Rodriguez’s legacy is likely to be viewed more kindly as time passes

Alex Rodriguez often said he will leave it up to others to determine his baseball legacy. With his tenure as a Yankees player ending this week, let the examination begin.

“It will be, I think, a different legacy immediately upon retirement and a different legacy 10 or 20 years down the road,” said John Thorn, Major League Baseball’s resident historian. “He was the best player in baseball for a long time. I think his PED use and his obstreperous relationship with Major League Baseball during the [Biogenesis] investigation cast a cloud over his career.

“But the numbers speak for themselves. He was [originally] a shortstop, so those kinds of numbers at that position are without precedence. Honus Wagner, Cal Ripken could only dream of those numbers. He came to the Yankees knowing he would not displace Derek Jeter. However, he was the better defensive shortstop at that time.”

Rodriguez has voluminous Hall of Fame-worthy statistics — led by 696 career home runs — but a year-long suspension in 2014 in the Biogenesis case would likely affect his candidacy at least in the early years of eligibility, which begins five years after his last season in the big leagues.

“I can’t say with any certainty what will happen,” Thorn said, “but I am hopeful that with time the individual transgressions will be seen in the context of an era which had a different norm for conduct, different mores. Rafael Palmeiro, [Sammy] Sosa, [Mark] McGwire, the names go on who posted numbers that would have placed them in the Hall of Fame. They would have been locks.

“My view is that everyone was guilty, everyone benefited from the offensive explosion in the 90s and early [2000s]. To have the only people hung out to dry at the end being individual players of extraordinary accomplishment seems to me overly simple and that the Hall ought not to have a crater in the back room for this era. I think that the pendulum will swing to forgiveness rather than to punishment.”