Alex Rodriguez Opens Up About HGH, Jeter, Therapy, and Aging

2004

I HATED ALEX Rodriguez. Not solely did I hate Alex Rodriguez, I cherished hating Alex Rodriguez. Hating Alex Rodriguez was enjoyable. As a Boston Red Sox fan, I hated the New York Yankees as a matter of precept and behavior, hated their existence the best way I think about Cold War children hated the Soviets. Mine was a ritualistic, virtually banal hatred that usually didn’t lengthen to particular person gamers. In 2004, I didn’t significantly hate, say, Hideki Matsui, or Bernie Williams or Mike Mussina, which is to say I hated all of them just about the identical. Equal alternative and by definition. And you, too—in case you have a Yankees cap on, we’re not off to a superb begin. But A-Rod?

I fucking hated that man.

And I cherished it.

You don’t must be a hater typically to be able to hate somebody you don’t know. I wasn’t. We all use the phrase, and typically we imply it and typically we don’t, however all of us maintain hatred in our hearts, and it feels good typically to sic it on unhurt targets, comparable to All-Star third basemen.

I imply, come on: That yr’s American League Championship Series, winner advances to the World Series, a contest the Red Sox haven’t received since 1918, a string of 86 years throughout which the Yankees have received 26 World Series titles. This is a best- of-seven, and New York received the primary three video games, which implies the Sox must win an absurd 4 straight playoff video games, a comeback that’s by no means been achieved in any playoff sequence, ever.

In any sport.

Boston got here again from three video games to none and received two video games, and now that is Game 6. For the third recreation in a row, if the Yankees win, the Sox are out. Bottom of the eighth inning, the rating is Boston 4, New York 2. Yankees shortstop and unofficial mascot Derek Jeter is on first base. Bronson Arroyo, a thin punk with a sizzling arm however no expertise within the screaming volcano of Yankee Stadium within the playoffs, stands on

the mound. Rodriguez, batting cleanup, steps to the plate and works the rely to 2-2. Arroyo units. He delivers. A breaking ball. A-Rod swings and cracks a weak grounder off the top of the bat, first-base facet. Easy out. As Rodriguez sprints down the road, Arroyo prices the ball and gloves it. He waves off the primary baseman—he’ll tag A-Rod himself simply earlier than he reaches the bag. He does…however the ball goes flying out of Arroyo’s glove and bounces down the right-field line! A-Rod is secure! He runs to second on the obvious error! Jeter is rounding third and comes house to attain!

The crowd screams itself foolish, and it appears to be like as if the mighty, silly Yankees, with their annual, ineluctable playoff heroics, will as soon as once more break just a few million hearts up and down the Mass Pike, from Scituate to the Allagash, from Hartford to Hanover.

But maintain on. Sox supervisor Terry Francona is jogging out of the dugout. You gotta be kidding me, his face says, and that’s what everybody watching on TV, and in all probability half the followers within the stadium, are pondering too.

Did A-Rod simply—? Did he truly—? Did he significantly slap the ball out of Arroyo’s glove?

Alex Rodriguez slaps the ball out of the glove of Bronson Arroyo throughout Game 6 of the American League Championship Series at Yankee Stadium on October 19, 2004.

The Fox broadcast flashes immediately to the replay. Tim McCarver, the analyst and Hall of Fame former MLB participant, bellows, “He swatted…the ball…out of Arroyo’s hand!” Joe Buck, the deaconish play-by-play man, confirms: “He should be out.” They present it once more and once more, from each angle, and every time, you may’t consider 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 drive and objective of a tantrumming toddler, inflicting the ball to leap out of the pitcher’s glove. And when the umpires confer and agree that they only noticed what we simply noticed, they shortly reverse the “safe” name to “out.” What does A-Rod do, standing on second? Dude raises his palms towards the heavens and makes a face like, Who, me?

