An American Baseball Perspective exclusive by William Tell

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

(Ed. note: Part 2 can be read here; Part 3 can be read here.)

More than any other factor, the person and personality of John Rodriguez shapes the PEBA as we know it.  To gain a deeper understanding of the Machiavellian machinations of the PEBA Commissioner and what makes him, his team and the league tick, one need only sit down and have a conversation with the 87-year-old former personal trainer at his office in Aurora.  In the upcoming trio of articles from this intrepid writer, you will read (or at least skim through) the singular narrative that grew from my attempts to do just that.

Travel was something of a hurdle.  One would assume that a team called the Aurora Borealis – with the name conjuring images of the Northern Lights glowing over a clear, frostbitten landscape – would be located in Alaska.  One, as I found when I touched down in Fairbanks, would be wrong.  After fending off the wink-laden flirtations of a certain holder of public office who seemed rather starved for the spotlight, I departed to the actual home of the Aurora Borealis: Aurora, Colorado.  Here, living near his lavish office and his two grown sons, resides the baseball legend that is John Rodriguez.

Rodriguez is a wizened old man, half Jack Palance, half Mr.  Miyagi in appearance.  Though most of his adult life has been devoted to physical fitness, a recent bout with polio – “From my time in the service,” he illogically explains – has sapped him of his former physical strength.  An infection has settled in his lungs of late, making it more difficult for him to get out and about.  Despite his physical frailty, Rodriguez seems to have his mental faculties about him and his personality is no less jocular than when he was in his prime.

To see Rodriguez for whom he is in the present, one must understand who he was in the past.  “I once curled eight times my body weight, boy,” he proclaims while leaning on the cane the he now relies on to support his frame.  When presented with the logical impossibility of the feat and the fact that witnesses say the weight was actually eight pounds, Rodriguez grows defensive.  “I know it was eight times my body weight, I put ‘8’ on the damn thing myself!”  But how did he know how to label weight “8” rather than, say, “57”?  “It had eight stamped right on it, that’s how I knew how much it weighed!”  It is this impenetrable web of circular thought that led Rodriguez to get on board with the PEBA after the MLB folded in 2006.  “I knew people would miss baseball because there wasn’t any baseball to miss; otherwise there would have already been a league and we wouldn’t have started our own league because people wouldn’t be missing anything at all then,” he announces before exploding into gut-busting laughter whose enthusiasm is as contagious as it is inexplicable.

Rodriguez is part Steinbrenner, part David Stern and part Billy Mays.  He so seamlessly switches from eccentric to levelheaded that one cannot help but feel like the butt of some private joke while trying to interpret what is real and what is jest.  The self-made fitness magnate married his high-school sweetheart the day she turned 16 – he was only 19 at the time – and they ran off to start a new life together.  “Her parents hated me for that; probably still would if they were still here.  I had to do it though; I could see that my number was coming up in the draft and I wanted to make sure she was mine before I left.”  Indeed, John was drafted into the US Army in 1943 at the age of 21.  Though he never saw action, he came out of the service with a new focus for what he wanted out of life.  “I saw 10,000 men doing jumping jacks, push-ups, all sorts of ass-hattery just because some officer told them to.  I decided that I could be that officer and have people pay me to yell at them to exercise.”

His business model, from which his billions in net worth would spring, was that simple.  “I just yelled,” he explains, “and people responded.  Crunches, running miles, lifting weights, whatever.  Americans thrive on feeling bad about themselves, and I dealt it out in spades.”  Despite his brusque business manner, Rodriguez was – by his account as well as others – a great husband and father.  “I was faithful to Edie the whole time I was at war – which for me was mostly a supply base in Manila.  It wasn’t long after I was back that I was father to two boys.”  No doubt the Rodriguez household would have expanded even more, but Edie’s occupation as a nurse in a TB ward led to her eventual death at the age of 26.  It was a heartbreaking time for John, during which he poured himself into his work and his children at the expense of any other real personal relationships.

From the early ’50s through the mid-’90s, the years passed by almost indistinguishably for the head of the Rodriguez Fitness empire.  John, Jr., the elder son, enlisted in the Army at age 18 and began working his way up through the ranks.  A steady demeanor and a cool head under pressure made him a hit with the officers, while his tough-but-fair way of dealing with everyone around him boosted his popularity among the enlisted men.  Christopher, two years his junior, graduated from business school and began helping his father in the family business.  Chris’s business mind has sometimes been undermined by his unmitigated hubris and aloof personality, but he has shown a knack for grabbing the right opportunities at the right times.  John, Sr., meanwhile, briefly owned part of the Cleveland Indians in the 1970s (“…but hell, who didn’t?” he explains), marking his first foray into sports ownership.

“Those were some of the best times of my life,” recalls John, Sr., as his memory transports him to bygone days.  “Little John wasn’t making any headlines, but his peers all respected him and his men loved him.  I was working side-by-side with Chris, who showed a business mind I had never had.  We were a family, the three of us.  I was so proud of my boys – still am.  Things couldn’t stay that way forever, though.”

Coming up: A rift divides the Rodriguez family as the PEBA comes about