A-Rod may be in hot water with the Yankees

When the news hit last week that the feds wanted to talk to Alex Rodriguez about Anthony Galea, the Canadian doctor in the cross-hairs of an HGH investigation, A-Rod said “this was about someone else.” The impression which was created, whether A-Rod intended to create it with those words or not, was that he never received treatment from Galea. For their part, the Yankees said that they knew nothing about A-Rod being treated by Galea and said that they never authorized such a thing.

Which makes this all rather problematic:

A sports doctor at the centre of drug investigations in Canada and the United States said Monday he treated Alex Rodriguez after the Yankees slugger had hip surgery last year and prescribed anti-inflammatories but not human growth hormone . . . “He had a damaged hip. Inflamed. It was damaged,” Galea said in an interview at his clinic. “He needed anti-inflammatories for his hip. I was basically helping in the rehab.”

The Yankees are standing by their statement that they never approved such treatment. Which could be a big problem if the treatment is determined to have been necessary as opposed to elective, because a team is supposed to sign off on necessary treatments (see, Beltran, Carlos).

The New York media went bananas last week trying to turn this into a steroids story. It’s really not, not even as it applies to A-Rod. It is, however, starting to look like another one of those A-Rod-lives-to-create-PR-headache stories, and the New York media is really good at going bananas over those too. So it looks like a sleepy spring training in Tampa just woke the hell up.