It was so A-Rod. In my coronary heart, I do know that even Yankee followers had been embarrassed in that second. 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 clearly didn’t know the person, however we knew sufficient. It began when he signed a contract for $252 million with the Texas Rangers in 2000, skipping city on the contender Seattle Mariners to develop into a rich fish on a horrible, small-pond group. It continued, a bit of unfairly, when he tried to engineer a commerce to the Red Sox in 2003, a deal that was quashed by the MLB gamers’ union as a result of Rodriguez was agreeing to take much less cash to play for Boston—however we knew it one way or the other will need to have been his fault. Fuck that man.

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

Then he posed in Details journal kissing a mirror.

Then he and the silly Yankees received the championship in 2009.

Then he was discovered responsible of utilizing banned substances, together with human development hormone (HGH), and suspended from baseball for a complete season, in 2014.

Fuck that man.

2018 (I THINK)

Weird factor. I’m watching the World Series someday within the late teenagers, and there, pre-game, in excessive definition, is God and the Devil. God Himself! David Ortiz, “Big Papi,” the hero of that historic 2004 Red Sox championship group (they accomplished the comeback and saved going), hitter of majestic Twelfth-inning walk-off house 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 subsequent to…A-Rod?

And they’re laughing. They’re sitting behind a desk, pontificating and prognosticating, well mannered and erudite and easy. They put on barely aggressive fits and shiny ties, and they appear incredible, the 2 of them, joshing, opining. Together. I don’t know if I like this. There is us, and there may be them, and this doesn’t make any sense in any respect.

Top left: Rodriguez chopping it up with David Ortiz throughout batting apply earlier than the Yankees confronted the Red Sox on April 16, 2004. Top proper: Rodriguez and Derek Jeter speak technique throughout a spring coaching recreation on March 7, 2004. Above: Rodriguez, Ortiz, and Jeter on set through the 2026 MLB All-Star Game on July 14, 2026.

2026

It’s midday and he hasn’t eaten but. He rises every morning at 7:30 in his house on the Upper West Side of Manhattan after a median of six and a half hours of sleep. It must be extra. He stays up too late, normally, watching sports activities, watching Game of Thrones. From 8 a.m. to midday is do-not-disturb, except you’re considered one of his two daughters. They can disturb. Everyone else—his “team,” the officers of his holding firm, A-Rod Corp; publicists; the individuals who handle his affairs—is aware of. He lifts weights on the native Life Time gymnasium or, if he’s in Miami, at one of many UFC Gyms he owns. He meditates. He goes to remedy. He practices yoga and visualization. For these 4 hours, he tries to not contact his telephone.

Now we’re at an costly Italian seafood restaurant, and he orders starters for each 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 espresso. As the waitress collects our menus, he straightens his again and appears to be like over at what the girl on the subsequent desk is consuming. He factors, discreet, and says, “Just for the record, is that what I ordered, over there?”

No, that’s the fusilli with the octopus braised in crimson 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 chilly, the best way they do. Would I like to talk with Alex Rodriguez on the telephone a few line of eyeglasses he did with Look Optic?

Um. Yes. But—nicely, possibly a bit of bit concerning the glasses, however largely about AlexRodriguez. My emotions apart, the person is as related as ever: firmly (and maybe paradoxically, given his 2014 PED suspension and the seeming HOF ban) part of baseball tradition as a perennial (and astute) playoff commentator; a brand new co-owner of the Minnesota Timberwolves, the place already his affect is enhancing the group, which scored LaMelo Ball in an enormous low season commerce; his title usually invoked within the dialog about peptides and testosterone use. I had seen the documentary he made about himself, a three-parter on HBO Max final yr. Alex vs ARod, they known as it, which seemed like an arrogance undertaking. In equity, he didn’t make it—it was directed by two documentarians, Gotham Chopra and Erik LeDrew, and it went deep, however inform me the topic didn’t have a hand on the wheel. Still, this was an opportunity to sit down face-to-face with a villain, in particular person, and these probabilities don’t come alongside usually, and right here on the desk I’m coiled tight, my mouth is moist, then dry. I’ve screamed curses at this man, unheard by the tv. I’ve booed him from the stands. I nonetheless hate him in my coronary heart. But he’s a humongous man with humongous arms, groomed and dressed like a titan of trade, unsmiling. The softness of his voice appears like a risk.

