball before he discovers what type of guap he can make legally and especially illegally on the stock market.
