A-Rod plays his final game with Yankees today
NEW YORK — This is how it ends for Alex Rodriguez? With a Yankeesorchestrated whimper instead of an all-out public relations war?
Hard to believe. For the moment, let’s not.
It is possible that Rodriguez — at 41 and having been, as he put it, “to hell and back” — talked himself into being “at peace” about walking away after Friday night’s game against Tampa Bay at Yankee Stadium.
But after a long and tumultuous career fueled by what even amateur psychologists could positively diagnose as a chronic inner turbulence, we suspect this was A-Rod merely acceding to the franchise’s wishes to move beyond him without stirring up memories of his contentious and litigious past.
Four home runs short of 700, 18 shy of Babe Ruth, this image- and achievement-obsessed man, once photographed kissing his reflection in the mirror, is going to retire just because Hal Steinbrenner and Brian Cashman decided it was time?
“Of course, I think I can play baseball,” Rodriguez said. “You always think you have one more hit in you. That wasn’t in the cards. That was the Yankees’ decision, and I’m at peace with it.”
All of that rang true except the last part. That is why no one should be surprised if another team reaches out in the next couple of weeks or for next season and Rodriguez’s tenure as a Yankees organizational adviser has the staying power of a Trump news cycle.
Understand that the Yankees are great at selling history but are not exactly in the business of overdoing sentimentality.
Cashman, above all, was once ready to run off Derek Jeter in the middle of a contract squabble. He was not about to yield to Rodriguez’s wishes for a steady diet of at-bats when he couldn’t produce as the designated hitter and the Yankees had finally come to grips with the recurrence of 1965.
For those not versed in pinstriped lore: with the realization that their oncepowerful roster was old, broken down and overdue for disassembly.
As A-Rod rode the bench these last few weeks — “painful and embarrassing,” he said — and Manager Joe Girardi bristled at reporters’ questions of why, anyone who knows Cashman could imagine his hardening feelings about a player the Yankees welcomed back in 2015 after a one-season suspension for being snared in the net of the Biogenesis drug scandal.
Yes, Rodriguez was necessarily contrite and no longer a provocative clubhouse presence. More important, he produced, against all odds and expectations, on the way to 33 home runs.
The image enhancement reached the point where the Yankees celebrated his 3,000th hit with a commemorative day in September, an event unimaginable when Rodriguez was suing or defaming everyone but the talk radio host Mike Francesa in a scorched-earth attempt — wisely abandoned — to avoid suspension by Major League Baseball.
But more than any singular story line, Rodriguez’s Yankees career was characterized by unpredictable twists and hair-raising turns. By his special day, wouldn’t you know that his bat had slowed and the letters-high fastball had become an unhittable blur?
His return season was nonetheless hailed as a triumphant character reconstruction. He was no longer an albatross with a capital A — until he resumed flailing away this season and the unsparing Cashman had to ask himself, besides $21 million in 2017, how much do we owe this guy?
Rodriguez had no more leverage in New York, and what was the point of making a fuss? He went along tamely with the Yankees’ wishes and provided more behavioral assurance for any team that might seriously weigh his explanation on Sunday for why he couldn’t hit a lick after returning from time on the disabled list in May.
“Mechanically, I never felt like I caught up,” he said, suggesting that it was more an issue of timing than the intervention of Father Time.
If the phone doesn’t ring — a good possibility — then Rodriguez will at least wear the redemptive aura into his playing afterlife as he contemplates a continued association with the game.
But who is naïve enough to think he won’t be burning for one last shot?
“As far as 700, or any of those type of milestones, I would have had an unbelievable, fun time going after them,” he said, perhaps a flare to anyone in need of a marketing tool while playing out a lost season?
What we can be certain of is that the timing of the departure from the Yankees’ bench — one night before Jeter and the 1996 World Series champions return to the Stadium to take another bow — was no coincidence.
So many of Rodriguez’s machinations with the Yankees were painfully contrived, especially the 10-year, $275 million deal that tethered him to the team past the point where the marriage was played out.
Remember how word happened to get out during the 2007 World Series that Rodriguez was intending to leave the Yankees as a free agent?
As a commodity, he had juice back then, the Yankees capitulated and the deal was officially announced on the very day baseball released the Mitchell report, detailing an entrenched steroid culture we would soon learn Rodriguez was part of.
For timing so transparently tacky, it was easy to say, in the flurry of headlines to follow, that A-Rod and the Yankees deserved each other. All due respect and good cheer aside, that part of the narrative will never change.