The solely burp within the course of got here the night time earlier than, when the publicist talked about that he could be on the lunch too, and I mentioned no thanks. There was some well mannered back-and-forth, and ultimately, Rodriguez confirmed up at the moment alone. This behind-the-scenes nonsense—publicists and pitches and negotiations—usually filler, is vital to this explicit 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 appears to be like up from his plate.

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

When Rodriguez signed a 10-year deal worth more than a quarter of a billion dollars on December 11, 2000, it was the biggest-ever contract in professional sports.

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 associates, his well being, the prized love of his daughters. As Rambo, he made lists solely of what he didn’t but have. Records he hadn’t damaged. Bigger and greater contracts. Championships, extra-base hits, Gold Gloves, baseball baseball baseball. Even in his first full season within the majors, he received the American League batting title and completed second within the voting for Most Valuable Player. But that wasn’t sufficient. “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 energy. He wished extra energy. When A-Rod was born, the heavens shot thunder into his arms, his chest, his quads, however he wished extra. More extra extra. So he tried some stuff. Steroids first, between 2001 and 2003. He mentioned later that his cousin obtained it for him, and he didn’t know what it was. He stopped, and if he had by no means injected another banned substance into his highly effective physique, he says he could be within the Hall of Fame by now.

But he wished extra. “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 extra consequentially, as a result of Major League Baseball wasn’t messing round anymore—he took HGH. And he lied about it, as a result of it was towards the foundations. And he obtained caught.

“Ironically, that ‘didn’t have’ kind of kept my ass away from the Hall of Fame,” he says, bobbing his head a bit of as he hears the phrases 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 desk is half eaten.

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

“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 till he’s obtained an oversize chew. He smiles.

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

“It’s funny.”

Performance-enhancing medication had been one of many main tales in baseball through the early 2000s, and Rodriguez made front-page information in 2009 and 2013.

Game days he used to get up at 9 a.m., 9:30 if the sport the night time earlier than went lengthy. The house constructing the place he lived, on Central Park, had a phenomenal gymnasium 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 together with his coach, to flush out all that lactic acid from final night time’s recreation.

Then a superb breakfast: egg whites, oatmeal, fruit, espresso.

Then a one-hour nap.

Then one other 30-minute stretch earlier than a lunch of fish, brown rice, a salad, candy potato, and “a couple of jugs of mineral water.”

After the sport, he drank a protein shake. He’d sit within the chilly tub if he wanted to, then bang out one other stretching session together with his coach at house, in entrance of a financial institution of televisions. Three could be tuned to the American League video games on the West Coast that night time—Seattle, Oakland, the Angels. The fourth TV could be tuned to an entire replay of the sport he had simply performed.

Then he would eat dinner and go to mattress.

All that ended 10 years in the past, when the Yankees minimize him unfastened and he walked off the sector to a standing ovation. Now, like the remainder of us 51-year-olds, if he has a second piece of bread from the man strolling round with the bread basket (which we do), he feels it. It rattles his thoughts—Gonna must work that off—and he can really feel it bodily.

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

This is roughly once I begin regarding Alex Rodriguez. It creeps up on me. I’m nodding together with him and we’re simply 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 final night time and barely completed his one tequila-soda.)

“I know!” I say.

If he can’t elevate weights at some point, he tries not less than to do one thing, something. A run round Central Park. Walk three blocks after dinner. Walks after meals assist metabolism. And that’s mainly it: sleep, good vitamin, watch the booze, and elevate weights. “As you get older, we become, what’s the word—frail? You see old people, they start bending over,” he says, sitting again within the restaurant’s sales space. “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.”

Rodriguez nonetheless likes to coach day by day and is proven right here figuring out at a gymnasium in Miami.

Here A-Rod is, after all, speaking about A-Rod as an aged particular person. What which may seem like. Which is one thing he has some management over, management he’ll most actually train, as a result of yeah, baseball’s over however egos don’t simply disappear. Not egos as large as his, a reality of which he’s conscious.

