I Hated Alex Rodriguez for 20 Years. Then I Sat Down With Him.

2004

I HATED ALEX Rodriguez. Not only did I hate Alex Rodriguez, I loved hating Alex Rodriguez. Hating Alex Rodriguez was fun. As a Boston Red Sox fan, I hated the New York Yankees as a matter of principle and habit, hated their existence the way I imagine Cold War kids hated the Soviets. Mine was a ritualistic, almost banal hatred that normally didn’t extend to individual players. In 2004, I didn’t particularly hate, say, Hideki Matsui, or Bernie Williams or Mike Mussina, which is to say I hated them all pretty much the same. Equal opportunity and by definition. And you, too—if you have a Yankees cap on, we’re not off to a good start. But A-Rod?

I fucking hated that guy.

And I loved it.

You don’t have to be a hater generally in order to hate someone you don’t know. I wasn’t. We all use the word, and sometimes we mean it and sometimes we don’t, but we all hold hatred in our hearts, and it feels good sometimes to sic it on unharmed targets, such as All-Star third basemen.

I mean, come on: That year’s American League Championship Series, winner advances to the World Series, a contest the Red Sox haven’t won since 1918, a string of 86 years during which the Yankees have won 26 World Series titles. This is a best- of-seven, and New York won the first three games, which means the Sox have to win an absurd four straight playoff games, a comeback that’s never been achieved in any playoff series, ever.

In any sport.

Boston came back from three games to none and won two games, and now this is Game 6. For the third game in a row, if the Yankees win, the Sox are out. Bottom of the eighth inning, the score is Boston 4, New York 2. Yankees shortstop and unofficial mascot Derek Jeter is on first base. Bronson Arroyo, a skinny punk with a hot arm but no experience in the screaming volcano of Yankee Stadium in the playoffs, stands on

the mound. Rodriguez, batting cleanup, steps to the plate and works the count to 2-2. Arroyo sets. He delivers. A breaking ball. A-Rod swings and cracks a weak grounder off the end of the bat, first-base side. Easy out. As Rodriguez sprints down the line, Arroyo charges the ball and gloves it. He waves off the first baseman—he’ll tag A-Rod himself easily before he reaches the bag. He does…but the ball goes flying out of Arroyo’s glove and bounces down the right-field line! A-Rod is safe! He runs to second on the apparent error! Jeter is rounding third and comes home to score!

The crowd screams itself silly, and it looks as if the mighty, stupid Yankees, with their annual, ineluctable playoff heroics, will once again break a few million hearts up and down the Mass Pike, from Scituate to the Allagash, from Hartford to Hanover.

But hold on. Sox manager Terry Francona is jogging out of the dugout. You gotta be kidding me, his face says, and that’s what everyone watching on TV, and probably half the fans in the stadium, are thinking too.

Did A-Rod just—? Did he actually—? Did he seriously slap the ball out of Arroyo’s glove?

The Fox broadcast flashes right away to the replay. Tim McCarver, the analyst and Hall of Fame former MLB player, bellows, “He swatted…the ball…out of Arroyo’s hand!” Joe Buck, the deaconish play-by-play man, confirms: “He should be out.” They show it again and again, from every angle, and each time, you can’t believe what you’re seeing. Just as he’s about to be tagged out for his weak-ass grounder, Rodriguez raises his left arm and smites Arroyo’s forearm with the force and purpose of a tantrumming toddler, causing the ball to jump out of the pitcher’s glove. And when the umpires confer and agree that they just saw what we just saw, they quickly reverse the “safe” call to “out.” What does A-Rod do, standing on second? Dude raises his palms toward the heavens and makes a face like, Who, me?

It was so A-Rod. In my heart, I know that even Yankee fans were embarrassed in that moment. What a prick. Who does that? Seriously, who the—?

But that’s not why I hated him. That was validation of my, of our, hatred. We obviously didn’t know the man, but we knew enough. It started when he signed a contract for $252 million with the Texas Rangers in 2000, skipping town on the contender Seattle Mariners to become a wealthy fish on a terrible, small-pond team. It continued, a little unfairly, when he tried to engineer a trade to the Red Sox in 2003, a deal that was quashed by the MLB players’ union because Rodriguez was agreeing to take less money to play for Boston—but we knew it somehow must have been his fault. Fuck that guy.

