A grand jury has Porter Fischer’s documents and is ramping up its inquiry into Biogenesis

If you’re Alex Rodriguez you probably have to be smiling a bit about this report from Mike Fish of ESPN:

After months of negotiations and legal wrangling with the whistle-blower in the Biogenesis clinic scandal, Major League Baseball still hasn’t pried loose documents he took from the clinic. But within the past week, Porter Fischer, the clinic’s former marketing director, appeared before a federal grand jury in Miami and turned over the records, sources told “Outside the Lines.” ... The grand jury appearance by Fischer and his turning over of documents is a clear sign that the scandal has gone beyond Major League Baseball’s intensive in-house probe and evolved into a federal law enforcement investigation that could potentially lead to criminal charges against individuals tied to the clinic and its distribution network, including Tony Bosch, the shuttered clinic’s founder who is cooperating in baseball’s investigation.

To sum up: Baseball doesn’t have the documents, but the government does. You know what’s really, really hard? Trying to get documents from the government that are part of a criminal investigation so that you can use them for your personal business purposes. Which is what baseball would have to do if it were to use Fischer’s documents in an arbitration against A-Rod.

So, why not just go to Tony Bosch, you ask? Well, according to this report he could very well face criminal indictment here. Know what else is really hard? Getting someone who is under a criminal indictment to go on the record in a civil arbitration admitting to all of the drug stuff he did. Which is something else baseball would have to do if it were to go hard after A-Rod in the arbitration.

None of which is to say that baseball’s case is dead. There are reportedly other witnesses, cell phone records and things already in their possession. But given how significant Bosch and Fisher are supposed to be, and given how there is a non-trivial risk that they could be put out of reach as evidence sources going forward, one has to wonder if anyone at MLB is nervous here.