The Yankees benched him in the playoffs, so ... they weren't rolling him out there in the hopes that he'd fail.

ARod sounds like a paranoid, misguided man:

"The worst scandal in baseball history, the one that threatened the very existence of the game, was the decision by several members of the 1919 Chicago White Sox to intentionally lose the World Series. Alex Rodriguez’s lawyer has accused the Yankees of committing a similar act of treason. 

The lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, said the Yankees knew Rodriguez had a torn labrum in his hip but continued to use him in the 2012 playoffs, hoping he would sustain further physical harm and never play for them again. 

To be clear, Tacopina is not implying that the Yankees used Rodriguez while he was injured in an effort to help the team win. That would be immoral but not traitorous. Tacopina is saying that the Yankees deliberately did not field their best team by knowingly using a player who was physically unable to perform. 

'They rolled him out there like an invalid and made him look like he was finished as a ballplayer,' Tacopina said.

...

Tacopina clumsily evoked the legacy of George Steinbrenner, offering a revisionist version of the scheming — but now sainted — former owner who once paid a gambler for dirt on Dave Winfield. That offense earned Steinbrenner a suspension that lasted nearly three years.

Now the player, not the owner, faces a suspension. As Rodriguez fights it, he tries to win for a franchise he accuses of acting unconscionably."

The commissioner works for the owners.

I don't doubt that the Yankees were secretly hoping that a MLB punitive action could relieve them of a lot of their contractual obligations to ARod.

I also think it's important to fight Selig's edicts and put in plenty of checks and balances.


But this lawyer talk is seriously out of line BS. The Yankees weren't trying to injure ARod. That would be flat-out criminal and way beyond a dispute about playing time or a contract buyout.