Then, in 2009, after denying he had ever used steroids, he admitted to having used steroids, when he played for Texas.

Then he posed in Details magazine kissing a mirror.

Then he and the stupid Yankees won the championship in 2009.

Then he was found guilty of using banned substances, including human growth hormone (HGH), and suspended from baseball for an entire season, in 2014.

Fuck that guy.

---

2018 (I THINK)

Weird thing. I’m watching the World Series sometime in the late teens, and there, pre-game, in high definition, is God and the Devil. God Himself! David Ortiz, “Big Papi,” the hero of that historic 2004 Red Sox championship team (they completed the comeback and kept going), hitter of majestic 12th-inning walk-off home runs over the Green Monster, proud and profane defender of Boston after the 2013 marathon bombing, clutchest of the clutch, Yankee killer—and he’s sitting next to…A-Rod?

And they’re laughing. They’re sitting behind a desk, pontificating and prognosticating, polite and erudite and smooth. They wear slightly aggressive suits and shiny ties, and they look fantastic, the two of them, joshing, opining. Together. I don’t know if I like this. There is us, and there is them, and this doesn’t make any sense at all.

---

2026

It’s noon and he hasn’t eaten yet. He rises each morning at 7:30 in his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan after an average of six and a half hours of sleep. It should be more. He stays up too late, usually, watching sports, watching Game of Thrones. From 8 a.m. to noon is do-not-disturb, unless you are one of his two daughters. They can disturb. Everyone else—his “team,” the officers of his holding company, A-Rod Corp; publicists; the people who manage his affairs—knows. He lifts weights at the local Life Time gym or, if he’s in Miami, at one of the UFC Gyms he owns. He meditates. He goes to therapy. He practices yoga and visualization. For those four hours, he tries not to touch his phone.

Now we’re at an expensive Italian seafood restaurant, and he orders starters for both of us. A dozen oysters, Caesar salads, “Is there a tuna tartare, or something like that?” And then for himself: a pasta course with jumbo lump crab and sea urchin puree, and the branzino. And black coffee. As the waitress collects our menus, he straightens his back and looks over at what the woman at the next table is eating. He points, discreet, and says, “Just for the record, is that what I ordered, over there?”

No, that’s the fusilli with the octopus braised in red wine, enriched with bone marrow.

“That’s pretty good too?”

“It’s our signature,” the waitress says.

“All right, I’m gonna go with that,” he says. “I’m a picture guy. I like books with no words, just pictures.”

A publicist had emailed cold, the way they do. Would I like to speak with Alex Rodriguez on the phone about a line of eyeglasses he did with Look Optic?

Um. Yes. But—well, maybe a little bit about the glasses, but mostly about AlexRodriguez. My feelings aside, the man is as relevant as ever: firmly (and perhaps ironically, given his 2014 PED suspension and the seeming HOF ban) a part of baseball culture as a perennial (and astute) playoff commentator; a new co-owner of the Minnesota Timberwolves, where already his influence is improving the team, which scored LaMelo Ball in a huge off-season trade; his name often invoked in the conversation about peptides and testosterone use. I had seen the documentary he made about himself, a three-parter on HBO Max last year. Alex vs ARod, they called it, which sounded like a vanity project. In fairness, he didn’t make it—it was directed by two documentarians, Gotham Chopra and Erik LeDrew, and it went deep, but tell me the subject didn’t have a hand on the wheel. Still, this was a chance to sit face-to-face with a villain, in person, and those chances don’t come along often, and here at the table I’m coiled tight, my mouth is wet, then dry. I have screamed curses at this man, unheard through the television. I have booed him from the stands. I still hate him in my heart. But he’s a humongous man with humongous hands, groomed and dressed like a titan of industry, unsmiling. The softness of his voice feels like a threat.

