It seems there’s no love lost between Doug Mientkiewicz and his former Yankees teammate, Alex Rodriguez.
During a recent appearance on the “Foul Territory” podcast with A.J. Pierzynski and Scott Braun, Mientkiewicz unloaded on the MLB analyst in a wide-ranging tirade that encompassed Rodriguez’s steroid usage and personal life, stating in part how he’s “going to die a lonely man.”
“It’s painful,” Mientkiewicz said of Rodriguez. “It’s like, wait a minute, do you (forget) you got suspended 200 games? It’s like, ‘Come on, man. Stop it. I get it.’ I played a power position and didn’t have any. Did it cross my mind? Of course. You thought about it. But I was like, ‘You know what, I want to be able to walk when I’m 50.”
Rodriguez was suspended for the entire 2014 season due to PED use.
In the years leading up to that ban, Rodriguez and Mientkiewicz — who were teammates in high school — briefly played together on the Yankees in 2007 after Mientkiewicz won the World Series with the Red Sox in 2004.
Mientkiewicz, 48, also remarked that Rodriguez has not properly handled broken bonds from the past, according to NJ.com.
“This whole ‘father of the year’ stuff, God bless him with his daughters, because it’s got to come a long way,” Mientkiewicz said.
“But it’s like, ‘You’re just trying to get into heaven now.’ I’m still friends with my high school team. We still text often, not as often as we should, but we still text, group thread, constantly badgering each other. He’s just distant from it. I don’t care how good or how great you become and how far your career goes, you never forget your high school dudes.”
The former first basemen being openly critical of Rodriguez is a bit of a turn compared to years past.
Back in 2009, Mientkiewicz said he never saw Rodriguez use steroids in high school.
“From my perspective, it would be 99.9% impossible for us not to know,” Mientkiewicz told the Los Angeles Times of his one-time teammate at Miami’s Westminster Christian High School.
“… I knew what he looked like in ninth grade. He was skinny. Who isn’t in ninth grade? He was very dedicated back then, he worked harder than anyone else.”
Mientkiewicz hit 66 career home runs between 1998 and 2009, spanning 1,087 career at-bats.