Alex Rodriguez as a New York Yankee during the 2006 American League Division Series in 2006. Rob Tringali/Sportschrome/Getty Images Share on Facebook Share on X Share to Flipboard Send an Email Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Print the Article Post a Comment Logo text Throughout his Hall of Fame-worthy (go ahead and @ me, bro) Major League Baseball career, Alex Rodriguez did not always play clean. In new HBO docuseries Alex vs. ARod, directed by Gotham Chopra and Erik LeDrew, Rodriguez finally comes clean about his on-again, off-again performance-enhancing drug (PED) use, and the untruths he told to cover it up along the way. In the doc as well as in our conversation below, Rodriguez, now 50, is forthcoming, thoughtful and an excellent conversationist. If only he had been able to tap into this part of himself a decade earlier, baseball writers may have given him a pass to Cooperstown by now. But in life, as in baseball, not everything's a home run - there are errors and strikeouts along the way, too. Alex vs. ARod taps into all most of that. Related Stories Movies 'Not Made for Politics' Doc Shows "Female Resistance Against Patriarchal Tyranny" in Belarus TV How to Watch 'Thursday Night Football' Online for Free Stepping up to the plate for a The Hollywood Reporter Q&A below is number 13, Alex Rodriguez. *** You could have done a documentary years ago or years from now - or, of course, never. Why did now seem like the right time for you to open yourself up? I've been asked about doing some type of documentary probably for the last 15 years, and I just never thought about it. It was always a quick, hard, "No way. I'm too close to it. Too soon. What's the purpose?" All these years later, I think I have the perspective going back now to say, "You know what? I've never really told my story in any way, shape or form. And there's some things that have been told about me that are super accurate and some that are wildly inaccurate, and I've never really tried to play the correction game. One is that there's this centaur - half-horse, half-me - painting in my apartment. I mean, this (Rodriguez on Zoom gestures to surroundings) is my apartment. I promise you, there's nothing like that here. But I've never tried to correct that. That's been a [reported] story out there that's never been corrected, because I think it's actually comical. But that's one example of something that never happened and will never happen - not because I don't have a healthy ego, I'm just not that creative. It was important [to do the docuseries] too, because my lessons were so ugly and deep and punitive. So much was at stake - I lost that Hall of Fame and other things - that as I mentor kids today, one of the things that I do is I always lead with my biggest mistakes, and if my mentees can take one thing away, is if they can avoid one of my mistakes, that is a big [reason]. I'm biased in your case. But I'm also a writer and in general, I don't like the punitive nature of baseball writers withholding the Hall of Fame from PED users. Do you really think you'll never get in? Like, not late, not even posthumously - which I still believe would be unfair - but never? I don't know. Honestly, I don't know. I hope for the best, plan for the worst. In many ways, that's why I've given up on it already, because I knew the rules. I broke [them]. I gotta lay in my bed now, and that's the league we live in, and I'm not gonna change that. But what I can do is take those lessons, learn from them and move it forward. I've done the best I could over the last decade. I had this as a Top 10 World Series ever before Game 7. Now I have it Top 5, though I admit I don't actually have spelled-out rankings. Where would you rank this past World Series? Well, I'll tell you. I'm 50. I don't remember the first five, but I've probably watched every World Series game the last 45 years. I'm lucky that I played in six of them. For Fox, I cover them and analyze them and study it. I think it's top five, and I have reasons for that. As far as just viewership, if you look at the last 10 years, we've probably averaged somewhere between 12-14 million people watching. This year, Game 7 was at the peak almost 32 million viewers [in the U.S.] - it was the most-watched World Series of all time, when you include the different interests, parties and countries. Obviously, America doesn't include one person from Canada - millions of people there. Then you go to Japan, Latin America, the rest of the world. But when you have unicorns like Ohtani - you've never seen this before. He's the perfect combination of Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens - oh, by the way, Ricky Henderson. He's also six-foot-four. He's just a beautiful-looking person. And then his teammate, Yamamoto, has now established himself as the greatest pitcher in our game today. We've never seen three wins a matter of seven, eight days - it's unheard