Cynthia Rodriguez Nicolas (née Scurtis), the ex-wife of Alex Rodriguez, once attempted to broker a reconciliation between the baseball star and his estranged father.
Before Cynthia, 52, and Alex, 50, were even married, she proposed a meeting between Alex and his father, Victor, who left Alex and his family when he was just 9 years old.
“I could hear an angst in him, a yearning to reconnect,” Cynthia explained in the first episode of the HBO docuseries Alex vs ARod, which premiered on Thursday, November 6. “I felt that he needed to have a meeting with his dad.”
So, in 2000, Cynthia took matters into her own hands and floated the idea of attempting to track down Alex’s father on her own. (Cynthia and Alex were married from 2002 to 2008 and share daughters Natasha, 20, and Ella, 17.)
“At first it was kind of like a hard ‘No,’” Alex said in the docuseries. “I didn’t want to open up those wounds again. And then she started working me and telling me why this could be beneficial, that I would have regrets if he passes and we don’t close the loop.”
Cynthia got in touch with Alex’s cousin, who knew where Victor was living, and the group agreed to meet during a Seattle Mariners four-game road trip to Minnesota in June 2000. Alex was drafted with the No. 1 overall pick by the Mariners in the 1993 MLB Draft and spent the first seven seasons of his career with the franchise.
“The first day, Cynthia picks him up and takes him to, like, T.J. Maxx or something and buys him four suits, because he likes to wear suits all the time,” Alex remembered.
At the airport, Cynthia saw Victor and “knew immediately it was his dad.”
“I went up to him, and he held my hand and he called me his daughter,” Cynthia said of their initial meeting. “He was just like, I don’t know, it was sad. I thought, ‘Wow, how did this happen?’”
The trio had adjoining rooms in a hotel in Minnesota — Alex and Cynthia in one room, Victor in the other — which was meant to foster conversation between Alex and his father, who he hadn’t seen in 14 years.
“I was hoping that they would rekindle and that some of the old wounds would heal and that they would have time together to share,” Cynthia said. “Maybe they lost those formative years together, but they could recapture something now.”
However, things were immediately more tense than therapeutic.
“The first few days was a lot of silence on my part,” Alex recalled. “It felt awkward. I felt bad for Cynthia because she was like Judge Judy in the middle, trying to make small talk and a little joke here, a little joke there. I wasn’t having it.”
Cynthia and Victor went to all four games of the Mariners’ series against the Twins. During that time, Alex realized a reconciliation with his father was probably not in the cards.
“I remember it was the third game and I see them both clapping up there and I look up for a second and I’m like, ‘Yeah, this is what you walked away from. F*** off,’” Alex said.
He added, “Those are the only four games that he ever saw me play.”
Victor died in 2014.
The first episode of Alex vs ARod is available on HBO Max, with episodes two and three premiering on November 13 and November 20, respectively.
