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No doubt by now you've seen the Miami New Times story that puts Alex Rodriguez in a group with Bartolo Colon, Melky Cabrera, and other players as clients of Biogenesis, an "anti-aging clinic" being investigated by MLB and the DEA.
A-Rod admitted in 2009 that he had used steroids, claiming in an ESPN interview that his doping was limited to a three-year window — 2001 through 2003 — while he played under a record contract for the Texas Rangers. Ever since then, A-Rod claimed, he'd been playing clean. He'd never failed an MLB drug test since penalties were put into place.
Yet there was his name, over and over again, logged as either "Alex Rodriguez," "Alex Rod," or his nickname at the clinic, "Cacique," a pre-Columbian Caribbean chief. Rodriguez's name appears 16 times throughout the records New Times reviewed.
...There, at number seven on the list, is Alex Rodriguez. He paid $3,500, Bosch notes. Below that, he writes, "1.5/1.5 HGH (sports perf.) creams test., glut., MIC, supplement, sports perf. Diet." HGH, of course, is banned in baseball, as are testosterone creams.
That's not the only damning evidence against A-Rod, though. Another document from the files, a loose sheet with a header from the 19th Annual World Congress on Anti-Aging and Aesthetic Medicine, lays out a full regimen under the name Cacique: "Test. cream... troches prior to workout... and GHRP... IGF-1... pink cream."
Rodriguez is in the notebooks spanning a period from 2009 through 2012. None of this constitutes absolute proof that he used in the eyes of baseball -- you have to fail a test for that to happen, though it's not impossible he could be suspended anyway -- and we can also debate the real value of human growth hormone as a performance-enhancing drug. However, at the very least, this calls Rodriguez's integrity into question again, and also underscores a certain pathos, because drugs or no drugs, his performance has been dropping year after year after year and the injuries simultaneously rising. All of his interventions, all of the cheating (or "cheating," if you prefer) has done nothing to change that.