A-Rod Set to Return to Yanks Amidst PR Blitz

When you have a $250 million property, you go to great lengths to protect it.

Alex Rodriguez, who many admit is the best player in baseball, has a battery of lawyers, agents, and flacks who seek to protect and further the image and career that A-Rod himself assiduously seeks to diminish. The New York Yankees, the most successful and drama-laden sports franchise, occasionally spawn tell-all/shock books like Sparky Lyle’s Bronx Zoo, and Joe Torre’s Yankee Years, along with endless news stories, sports columns and blog posts.

When you’re A-Rod, secretly cavorting with Madonna, or Joe DiMaggio, marrying Marilyn Monroe, the stories spill from the sports section to gossip and celebrity - every word is dissected and analyzed, even silence becomes a statement.

A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez by Selena Roberts was released recently. It is the catalyst for the latest A-Rod mania, following his admission of steroid use (a story that Roberts broke). Selena Roberts is obsessed with Alex Rodriguez and she is no fan. As a sports reporter for The New York Times before she jumped to Sports Illustrated, she wrote probing, elegant, albeit negative pieces insinuating that the Yankees would be better off without A-Rod, the preening, self-aggrandizing, over paid diva. These days you can become a pseudo celebrity just by writing about A-Rod.

Yankee manager Joe Girardi lashed out against the A-Rod book  with an aw-shucks if you can’t say something good about somebody, why say anything at all attitude, thereby cementing his legacy as the anti-Billy Martin. Other sports bloggers have come to A-Rod’s defense: Why I’m skeptical of Selena Roberts’ new book, from SysterBall |  Selena Roberts’ Poison Pen, from the Yankees Republic | In defense of Public Enemy No. 1 , from Sports-Illustrated writer Jim Caple | Roberts’ book on A-Rod should be questioned, from KansasCity.com.

All this falls in the ’any publicity is good publicity’ category as A-Rod returns to the team this week, maybe as early as Friday.  The Yankees are slumping along without him.  Can he lift the team by way of his awesome talent and unfortunate personality? Nothing like the heated glare of the avaricious New York media to pump some life into a listless sports franchise - or drive it further down.

A-Rod Archives:

• A-Rod Bunts in PR Press Conference, PRBlogNews, 02/18/2009
• Rubenstein PR Fingerprints on A-Rod’s Ass, PRBlogNews, 02/13/2009
• A-Rod Slams Media in PR Home Run, PRBlogNews, 02/10/2009
• A-Rod Needs Good PR Bad, PRBlogNews, 02/09/2009
• BorAss Reamed in the Bronx, PRBlogNews 11/04/2007
• PR Drives A-Rod & BorAss Money Show, PRBlogNews, 11/01/2007
• BorAss PR Stunt Spits on Baseball, PRBlogNews, 10/29/2007

PR/Media Week in Review 05-03-2009

New York is the great stage and the Yankees are the most dramatic sports team on that stage. On that stage  there is always one, and only one, player who is the big star, the media magnet, the conflicted soul who demands attention and is tortured by the public scrutiny and vilification that inevitably comes with it.

Alex Rodriquez - A-Rod - is the guaranteed modern-day Yankee Adonis of controversy, even when he is recovering from surgery and not on the field (although A-Rod is always present in some form, always  playing some angle).

A-Rod is a huge PR issue for baseball and the Yankees, and constant fodder for the mercenary New York press. The new book by the A-Rod obsessed Sports Illustrated reporter Selena Roberts has amped up the A-Rod gag-o-meter to a new level. Roberts portrays A-Rod as a crass, womanizing, steroid-using, ego-maniacal douche-bag who is a bad tipper at Hooters, a liar and a cheat. None of this is particularly shocking or entirely unexpected but it has left Yankee manager Joe Girardi walking a tightrope.

The A-Rod show would be a lot more entertaining if the Yankees were having a terrific season. Instead, they are once again running hot and cold, failing to coalesce all that monied talent into a winning team. Now, of course, the perfect scenario is set for A-Rod to return and carry the team to the playoffs. This is precisely the sort of pressured situation he usually fails at.  All of it leaves some fans to wonder - is all this A-Rod agita worth it? Can his talent overcome all the bad PR baggage that comes with it?

