Alex Rodriguez’s New York Yankees missed Major League Baseball’s postseason for the second time in the past eighteen seasons, but that doesn’t mean his October has been uneventful. Rodriguez is the last man standing after baseball’s most recent salvo in their war on performance enhancing drugs (PEDs), and he and his legal team have spent the past month preparing for what figures to be a long and drawn out appeal of an unprecedented 211-game suspension for his involvement with a Miami clinic.

Over a dozen other players were suspended along with Rodriguez. Unlike Rodriguez, they all accepted their suspensions — in most cases fifty games, MLB’s typical suspension for first-time steroid offenders. Perhaps the evidence was strong. Perhaps they didn’t want to be blackballed by the owners. Rodriguez was the only one of the group without a future contract to think about — he will be forty-two years old when his current ten-year, $275 million contract expires in 2017. The next oldest player suspended was thirty-three-year-old Nelson Cruz — a free agent following the season.

Baseball’s key witness in the case is Anthony Bosch, the owner of the clinic from which the players allegedly obtained performance enhancing drugs. Bosch refused to cooperate with MLB’s investigation for months until MLB filed suit against him for “tortious interference.” Thus compelled, he cooperated. ESPN legal analyst Lester Munson wrote, “We know only that MLB promised to protect him from any legal actions that might result from his cooperation and that MLB assured Bosch it would provide personal security.” Munson also suggested MLB may have offered to help Bosch with his problems with the IRS and other lawsuits, although this has not been confirmed.