The ARod Saga Continues
The latest chapter of the death struggle between Alex Rodriguez and Major League Baseball appears to be his unconditional surrender. ARod has dropped his lawsuits against baseball, the commissioner, and the union. In response, MLB has been polite without giving an inch:
We have been informed that Alex Rodriguez has reached the prudent decision to end all of the litigation related to the Biogenesis matter. We believe that Mr. Rodriguez’s actions show his desire to return the focus to the play of our great game on the field and to all of the positive attributes and actions of his fellow major league players. We share that desire.
Note the absence of any suggestion of welcoming ARod himself back onto the field a year from now.
Arod hasn’t said anything public about the decision, but some possible explanations are:
- He realized how little chance he had to win. Courts do not like to overturn decisions arrived at by binding arbitration.
- Lawsuits are expensive, especially when you’re an individual suing deep-pocketed organizations with teams of lawyers on staff.
- ARod is still owed more than $60 million for the 2015 through 2017 seasons. If he wants to avoid any further difficulties that would pose a risk to that money, laying low is probably the smart move.
But we’ll never really know what went through ARod’s wholly opaque mind. If he gives an explanation in the future, it’ll more likely than not be a transparently self-serving lie.
ARod’s now acting so rational he must have recently gone insane.Report
There is a fourth, much more likely, possibility here: the lawsuit was always little more than a strike suit intended to give ARod negotiating leverage to reduce his suspension by trying to create public uproar in ARods favor. His lawyers never intended it to go very far in the courts themselves because the suit was borderline frivolous and sanctionable. Not coincidentally, yesterday was the deadline for ARod to respond to MLB’s pre-motion letter arguing for dismissal (pre-motion letters are a peculiarity of the SDNY and EDNY federal courts- basically in those courts you often have to send the judge a letter saying why you intend to file a motion before the judge will allow you to file the actual motion). Because they had no actual legal arguments to justify the suit (and never did have any), continuing with the charade any longer would have started to risk sanctions, and once the hoped for public uproar failed to materialize and MLB showed no signs of budging, it was time to give up.Report
Create a public uproar in favor of the most hated current player in baseball? That would have been completely delusional.
So yeah, could be.Report
In ARod’s extremely limited defense, the mere act of filing a frivolous lawsuit is not terribly expensive for someone like ARod; even for expensive lawyers, it surely wasn’t more than $10k to do that, pocket change for ARod and just a tiny fraction of what the arbitration cost him. So for someone who is already despised universally and has no regard for that thing some might call “ethics,” it’s close to a no risk strategy.Report
That’s certainly a possibility Mark. But how would you account for the suit against Bud Selig personally? The suit against the Yankees team physician? When you include those (and other behaviors) in with the the MLB/MLBPA suits, it’s hard to sustain the view he was acting out of purely pragmatic desires to reduce his suspension. For me, anyway. To do so stretches the definition of “pragmatic” beyond the breaking point.Report
Sorry, that was confusing. Of course he wanted to reduce the suspension. What I don’t think he was doing was merely trying to create a public outcry to serve those ends.Report
Well, in general, if you’re just throwing shit against the wall anyhow, the more shit you fling, the more chance you have that something will stick. But if you’re at all serious about trying to win a lawsuit when you file it, you don’t just voluntarily dismiss it before you even get a motion to dismiss filed against you. It’s not as if they learned anything new in the last couple weeks that would have had the potential change their minds about the merits of the lawsuit, and it’s not as if they were surprised that MLB immediately indicated that it wanted to dismiss the lawsuit. To dismiss it voluntarily before a formal motion is even filed tells me that they were planning on dismissing it at this stage all along, which in turn tells me that it was always a strike suit.Report
This place is turning into a suburban man-cave. Sports, sports, sports, mansplanations about sexual harassment, sports again. Geez.Report
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