Time for Yankees to Say Goodbye to A-Rod, Huffington Post |  Alex Rodriguez: Wiping His Butt With the Fabric of America - great post from Bleacher Report | Rubenstein PR Fingerprints On A-Rod’s Ass - PRBlogNews

CONNECTING

Mandy Stadtmiller (right), that ultra funny NY Post columnist, stand up comedian (although she often sits), and general gal about town and country is desperate for fans, like she wants to everybody in NYC to be her fan. So fan Mandy on Facebook here http://tinyurl.com/cto7lq and Twitter her here http://twitter.com/mandystadt so you can become a peep of Mandy’s and get the inside skinny when she needs a source for a story or asses on seats for a gig.

 blog: edit30, insight for business communicators - Richard Miles takes this stuff seriously| blog: Silicon Valley Watcher: Every company is a media company - I couldn’t have said it better|  Twitter: @serena - she has a clue, she’s fun and she streams useful biz/PR connections | Reading | MediaWeek Is Twitter the next Second Life? A mere 40 percent of new visitors return to site … A new study by Nielson Online found that 60 percent of people who sign-up for Twitter do not return after one month. That means only 40 percent of new visitors return, which is up from 30 percent, Nielson reported. MediaWeek suggested these numbers make Twitter similar to the over-hyped virtual world Second Life, which enjoyed much press attention a couple years ago. |  chaimhaasRT @JohnAByrnePRWeek media survey data: 58% of media pros are now on Facebook, 51% LinkedIn, 28% MySpace, & 22% on Twitter. Only 22%? | White House new Flickr photo stream:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/whitehouse/ | Matthew Bishop, The Economist, enjoys his Twitter: @MattBish |  Reasons to reconsider the social media release; tips for getting there

A-Rod Show Continues Today

The pumped up Alex Rodriguez show kicks into high gear at 1:30 PM today at the Yankees spring training camp in Tampa, Florida. A-Rod will face the media en masse after his one-on-one with ESPN’s Peter Gammons last week left a lot of questions. In that interview A-Rod falsely accused Sports Illustrated writer Selena Roberts of stalking him and breaking into his home. A-Rod subsequently apologized to Roberts.

Expect a lot of hardball questions - Exactly what drugs did he take? Where did he get them? What did they do for him? - and some serious deflection and containment by A-Rod.

It is hard to keep up with all of A-Rod’s handlers, managers and advisors (Scott Boras, Guy Oseary, William Morris Agency, Richard Rubenstein). Plus, he supposedly has two therapists to keep his head on straight. Initial reports are that he will not be as open and contrite as Yankee pitcher Andy Pettitte was at last year’s Yankee steroid media confession. That would be a mistake.

What A-Rod and the Yankees want is for this to recede into the background as quickly as possible. Hundreds of baseball players took performance enhancing drugs. Because this is A-Rod - he has assiduously polished his squeaky clean image and he flat out denied taking PED’s before he was caught - he will be hounded and the Yankees will suffer if he does not get it all out at once.

As if A-Rod is not getting enough advice, here is some more: don’t say ‘to be perfectly honest’ and then say you can’t remember what drugs you took, as he did with Gammons. A-Rod is meticulous about his body, his image and his work out regimen. He can only get away with that once.

(top left, Barry Blitt, cover of The New Yorker, Feb. 23, 2009)

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PR/Media Week in Review 02-15-2009

News You Can Lose. Every industry deserves the trade press it gets but can’t even lowly PR do better than PRNews? I deleted at least 10 emails from PRNews last week imploring me to buy their books, go to their conferences, attend webinars on media relations, media training, digital whatever… and I am constantly telemarketed to buy the print publication.  This despite my blog post 2/5 titled PRNews Stuck in Abacus Land that should have elicited some PR maneuvers or at least notified someone that I am not a good prospect for their stuff .

PRNews obviously knows nothing about PR - anybody who buys their dreck is either naive or over stimulated with stimulus funds. Still, repackaging the same PR ‘intelligence’ in a variety of formats and pushing it out to a resistant audience is apparently paying someone’s bills so we officially launch into that business today with the First Annual Media Relations Guide for PRummies (PR Dummies). We employ our own time-tested, field proven three step approach:

#1: Know your client’s business
#2: Know the media you are pitching
#3: Marry #1 & #2

We will send this ‘intelligence’ out in mass emails, conduct webinars, print books, and hold conferences all around the country. Stay tuned.

