The owner of the South Florida anti-aging clinic at the center of baseball’s latest doping scandal asked embattled Yankee star Alex Rodriguez for financial help after Major League Baseball filed a lawsuit that alleged he had sold performance-enhancing drugs to Major League Baseball players.
When Rodriguez rebuffed Anthony Bosch’s request for money, believed to be in the hundreds of thousands, the self-styled “biochemist” turned to a strange bedfellow — MLB.
The Daily News spins this as MLB being “worried” and concerned about what Bosch might do and then reaching out to assist him. It’s worth asking, however, if Bosch was seeking cash in all of this before, what exactly is he getting from MLB now? It has been reported that MLB has agreed to drop the lawsuit it filed against him earlier this year, to pay his legal bills, to indemnify him for any civil liability that arises from his cooperation, to provide him with personal security and to intervene on his behalf if he gets into criminal trouble of his own. That stuff is all very valuable.
But if this report is accurate, he was seeking cash from A-Rod very recently. Is he now getting cash from MLB? Did he approach any other players in order to get cash before? All witnesses in Bosch’s situation are vulnerable to cross-examination about what they’re getting in exchange for their testimony. But if it’s cash on the barrelhead for non-expert testimony or if he has peddled his loyalty to both sides of the case and decided to go all-in with the one who gave him the best deal, his credibility is in even greater trouble than your typical hired-gun witness.
There have been reports of ex-Biogenesis employees trying to sell documents to the press, essentially holding an auction for information. Has Anthony Bosch done the same thing with his testimony? If we don’t find out before MLB takes any action in this matter, we will certainly find out when the players and the union’s lawyers attack Bosch with it in an arbitration later.