The Yankees said in a statement they would have no comment on the Rodriguez case as it is appealed.

Rodriguez, who was born in New York and grew up in the Dominican Republic and in Florida, has long been under suspicion for using performance-enhancing drugs, which he admitted using for a limited time earlier in his career.

At the start of the 2009 season, Rodriguez was 33 and had 553 career home runs, putting him on track to break Barry Bonds’s career record of 762 by the time Rodriguez reached 40.

As part of the $275 million contract the Yankees negotiated with Rodriguez a year earlier, the club agreed to pay him several million dollars to secure all the rights to market his home run chase, which they believed would be a commercial bonanza. Rodriguez was thought to be on a pace to pass Willie Mays (660 homers), Babe Ruth (714), Hank Aaron (755) and finally Bonds on the career list.

At the time, it seemed that Rodriguez’s breaking the home run record would provide a powerful sign of how baseball had moved beyond the so-called steroids era and would be an important milestone for Selig, who is keenly aware of his legacy and has been criticized for his seeming ambivalence to the issue of doping during the first part of his tenure.

But in early February 2009, Rodriguez’s image as the game’s pristine slugger was shattered. Sports Illustrated published an article that asserted he was among the players who had tested positive in 2003 for performance-enhancing drugs. That test was designed as an anonymous survey and carried no penalties.