The ups and downs of Alex Rodriguez's career in Major League Baseball have been well-documented. A three-time American League Most Valuable Player, Rodriguez has racked up hall of fame-caliber stats on the field and courted hall of shame-caliber controversy off of it, notably his history of using performance-enhancing drugs. The New York Yankees third baseman is currently serving a 162-game suspension for all of the 2014 season for his part in the Biogenesis scandal.
New details regarding Rodriguez's PED use have emerged via Tom Elfrink and Gus Garcia-Roberts' new book, "Blood Sport," including that Rodriguez received a rare therapeutic use exemption from MLB to use a performance-enhancing drug in 2007, when he won the AL MVP for the third time.
Garcia-Roberts joined HuffPost Live on Tuesday to chat about the book, and about how baseball's most excoriated man embodies the steroid era as a whole. Rodriguez made his Major-League debut on July 8, 1994, and would emerge as a star in his own right in the years after baseball returned to prominence following the World Series strike of 1994. Home runs (and steroids) were abundant, and fans flocked to seats.
"He started in the early 90s. At this point, the league was overrun with PED use...Nobody's going to feel bad for A-Rod. But in a way, you could say he he kind of got the worst shake of all because he started in a time when, basically, it was the steroid heyday of baseball," Garcia-Roberts told host Marc Lamont Hill. Throughout his career, he's seen baseball get more and more strict until he bears the brunt of that unprecedented punishment."
Watch the rest of the clip above, and catch the full HuffPost Live conversation here.
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