The only burp in the process came the night before, when the publicist mentioned that he would be at the lunch too, and I said no thank you. There was some polite back-and-forth, and in the end, Rodriguez showed up today alone. This behind-the-scenes nonsense—publicists and pitches and negotiations—normally filler, is important to this particular story. “When [the publicist] was like, ‘Ryan doesn’t want me there,’ I’m like, ‘Why the fuck would you come? I can handle that,’ ” Rodriguez says. “[In the past,]

I would have canceled this interview because I would have been nervous to sit with you because I didn’t feel comfortable. [Now] I’m comfortable in my skin. I’m not losing sleep about what you’re gonna write. That’s a paradigm shift. I have a completely incredible relationship with my daughters, great friends, I’m healthy. I’m very, very happy. I can probably say that, under the age of 45, I don’t think I could answer like that. I was in the rat race of excellence, to a point where it was probably unhealthy.”

He looks up from his plate.

“It was unhealthy,” he says. “Just the Rambo, maniacal, ‘I was born to play baseball.’

When he spoke to the camera for the documentary, and when he speaks to me, many of his answers eventually find their way to the word therapy. In 2009 he started working with David Schnarch, PhD, a clinical psychologist in Colorado who treated him in intensive sessions that would run eight hours a day, no lunch, for a week at a time. He became a true believer and now calls himself a “recovering narcissist.”

Today he enumerates the treasures he now possesses: his friends, his health, the prized love of his daughters. As Rambo, he made lists only of what he didn’t yet have. Records he hadn’t broken. Bigger and bigger contracts. Championships, extra-base hits, Gold Gloves, baseball baseball baseball. Even in his first full season in the majors, he won the American League batting title and finished second in the voting for Most Valuable Player. But that wasn’t enough. “It was always never enough,” he says. “When I was 20 years old, won the batting title and came in second in MVP voting—the closest race I think over the last 30 years, Juan Gonzalez beat me by three points—but it was never enough, enough, enough, enough.”

And power. He wanted more power. When A-Rod was born, the heavens shot thunder into his arms, his chest, his quads, but he wanted more. More more more. So he tried some stuff. Steroids first, between 2001 and 2003. He said later that his cousin got it for him, and he didn’t know what it was. He stopped, and if he had never injected any other banned substance into his powerful body, he says he would be in the Hall of Fame by now.

But he wanted more. “If I hit 58 home runs and drove in 150 runs one year, I’m like, what the fuck, I can’t hit two more for 60?” he says. So, later—and more consequentially, because Major League Baseball wasn’t messing around anymore—he took HGH. And he lied about it, because it was against the rules. And he got caught.

“Ironically, that ‘didn’t have’ kind of kept my ass away from the Hall of Fame,” he says, bobbing his head a little as he hears the words come out of his mouth. “It’s interesting. And now I just don’t need to chase anything. If it’s there, it works. And if it’s not, we’ll catch the next one.”

There’s a silence. Everything on the table is half eaten.

The Hall of Fame. Has that ship sailed, does he think?

“Well, first of all, it’s not my decision. And if it has sailed, then I can look in the mirror and blame that guy, you know?”

He stabs a forkful of pale branzino and mixes it into the sanguineous octopus pasta until he’s got an oversize bite. He smiles.

“All my stuff’s in the Hall of Fame. All my gear, my records.” He dabs the corner of his mouth with the linen napkin.

“It’s funny.”

Game days he used to wake up at 9 a.m., 9:30 if the game the night before went long. The apartment building where he lived, on Central Park, had a beautiful gym and pool, and he would go straight down there, “get a really, really, really heavy lift, like really heavy. Like, you know, 400 pounds off the ground. Maybe like just max three or four. All out, but it would be short. Fifteen minutes, wake up the nervous system.”

Then a deep, 30-minute stretch with his trainer, to flush out all that lactic acid from last night’s game.

Then a good breakfast: egg whites, oatmeal, fruit, coffee.

Then a one-hour nap.

Then another 30-minute stretch before a lunch of fish, brown rice, a salad, sweet potato, and “a couple of jugs of mineral water.”

After the game, he drank a protein shake. He’d sit in the cold tub if he needed to, then bang out another stretching session with his trainer at home, in front of a bank of televisions. Three would be tuned to the American League games on the West Coast that night—Seattle, Oakland, the Angels. The fourth TV would be tuned to a complete replay of the game he had just played.

