Steve Fishman, writing for New York Magazine:

The largest drug scandal in the history of baseball started over $4,000. The money was a debt owed to Porter Fischer, a steroid user who was involved with the South Florida clinic known as Biogenesis, through which Rodriguez is alleged to have procured his performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs). Fischer, well built and extravagantly tanned, possessed many large ideas about his future, which reality seemed determined to frustrate. He’d bounced around with little purpose, from managing a theme park to a couple of years at National Tobacco, until he was fired for selling samples on eBay. Lately, he had been describing himself as a freelance marketer and lived in a guesthouse in his mother’s backyard.
Then, one day in March 2011, Fischer’s luck changed. He was hit by a car, and not just any car—it was a Jaguar. Injuring his knee, he received a settlement of $35,000, after which he started telling people, “I came into a little money.”

As a Yankees fan, and former A-Rod supporter, this piece was more of the same—more of A-Rod's canned lines, more dopey, greedy, potentially lying testifiers, and Major League Baseball, simultaneously trying to keep making millions while going after their own product. So—depressing and infuriating.

But as a creator of stories, this is a real lesson—everything begins from some small, seemingly innocent, incident. No power or prestige or grand conspiracy needed. Just a small sum of money (compared to the millions, perhaps billions, at stake), an idiot who lucked into another small sum of money, and some hurt feelings.

Joe Stracci