A-Rod Admits Steroid Use (2009)

February 7, 2009. Sports Illustrated's Selena Roberts and David Epstein dropped a story that blew up the New York Yankees' offseason before pitchers and catchers even reported: Alex Rodriguez had tested positive for steroids back in 2003, when he was the best shortstop alive for the Texas Rangers. Two days later, he sat down with ESPN's Peter Gammons and admitted it was all true. This isn't the 2013 Biogenesis suspension -- that's a different disaster entirely. This was the first time PEDs got attached to A-Rod's name, and it changed how everything he did afterward got read.

The SI Bombshell

Roberts and Epstein built their report on data nobody was supposed to see. Back in 2003, MLB and the players' union had agreed to anonymous survey testing -- no penalties, no names, just a gut check on how big the league's steroid problem really was. 104 players came back positive. MLB and the union promised those results would stay sealed forever. (They didn't. Federal agents seized the testing company's records in 2004 during the BALCO investigation, and five years later, four sources leaked A-Rod's name to SI.) He'd tested positive for testosterone and Primobolan -- the same season he won AL MVP in Texas. The timing alone was brutal.

Gammons Gets the Confession

Two days after the SI story broke, Rodriguez sat for a taped interview with Gammons in Miami Beach, and he didn't dodge it. "I did take a banned substance. And for that, I am very sorry and deeply regretful." He blamed the weight of the 10-year, $252 million contract he'd signed with Texas that offseason -- the richest deal in sports history at the time: "I felt like I had all the weight of the world on top of me." Then he copped to something worse than the steroids -- back in December 2007, he'd told Katie Couric on 60 Minutes, on camera, that he'd never touched PEDs. Now he was telling Gammons the real lie started earlier than that. "I wasn't even being truthful with myself." That's a hard thing to say into a camera.

Tampa Gets the Full Story

Ten days after the SI report, A-Rod stood in front of roughly 200 reporters at Steinbrenner Field and did the thing players almost never do voluntarily -- he took every freakin' question. He said a cousin, later identified in press reports as Yuri Sucart, had injected him with a substance known on the street in the Dominican Republic as "boli," bought over the counter, all through that 2001-2003 stretch. Jeter, Pettitte, Rivera, and Posada sat in the front row, a wall of pinstriped solidarity nobody made them build. (Imagine your coworkers showing up to your HR meeting just to sit there and stare down the room. That's roughly what this was.) He got through his prepared remarks fine until he reached his teammates, then stopped cold for 37 seconds, visibly rattled, before managing a quiet "thank you."

"I screwed up big time," he said. "I asked everyone to judge me from this day forward."

What It Set Up

Commissioner Bud Selig said he was "saddened" (a very commissioner way of saying "yikes"), and that Rodriguez would "have to live with the damage he has done to his name and reputation" -- which, at the time, sounded almost like an ending. Cashman, being Cashman, treated the whole thing like an asset-management problem: "He's a huge investment... if this is Humpty Dumpty, we've got to put him back together again, to get back up on the wall." Nobody in that Tampa room in February 2009 knew they were watching a preview. Four years later, the Biogenesis scandal proved his promise to stay clean from 2009 forward wasn't true either -- and that time, almost nobody bought the apology.

That's the real legacy of this week in February 2009. Not the admission by itself -- plenty of players from that era admitted to steroids and moved on with their careers mostly intact. It's that A-Rod burned his credibility once, swore he'd learned his lesson, and then burned it again four years later. You only get so many "judge me from this day forward" speeches before people stop listening.

Frequently Asked Questions

When did Alex Rodriguez admit to using steroids?

Rodriguez admitted it to ESPN's Peter Gammons on February 9, 2009, two days after Sports Illustrated reported he'd tested positive for testosterone and Primobolan during MLB's anonymous 2003 survey testing. He expanded on the admission at a press conference in Tampa on February 17, 2009.

Is the 2009 A-Rod steroid admission the same as the 2013 Biogenesis suspension?

No -- they're separate incidents four years apart. The 2009 story was A-Rod admitting to PED use from 2001-2003 with the Texas Rangers, before penalties even existed for a positive test. The 2013 Biogenesis suspension covered continued use through 2012 and resulted in a 211-game ban (reduced to 162) plus obstruction charges for trying to cover it up.

What steroids did Alex Rodriguez test positive for in 2003?

Testosterone and Primobolan, according to the Sports Illustrated report by Selena Roberts and David Epstein, sourced to results from MLB's confidential 2003 survey testing program.

Did Alex Rodriguez deny using steroids before 2009?

Yes. In a December 2007 interview with Katie Couric on 60 Minutes, Rodriguez flatly denied ever using steroids or PEDs. He later told Peter Gammons that the 2007 denial was a lie he'd told himself before he ever told anyone else.