According to a report from the San Francisco Chronicle, about $500,000 worth of items were stolen from Alex Rodriguez's rental car in San Francisco while he was in town working the ESPN broadcast for the Giants-Phillies game over the weekend. The car was reportedly parked only a few blocks from Oracle Park when someone broke into his SUV and made off with a camera, laptop, jewelry and bag on Sunday night.
Police suspect that the crime was committed between 9 p.m. and 11 p.m., while Rodriguez and several other ESPN staffers were having dinner after the game. As of Monday, no arrests have been made but an investigation is ongoing and it is reportedly deemed a "high priority" case.
Being the victim of a car break-in is usually a pretty petty annoyance, but one would imagine it's significantly more of a headache when a half-million dollars worth of stuff disappears from inside the vehicle. That had to be a pretty nice bag!
It's an extremely tough break for Rodriguez, though I suppose you have to be rather fortunate to even have $500,000 worth of stuff stashed in your car in the first place. Not to mention the fact that you have to be rather careless to be willing to leave that stuff unattended in a parked car in the middle of a major city -- one that has become rather notorious for car burglaries in recent years.
According to the Chronicle, there were 11,269 reported break-ins during the first half of the year, coming out to an average of 62 break-ins per day. Not exactly the best place to abandon your jackpot-on-wheels. It seems unlikely that many of those break-ins were more noteworthy or lucrative than this one, though you never know considering San Francisco is ranked No. 2 on the list of most expensive U.S. cities to live in.
It was a real tough-luck weekend for the Sunday Night Baseball crew and their cars, as Jessica Mendoza missed Sunday's broadcast while recovering from a car accident on a California freeway a few days prior. Mendoza was reportedly rear-ended at full speed and managed to escape serious injury, according to ESPN's PR.
Here's to a better weekend ahead for the ESPN crew. Let's hope Mendoza makes a full recovery while A-Rod gets his stuff back and finds a better place to park while in Pittsburgh.
