Yankees battle symbol of excess
A-Rod saga is providing some grand theatre
The rich are different than you or I, assuming you are not rich. Not just second-house-on-Nantucket rich, mind you; no, the threshold is higher in this case. The New York Yankees and Alex Rodriguez are attacking one another in public with the sort of escalating savagery usually reserved for mob wars, high school girls and maybe house hunting in the Hamptons. It’s the richest club in baseball and its richest player, slashing at one another with broken Riedel Sommelier wine glasses, going for the throat.
Sunday night, all that was only the backdrop for some glorious theatre. A-Rod stepped in against Red Sox pitcher and Canadian Ryan Dempster in Boston, and it took Dempster four pitches to bean him. A-Rod eventually came around to score and he briefly became a sympathetic figure, in the manner of a mannequin that has been discarded in a department store parking lot. In the sixth, with the boos still bucketing down, A-Rod hit a towering home run to centre and loped around the bases with his distinctive canter, slow and deliberate. He stopped at home plate for an extra second or two. It was, in a word, hilarious.
Dempster allowed seven runs in 5 1/3 innings and was given a standing ovation when he left. A-Rod went 3-for-4 and was the player of the game. Dempster and Boston manager John Farrell claim Dempster was just trying to pitch inside, unaware that lying about trying to bean A-Rod is a pretty A-Rod thing to do. There was a big professional wrestling card on Sunday night, too, and the differences weren’t as significant as you might think.
It takes some doing to make A-Rod anything less than a villain, even if baseball is doing its best. Over the last two weeks A-Rod has been suspended for a major-league-record 211 games and appealed (WHAT ABUM was the New York Daily News’ headline), played through his appeal (AND THE BANNED PLAYS ON, trumpeted the New York Post), been benched (WHAT A SIT SHOW, blared the Daily News), been accused of leaking the identities of fellow Biogenesis clients Ryan Braun and teammate Francisco Cervelli to the press (A-RAT, decided the Daily News) and denied the leak allegations (I’M NOT ARAT, reported the Post, with A-Rod’s face Photoshopped onto a white rat). Frankly, it’s been exhausting.
That was just the preamble, as it turns out. This weekend, A-Rod’s flashy New York lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, unleashed a barrage of charges, one of which was that the Yankees intentionally concealed the results of an MRI showing a torn labrum in Rodriguez’s hip during the 2012 playoffs, leading him to go a feeble 3-for-25 with 12 strikeouts, when he wasn’t being pulled for pinch-hitters or being benched.
(Meanwhile, the Daily News reported that the former mistress of Yankees GM Brian Cashman says Tacopina should not be representing Rodriguez because the lawyer’s partner, Steven Turano, is one of her representatives. The possibility her conversations with Cashman could be shared by the lawyers, she believes, is a conflict of interest. In light of everything else, this barely produces a raised eyebrow).
Tacopina also alleged that Yankees president Randy Levine told Dr. Bryan Kelly, the man about to perform ARod’s hip surgery earlier this year, that “I don’t ever want to see him on the field again.” He didn’t allegedly add “so if you could just leave your keys or a set of steak knives in there,” but the worst-case inference would be that the Yankees asked a doctor to tank the surgery. So A-Rod’s lawyer alleges the team fielded a one-legged man in a playoff series to prove a point and then committed a potential criminal offence. Well, you can’t say he’s not interesting.
Levine shot back that the Yankees would release ARod’s medical records with his consent, and Tacopina replied that he had proof, and round and round we go. Tacopina also told The New York Times, “The legacy of George Steinbrenner would be horrified. This is the New York Yankees. This isn’t some thug-culture club.”
Well, technically George Steinbrenner was one for public feuds, and was nearly banned from baseball for paying gambler and mob-connected lowlife Howie Spira US$40,000 to dig up dirt on Dave Winfield, who had come to New York as a free agent and whom the Yankees made, for a time, the highest-paid player in baseball, though he was occasionally criticized for not delivering in the post-season.
So really, this current fiasco isn’t so much a deplorable departure from Yankees tradition as it is a fitting homage to their glorious past. All we need now is for Joe Girardi to get fired and re-hired a few times and for a couple Yankees to swap their wives and families.
Some people say they’re bored of the A-Rod saga, which is understandable but misguided. This is delicious. This is the rich eating the super-rich. This is the Yankees, who have missed the playoffs once since 1995, bumbling along with a lineup so strange that Lyle Overbay is third on the team in total bases and playing a series of vagrants and character actors at third base, and also A-Rod.
They are an aging wasteland, Rome at the end. They are at war with the greatest symbol of their excess. His US$275-million contract extension included $6 million US in home run bonuses for every home run benchmark he passed: He is 11 behind Willie Mays, 65 behind Babe Ruth, 106 behind Hank Aaron, 113 behind Barry Bonds. The Yankees had a vision of the great clean hope, erasing Bonds from the mountaintop, a giant in pinstripes. It almost worked out the way they planned it.
This is professional sports now. An incredibly expensive asset, a cold-blooded franchise, a sport whose commissioner has undergone a deathbed conversion, lawyers and lawyers and backroom scumbags and a game in there somewhere, under the lights, powering the whole thing. It is the bonfire of the vanities. ARod is the beginning of an era in professional sports and the end of one.
Oh, and if you want a villain, ESPN and Yahoo! both reported over the weekend that Braun, the Milwaukee Brewers star who received a 65-game suspension, spent last year telling fellow players that the drug test collector Dino Laurenzi Jr., who had handled Braun’s positive 2012 test that was eventually thrown out, was an antiSemite. Good guy.