A-Rod’s Ass. A-Rod was all over the news last week, including several posts here. This Tuesday he is expected to face the press in the Yankees spring training camp. That should spark another round of A-Rod fueled stories that will only feed his already bloated celebrity. Will Selena Roberts, the Sports Illustrated ’stalker,’ be allowed to participate?

Shrinking Media. Bloomberg announced its first ever layoffs last week. Dozens of staffers are facing the axe. Bloomberg always seemed immune to the pressure of traditional media. Now, with financial services in turmoil and media shrinking rapidly, Bloomberg is joining the rest of the world. Fret not, Mike Bloomberg himself is not hurting. He is able to scrape together $80 million or so for his next campaign to stay Mayor of New York.

Eight is Enough. The Killeen Furtney Group, a west coast PR firm, probably thought it was a good idea to represent octuplets mother Nadya Suleman pro bono. Then they started getting death threats. “They’d put me in the wood chipper and throw me in the bottom of the ocean and hope I die,” Killeen said. The Group decided last week that they will consider other ways to spend their non-billable time.

Rubenstein PR Fingerprints On A-Rod’s Ass

Who is covering Alex Rodriguez’s ass in his latest media imbroglio? Richard Rubenstein (left, in blue shirt and pink tie), estranged son of the famous ‘Czar of PR’ Howard Rubenstein, has confirmed that he is guarding the posterior of the best slugger in baseball.

What can Richard do for A-Rod that his weasel agent Scott Boras or his other agent Guy Oseary can’t? Richard isn’t talking but A-Rod’s ‘confession‘ has all the earmarks of aggressive PR hardball and a challenge to the media to back off. A-Rod was vague about what drugs he may have taken but specific about who the real enemy is - Sports Illustrated writer Selena Roberts. When you want to divert attention from the topic, you shoot the messenger - that’s hardball PR.

Richard’s father, Howard, has represented George Steinbrenner for years so that avenue is off limits to A-Rod. Howard’s other son, Steven, is heir to the elder Rubenstein’s empire but Richard has carved out his own mini-empire representing an odd conglomeration of small public companies, rappers, entertainers, and real estate moguls (he’s promoted several Trump projects).

See Gawker post on dueling memos between 5W honcho Ronn Torossian and Richard Rubenstein - two blustering schmegeggis who can’t spell and can’t write threatening each other with holy terror and lawsuits. These guys are … what? … 12 years old?

A-Rod Slams Media in PR Home Run

Alex Rodriguez’s interview yesterday with ESPN (see video below) was a masterstroke of PR message and obfuscation. A-Rod was clear that his use of PEDs  (performance enhancing drugs) was contained to a “naive, stupid” time of his career with Texas when the culture of baseball was “loosey goosey.” He has been clean since he joined the Yankees and he implored us to look at the consistency and longevity of his career and not judge him harshly for an anomaly he regrets.

Since this is A-Rod he always appears to be holding back more than he is revealing and he is jockeying to enhance and protect an image clean enough for a Wheaties box (at least he didn’t get caught smoking pot like Michael Phelps). New Yorkers like honesty and they like winners, A-Rod said. All true enough, but what’s this bit about Selena Roberts (top,left) , the Sports Illustrated reporter who broke the A-Rod PED story, stalking him and spreading lies?

Selena Roberts is a highly accomplished sports reporter. When she was with The New York Times she wrote insightful stories about A-Rod and his damaged psyche hurting the team. She is coming out with a book on A-Rod in May that apparently he will not like since he consistently referred to her as something of a journalistic svengali. 

Sports Illustrated published a Q & A with Roberts, in which the reporter talks about the process of breaking the story and her efforts to speak with Rodriguez. She also calls the slugger’s claims “absurd” in an interview with MLB Network.

“”I’ve never set foot in the lobby of Alex’s New York apartment. I’ve never set foot on his property. It’s pure fabrication,” said Roberts, who did say she drove by Rodriguez’s house after receiving permission from Miami Beach police to drive on public property near A-Rod’s house. The Miami Beach police have a “miscellaneous incident” report of that conversation, but Roberts was not cited for anything.

Roberts also asked for and received permission from security at the University of Miami to enter the school’s workout facilities and talk to Rodriguez on Thursday. “I think it’s a diversion, a shoot-the-messenger type of thing,” Roberts said.