In a complaint filed today, Yankee third baseman Alex Rodriguez sued Major League Baseball to overturn an arbitral panel’s decision to largely uphold his lengthy suspension from baseball. The panel’s decision, which was made public for the first time as an attachment to the complaint, reduced his suspension from 211 games to 162, but rejected A-Rod’s arguments to overturn or more substantially reduce the suspension. A-Rod’s complaint takes aim at the author of the arbitral decision, arbitrator Frederic Horowitz:

Arbitrator Horowitz — who has been widely described as a hard core baseball fan — repeatedly took actions that evidenced his blatant partiality toward MLB and were in disregard of well settled legal principles. These actions include, among other things, his decisions: (i) to deprive Mr. Rodriguez of his right to select a fair and impartial arbitrator to represent his interest on the Arbitration Panel; (ii) to deprive Mr. Rodriguez of his right to face his accuser and examine Commissioner Selig, the man responsible for imposing Mr. Rodriguez’s unprecedented suspension, who was described in testimony during the arbitration as the sole ultimate decision maker; (iii) to deprive Mr. Rodriguez of his right to a full and complete cross-examination of Anthony Bosch, the primary fact witness whom MLB relied upon in imposing the unprecedented suspension; (iv) to deprive Mr. Rodriguez of his right to inspect the BlackBerry devices which MLB claims contained the material correspondence between Mr. Rodriguez and Bosch concerning the alleged used of banned substances; and (v) permitting MLB and its officials — including one member of his own Arbitration Panel — to continuously leak confidential and prejudicial information concerning Mr. Rodriguez and the arbitration to the media.

The case is before Judge Ramos. In October, A-Rod sued the League alleging (among other things) that it engaged in a campaign to “smear” him “at all costs,” thereby tortiously interfering with his Yankees contract. Our prior posts on that case, which is pending before Judge Schofield, are here.