Then he would eat dinner and go to bed.

All that ended 10 years ago, when the Yankees cut him loose and he walked off the field to a standing ovation. Now, like the rest of us 51-year-olds, if he has a second piece of bread from the guy walking around with the bread basket (which we do), he feels it. It rattles his mind—Gonna have to work that off—and he can feel it physically.

And chips, forget chips. That’s his weak point, his nutritional fontanel. “All of them, dude,” he says. “Doritos, Cheetos, barbecue, salt-and-vinegar. I’m a fucking chip maniac.”

This is roughly when I start relating to Alex Rodriguez. It creeps up on me. I’m nodding along with him and we are just two middle-aged guys bitching about our doughy midsections. I’m like George Bailey getting seduced by Old Man Potter.

“For the first year after baseball it was fine, because you’re still kind of active and you have muscle memory. But a couple years out, you’re going like, Fuck, man, I ate pasta and I gained three pounds! I have a drink and I gained four pounds! I’m like, What the fuck? Everything sticks to you,” he says. (He was out for dinner last night and barely finished his one tequila-soda.)

“I know!” I say.

If he can’t lift weights one day, he tries at least to do something, anything. A run around Central Park. Walk three blocks after dinner. Walks after meals help metabolism. And that’s basically it: sleep, good nutrition, watch the booze, and lift weights. “As you get older, we become, what’s the word—frail? You see old people, they start bending over,” he says, sitting back in the restaurant’s booth. “They’re saying now that how long you live is completely connected to how strong your legs are. Which makes sense because people who are elderly, if they fall, usually bad things come after that. A hip, you know—you just can’t recover. You just can’t.”

Here A-Rod is, of course, talking about A-Rod as an elderly person. What that might look like. Which is something he has some control over, control he will most certainly exercise, because yeah, baseball’s over but egos don’t just disappear. Not egos as big as his, a fact of which he is aware.

“I’ve never met anyone that’s great at what they do without a very strong, healthy ego,” he says, when asked. “The question is, who can manage it better? And that’s— that’s the part where I needed to get the work in. I do believe that, you know, Alex would have probably been a pretty good ballplayer. But I needed A-Rod to go to Fenway, go into a hostile environment, and attack that Wall.”

Breath.

“You play 200 games in 232 days. Of those 232 days, none are off, basically. Half of them you’re flying across the country to one of the coasts in the middle of the night. When you’re in it, you’re just in it, you’re in the grind. So it’s actually good not to have self-awareness of your ego. Have a little bit of A-Rod and be a bit delusional. Because you need all that delusion to get through the fucking moment.”

You’re damn right, hostile environment. I can’t help it, not because I’m a Red Sox fan, or not just because I’m a Red Sox fan, and I ask: What was up with that Arroyo thing? Like, what the hell? And even after the game, when he was asked about it and he pretended not to even know Arroyo’s name, so unimportant was the little punk to the great A-Rod.

Rodriguez raises a finger, eyebrows up, says, “I just tried to get the fucking glove and like—look, you have two choices there, right? You just let them tag you and you’re out, or you try to make a physical play and hope for a miracle. And we almost got a miracle, and then they overturned it. But at that point, you’re just in desperate mode. And why not at least try it, you know? I wasn’t trying to be friends with them. I was trying to fucking beat them.”

Yeah. Um, okay, but—

“Wait, now, now: The silliness for me, that I cringe at, is not the play, it’s how I handled it. Instead of saying, ‘What’s his name again?’ and all this other bullshit, I should have said, ‘Yeah, I know it was a bush-league play, but I was desperateand I tried it, so that’s on me. My bad.’ And what else can you write? You’re like, ‘He’s a fucking asshole?’ Yeah, but I owned it. And by the way, you have to have the perspective: It’s not a game in April, it’s deep October with this [series] fucking sliding [away from us]—3 games to 0, to 3-2, to 3-3. We’re desperate, and that was a desperate move. And yeah, it’s kind of bush league. And I should have called up Arroyo and apologized.”

Hmm.

