To boo A-rod or cheer him? It’s complicated

Yankee slugger’s performance and reputation at odds

NEW YORK — Booing Alex Rodriguez has become so reflexive that it’s easy to forget what exactly we’re booing him for. Because he cheated? He’s not alone in that, certainly not in recent New York Yankees history and not even among his teammates. Because he lied about cheating? Other athletes have ferociously denied allegations, and pursued their accusers, for far longer and with far more false indignation. Because, despite receiving the baseball equivalent of a death sentence (a 211-game suspension), he simply refuses to disappear? Or because in his return to action that few wanted — not Major League Baseball, certainly, or his team’s top officials — Rodriguez is actually lifting the faltering Yankees back into playoff contention?

Make no mistake: The prospect of a defiant Rodriguez leading the Yankees into the playoffs or, heaven forbid, to another World Series must haunt Bud Selig’s most harrowing nightmares. Imagine this tableau. World Series, Game 7. Yankees versus the St. Louis Cardinals. Bottom of the eighth. Two outs, two on. A Rodriguez home run, deep into the night, puts the Yankees ahead. Then, in what will be his final career appearance, Mariano Rivera marches on one last time to Enter Sandman. And promptly blows the save. Yankees lose.

Yet the saga of Rodriguez — prodigy, superstar, cheater, pariah — has been such a strange one that we shouldn’t be surprised if it ends in the strangest possible way. If you need any more evidence that black is white, up is down and cats and dogs are cohabitating, just look to Boston Red Sox star David Ortiz, who spoke out publicly against the punitive plunking of Rodriguez by a Red Sox pitcher.

For Yankees fans, cheering for Rodriguez has always been a complicated matter, but it was possible as long as he contributed to one thing: Yankees victories. Now, in true Rodriguez fashion, he’s gone and complicated even that.

I’m not from Seattle, I don’t follow the Texas Rangers and I’ve never really been a Yankees fan, so I’ve had occasion to root for Rodriguez exactly once. It was back in 1995, a strike-shortened season, when the upstart Seattle Mariners beat the fabled Yankees in the first American League wild-card series. Rodriguez had hit only five home runs that season; at 19 years old, he was the youngest player in the major leagues. The next year, 1996, he would put up one of the greatest offensive seasons in baseball history and lose the American League Most Valuable Player Award by three voting points. But in 1995, he was nothing but a promise. That Mariners team, with Ken Griffey Jr., Randy Johnson and this skinny teenager named Rodriguez, glowed bright with possibility — it was enough to make any baseball fan, regardless of affiliation, cheer.

Griffey and Johnson got traded, and Rodriguez eventually left for Texas, and in the end it was the Yankees and their own skinny rookie shortstop who won the World Series in 1996 and three more times in the next four years. Perhaps it was inevitable that the Yankees and Rodriguez would meet again — in 2004, when the Yankees acquired him.

At the time, the Yankees’ dynastic run was nearly a decade old and there was still much talk of the Yankee Way: those values of teamwork, hard-nosed discipline and selfless sacrifice, as personified by fan favourites like Bernie Williams, the sainted Derek Jeter and even Paul O’Neill, who by then was retired. Yet the Yankee Way was already being stained by disclosures that linked two players — Jason Giambi and Gary Sheffield — to a federal drug investigation. Other Yankees — Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte, Chuck Knoblauch, Mike Stanton — would later be thrown into the same performance-enhancing mix.

Rodriguez’spresenceonthe team, in a sense, ran counter to that trend: He was simply the all-world talent playing for the all-world team. Later, the hope was that he would surpass Barry Bonds for the career home run record and, in doing so, cleanse baseball of that stain as well. He would set the record straight, literally. And he would do it as a Yankee for life.

Only the Yankee-for-life part has panned out, and there are many people, from the Yankees’ front office to the Yankees’ bleachers, who wish it hadn’t. (Just ask the bodega owner in Brooklyn who years back named his store A-Rod Grocery and is now searching for a new name.) And Yankees fans, so well-versed in booing, are now faced with something much weirder: cheering a player they no longer like because he’s boosting the team they still love.

It was another New York pariah, Anthony Weiner, who set the tone for this season, whether you’re talking

Quit is an especially dirty word in sports and apparently it’s not how Rodriguez rolls, either.

about baseball or politics. “Quit isn’t the way we roll in New York City,” he calmly proclaimed, when besieged on all sides by opponents and allies pleading with him to just go away. What’s so cunning and infuriating about his statement is that he’s using something New Yorkers are justifiably proud of (their resilience) to validate something they’re ashamed of (Anthony Weiner).

Quit is an especially dirty word in sports and apparently it’s not how Rodriguez rolls, either. At any other time, this quality would be celebrated, especially in a superstar who’s never exactly been known for resilience. But for the Yankees, over the past 18 seasons, what started as a commitment to winning has morphed into an unspoken credo to win at all costs, whether those costs entailed flouting the rules or simply acquiring every flawed superstar in sight. Rodriguez personifies both. So it’s fitting that his return should be the exclamation point to that era.

The team’s recent history has featured a proud tradition of winning. This season, without Rodriguez, it looked as if Yankees fans would finally have to get used to losing. Instead, they’re confronted with something even more unfamiliar and much uglier: winning without pride.