“I’ve never met anyone that’s great at what they do without a very strong, healthy ego,” he says, when requested. “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 rattling proper, hostile surroundings. I can’t assist it, not as a result of I’m a Red Sox fan, or not simply as a result of I’m a Red Sox fan, and I ask: What was up with that Arroyo factor? Like, what the hell? And even after the sport, when he was requested about it and he pretended to not even know Arroyo’s title, so unimportant was the little punk to the good 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, however—

“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 want enemies, if solely to bolster our personal understanding of the world. Competitive sports activities are constructed on the wonderful lie that our group is sweet and the opposite group is unhealthy. That’s the way it works. Just like you may’t know happiness if there’s no unhappiness to match it to, you may’t love your wonderful sports activities group if there’s not another miscreant sports activities group to hate. I wished A-Rod to be that prick glove-swatter juicer.

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

You know what he informed me? After the Yankees–Red Sox battles of the 2000s, in the event that they had been at Fenway, he used to go to Big Papi’s home, and Papi and his spouse on the time, Tiffany, would prepare dinner dinner for him. And they’d discuss hitting till the wee hours! Three hours earlier the Fenway trustworthy had been booing A-Rod each time he walked to the plate, and now he’s rummaging by Papi’s fridge with him, attempting to get him to eat more healthy. Like, what?

Don’t meet your villains, as a result of the issue is, they may prove to not be villains in any respect, however simply folks, doing their greatest and making errors and getting defensive however all the time, all the time, all the time doing their greatest, even after they might be doing higher.

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

But.

That’s all bullshit, that stuff about assembly your villains. You ought to. We see a emblem on a ball cap and we expect we all know one thing, something, about that particular person. Truth is, none of us is aware of something about anybody. And sitting down together with your perceived enemy over lunch, or a beer? To attempt to perceive what ideas and emotions and goals and heartbreaks are stirring behind their very punchable face? That’s the way it works. That’s the one method this works, any of it.

And so the thoughts meld is full. I don’t hate him anymore as a result of I by no means did. He was a caricature to me, and I do know now that he was a caricature even to himself again then, which in all probability signifies that I used to be a caricature too. I’m confused, however glad, I suppose. There’s a bit of little bit of hatred in my coronary heart that’s been freed up, and I hope I received’t apply it to anybody else. Even although till at the moment he by no means knew I hated him, he is aware of lots of people hated him, and that’s obtained to put on on you.

They say that when guys get in a combat, they wrestle and punch one another out within the alley and then shake arms and seize a beer. That’s the most effective approximation of what this appears 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?

Rodriguez is a co-owner of the Minnesota Timberwolves and is pictured here with Jaden McDaniels after a Game 7 win over the Denver Nuggets on May 19, 2024.

He’s actually asking me.

It’s embarrassing?

“And how would you be embarrassed?” Someone may report you and put up 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 once we sat at midday, is full now. His head is framed by the inexperienced timber of decrease Central Park, the clear blue sky above it, and the constructing the place he used to dwell, the constructing the place he lifted 400 kilos each morning and to which he returned all these nights after video games for rub-downs and 4 televisions and dinner and mattress.

In a world during which we’re all watching one another, he made a complete documentary about himself. Or, no matter, he didn’t make it, however he participated, obtained Jeter to be in it, and many others. and many others. Cynthia, with whom he’s nonetheless shut, is in it. (J.Lo’s not. Madonna’s not.) His daughters are in it. In reality, he says he wouldn’t have even completed it in the event that they didn’t agree not solely that he ought to, however that they would seem in it. He says they agreed, so long as he promised to be truthful, and to not apologize. He had apologized sufficient, they mentioned.

Still, it’s a bit of narcissistic, no? Especially for a self-proclaimed recovering narcissist? But that’s the place he’s obtained me once more. The complete factor, the documentary? It’s an commercial for remedy, he says. That’s all it’s. 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 might have mentioned the identical factor.

Ryan D’Agostino is Editorial Director, Projects at Hearst, and beforehand served as Editor-in-Chief at Popular Mechanics and Articles Editor at Esquire.