They say don’t ever meet your heroes? Never, ever meet your villains. We need enemies, if only to reinforce our own understanding of the world. Competitive sports are built on the excellent lie that our team is good and the other team is bad. That’s how it works. Just like you can’t know happiness if there’s no sadness to compare it to, you can’t love your amazing sports team if there’s not some other miscreant sports team to hate. I wanted A-Rod to be that prick glove-swatter juicer.

But he was taking all the fun out of hating him.

You know what he told me? After the Yankees–Red Sox battles of the 2000s, if they were at Fenway, he used to go to Big Papi’s house, and Papi and his wife at the time, Tiffany, would cook dinner for him. And they would talk about hitting until the wee hours! Three hours earlier the Fenway faithful were booing A-Rod every time he walked to the plate, and now he’s rummaging through Papi’s fridge with him, trying to get him to eat healthier. Like, what?

Don’t meet your villains, because the problem is, they might turn out not to be villains at all, but just people, doing their best and making mistakes and getting defensive but always, always, always doing their best, even when they could be doing better.

And then it’s no fun to hate them anymore.

But.

That’s all bullshit, that stuff about meeting your villains. You should. We see a logo on a ball cap and we think we know something, anything, about that person. Truth is, none of us knows anything about anyone. And sitting down with your perceived enemy over lunch, or a beer? To try to understand what thoughts and feelings and dreams and heartbreaks are stirring behind their very punchable face? That’s how it works. That’s the only way this works, any of it.

And so the mind meld is complete. I don’t hate him anymore because I never did. He was a caricature to me, and I know now that he was a caricature even to himself back then, which probably means that I was a caricature too. I’m confused, but glad, I guess. There’s a little bit of hatred in my heart that’s been freed up, and I hope I won’t use it on anyone else. Even though until today he never knew I hated him, he knows a lot of people hated him, and that’s got to wear on you.

They say that when guys get in a fight, they wrestle and punch each other out in the alley and then shake hands and grab a beer. That’s the best approximation of what this feels like.

“I read somewhere that men are dancing 85 percent less than they used to when we were growing up,” Rodriguez says. “That includes teenagers all the way up to our age and older. Why do you think that is?

He’s actually asking me.

It’s embarrassing?

“And how would you be embarrassed?” Someone could record you and post it? “Right. We’re all watching each other. It used to be that you had to be careful because Ryan’s around and he could listen. But now it’s like, that person is more dangerous than you are, because at least at Men’s Health you have journalism credibility and fact-checking. These people just fucking write anything and then fact- check later. That’s super scary. So if that’s a metaphor for life, of course no one’s gonna dance. We all, to a degree, are paralyzed. And the best version of yourself is when we used to—in high school everyone would do a big circle and you would dance in the middle for 10 seconds and everyone’s like… You could be a fucking buffoon when you were 19 or 20. And you should be. Now, it’s like, you’re 14 and you don’t want to fucking do a thing because someone might post it online.”

The restaurant, near-empty when we sat at noon, is full now. His head is framed by the green trees of lower Central Park, the clear blue sky above it, and the building where he used to live, the building where he lifted 400 pounds every morning and to which he returned all those nights after games for rub-downs and four televisions and dinner and bed.

In a world in which we’re all watching each other, he made a whole documentary about himself. Or, whatever, he didn’t make it, but he participated, got Jeter to be in it, etc. etc. Cynthia, with whom he is still close, is in it. (J.Lo’s not. Madonna’s not.) His daughters are in it. In fact, he says he wouldn’t have even done it if they didn’t agree not only that he should, but that they would appear in it. He says they agreed, as long as he promised to be truthful, and to not apologize. He had apologized enough, they said.

Still, it’s a little narcissistic, no? Especially for a self-proclaimed recovering narcissist? But that’s where he’s got me again. The whole thing, the documentary? It’s an advertisement for therapy, he says. That’s all it is. That’s why he did it.

“I think the documentary was about a person that was on a mental therapy journey,” he says. “That had incredible flaws and has incredible flaws. That’s 90 percent of the story. The other 10 percent is that this person just happens to be a pretty good baseball player. You see what I’m saying? And I think it’s just reversed. If you asked me this 20 years ago, I would have said, ‘Oh, no, I’m 100 percent baseball player. There’s no human.’”

I would have said the same thing.