Blood Sport: Alex Rodriguez, Biogenesis, and the Quest to End Baseball's Steroid Era - Hardcover

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CHAPTER ONE
A Cousin with a Rocket Launcher

The crisp ping of metal on rubber and hard cork echoed across the neatly trimmed fields just outside Birmingham, Alabama. A few dozen spectators in lawn chairs arched their necks in unison, tracking a softball arcing across the sky.

Tony Bosch was twenty-seven years old, with a preppy mop of black hair over thick eyebrows. He’d worked for years and spent thousands of dollars waiting for this moment.

When the final out of the game landed harmlessly in the outfielder’s glove, every fielder sprinted toward a second-base celebratory pile-on.

It was 1990, and the Miami Meds were national softball champions.

Bosch hadn’t played an inning of the tournament. But like an extremely low-rent George Steinbrenner striking deals for beer-bellied all-stars, he was the man who’d made this title happen. Ever since he’d grown up obsessed with baseball in Queens, New York, Bosch had struggled to find a way into the game. Too short and slow to stick as a player, he’d long since abandoned his dream of smacking game-winning homers like his childhood New York Mets heroes Tommie Agee and Cleon Jones.

But here, in the intensely competitive late ’80s and early ’90s Miami softball circuit, where coke dealers funded teams like glamour projects and major league stars including Jose and Ozzie Canseco showed up to bash slow-pitched leather grapefruits over the wall, Bosch had found his niche.

He’d turned his medical supply company—Miami Med Marketing, Inc.—into one of the biggest sponsors in the local league, drawing top-notch league players and even a few former college stars to wear nylon tributes to his beloved Mets.

On weeknights after work and weekend mornings before games, he’d obsess over statistics and watch video of his upcoming opponents. He’d fill notebooks with his neat, all-caps handwriting, plotting out who would pinch-hit, how he’d arrange his fielders for each batter, and what situational matchups he’d expect. On game day, he’d be on the bench commanding the field. Every once in a while, if the game was a blowout, he might even pencil in his own name and take an at-bat or two.

“For Tony, this was absolutely a passion. He put in just an incredible amount of time and money,” says Roger De Armas, a lifelong friend and Tony’s partner in Miami Meds, both the company and the softball team. “He was super excited to win it all.”

Sure, it was far from Major League Baseball, but on that night in Alabama, softball brought Tony a joy as unalloyed and pure as he’d felt as a kid watching the 1969 Miracle Mets hustle their way to a World Series ring.

Anyone who knew Tony knew that he truly loved baseball. But moments like this, where the game returned the affection, were rare. In truth, Tony Bosch’s relationship with the game more closely mirrored the doomed marriages and acrimonious business partnerships that stalked his life. The ill-fated flirtation ended with a historic scandal and attorneys brawling on Park Avenue.

Tony’s family came from a nation with its own conflicted relationship with baseball. In Cuba, politics and sports were often intertwined, as was violence. That explosive strand ran through the Bosch family history.

His father, Pedro, was born on October 19, 1937, in Jatibonico, a hamlet of forty thousand people right in the center of the Cuban island. More than two hundred miles southeast of bustling, cosmopolitan Havana, with its world-famous casinos and brothels, and nearly as far from the cooling ocean currents of the Caribbean coast, Jatibonico was sun-baked and fly-ridden. It was the sort of unpaved provincial town a gifted student like Pedro fled as soon as he could.

He did so in September 1955. The noisy chaos of Havana would have been a shock for any seventeen-year-old from the sticks, but Pedro Bosch must have felt especially small when he arrived at the University of Havana and enrolled in the school of medicine. The first mention of his name placed him in the shadow of a revolutionary cousin who was already a towering figure at the med school.

Orlando Bosch was nine years older than Pedro, from an even smaller Cuban village eighty miles west of Jatibonico. Like his younger first cousin, he was too talented and restless for life in a country town.

During his own tenure at the university, Orlando had become chums with a loquacious, brilliantly charismatic classmate named Fidel Castro. Orlando’s and Fidel’s paths followed close trajectories: As the fiery Orlando fought his way to become president of the medical students, the captivating Fidel won the same leadership role in the law school.

They both loathed Cuba’s corrupt, American-supported puppet regime, especially after a puffed-up military officer named Fulgencio Batista grabbed power in a 1952 coup. The palm-shaded university campus became ground zero for dissent, and Bosch and Castro were among the most active student leaders. The pair regularly plotted revolution in the school’s decaying, Greek-inspired buildings.

Fidel turned Cuba upside down starting in late 1956, when he crash-landed a yacht filled with rebels to spark a bloody three-year revolution. But during their school years, Orlando Bosch was arguably the more feared of the two campus leaders. His fellow med students had nicknamed him Piro, short for pyromaniac, as a nod to his explosive temper. During one campus uprising, he famously punched a police lieutenant.

Pedro arrived at the school two years after Orlando graduated. The older cousin had briefly lived in the United States, studying pediatrics at an Ohio university, before returning to his native province to become the first doctor administering polio vaccine in the rural area. Pedro was an equally proficient student. He earned a spot at the Calixto Garcia Hospital in downtown Havana and worked his way from the ob-gyn department to general surgery.

During the revolution, Orlando was a leader of the 26th of July Movement, Fidel’s revolutionary organization, in his native Santa Clara Province. Orlando met guerrilla forces in the rugged mountains around central Cuba, plotting attacks on Batista’s garrisons and communicating with Fidel and his revolutionary leader, Che Guevara.

While Orlando was fighting through the jungle with Fidel and Che, Pedro learned medicine. As Fidel’s rebels and Batista’s soldiers massacred one another, Pedro Bosch tended to patients and studied with physicians at Calixto Garcia. As Che and Castro led the decisive final march into Havana in 1959, which finally ended with Batista being ousted from power, Bosch worked in the surgery department. At school, he met another young med student named Stella, whom he soon married.

But if the teenager from Jatibonico mirrored his famous cousin in smarts and medical proficiency, he lacked Orlando’s explosive political gene. Pedro hadn’t escaped dusty Jatibonico and learned medicine in order to practice it for a pittance in a Socialist paradise.

In 1961, soon after Castro cemented his new revolutionary Marxist government, Pedro and Stella fled the island to Miami. Pedro and his wife then moved to New York, settling into a small Cuban niche in Astoria, Queens. In 1963, Tony was born. As Pedro perfected his credentials, at one point moving alone to Spain to complete his training at a Madrid university, Stella remained behind with baby Tony.

In a New York neighborhood packed with Greeks, the Bosches joined a budding network of other Cuban immigrants who had escaped Fidel’s reign. These countrymen included Roger De Armas’s parents.

Roger’s earliest memories in New York are of watching baseball with...