Steven Marcus of Newsday reported over the weekend that Alex Rodriguez’s appeal of his 211-game suspension will begin this week, at least preliminarily, with a status conference. He tweets today, however, that A-Rod’s team is considering other options before sitting down for an arbitration with Major League Baseball:
A-ROD: His camp looking at legal options in federal court even before arbitration, source says.
— steven marcus (@newsdaymarcus) September 3, 2013
This isn’t necessarily surprising. As we saw with the NFL bounty case, a person with little to lose — and given the length of A-Rod’s suspension he has little to lose — can possibly make some headway against his suspension by doing an end-run around league discipline and going to court. I’m not sure what sort of theory A-Rod could advance in court — maybe saying that Bud Selig violated the Collective Bargaining Agreement in leveling the discipline that he did — but it’s quite possible that this is a means of putting pressure on the league to come back to the table and try to negotiate a lighter suspension.
Meanwhile, the Yankees, thanks in part to Rodriguez, are still in the wild card hunt. Which has to be driving Selig absolutely nuts.
