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

The definitive and dramatic story of the Alex Rodriguez and Biogenesis scandal, written by the reporters who broke and covered the story

On January 29th, 2013, an exposé by Miami New Times reporter Tim Elfrink set the sports world on fire. Elfrink revealed that a Miami clinic, Biogenesis, had been supplying illegal performance enhancing drugs – PEDs – to many of the nation’s top baseball stars. One name stood out among all the others: Alex Rodriguez, the highest-earning player in the game.

Over the next year and more the story would unravel with incredible details about tanning salon robberies, coded text messages, and furtive steroid injections in the men’s room. In late 2013 Alex Rodriguez would be hit with the longest suspension in MLB history, prompting an ugly fight between him and top league brass. Fourteen other players, including superstar Ryan Braun, were also given shorter suspensions. Tony Bosch, Biogenesis’s founder, would appear on 60 Minutes in an effort to tell his side of the story.

What’s already been reported in the press has been fascinating; but the story behind the headlines that Elfrink and Newsday reporter Gus Garcia-Roberts have unearthed is even more dramatic and full of new, shocking details. Using exclusive documents, never-before-reported records and interviews with top sources, this book takes the reader inside drug deals, athletes’ mansions, and confidential suspension hearings to tell the true story behind the sport’s continuing PED crisis.

Both news-breaking sports journalism and wild South Florida noir, Blood Sport is simultaneously a revelatory record of the steroid and PED era’s continuing evolution and a call to arms for how to end it – this time, for good.

Tim Elfrink, managing editor of the Miami New Times, was the very first reporter to break the story of the Biogenesis scandal. His original story won the George Polk Award and was a finalist for the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting. He lives in Miami.

Gus Garcia-Roberts is an award-winning investigative reporter for Newsday, Long Island's daily newspaper. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Public Service in 2014 for the paper's series on police misconduct. He previously was a staff writer at Cleveland Scene and the senior writer at Miami New Times. He lives in Brooklyn.