On A-Rod, Asterisks and Milestones
By Mike Cardillo
Baseball, the New York Yankees, Alex Rodriguez and everyone involved with the great 660th home run milestone debate caught a break. A-Rod ripped a pinch-hit liner over the Green Monster last Friday night that ended up winning the game for the Yankees, so if nothing else the home run actually mattered inside the confines of a nine-inning game. It also took place on a) a Friday night and b) before the busiest sports day of the year, in terms of stuff happening.
A-Rod’s homer didn’t dominate the news cycle. The hot takes were mostly mild or muted. The milestone or “milestone” — the Yankees are trying to fight the language in his contract that awards him a $6 million bonus for the home run which tied him with Willie Mays for fourth all-time — was greeted with shrugs, which is probably how baseball wants it since former commissioner Bud Selig went so out of his way to punish Rodriguez for his role in the Biogenesis mess back in the summer of 2013.
By now, mostly everyone except for rabid anti-A-Rod columnists, the Yankees front office and contrarians are fatigued by anything and everything A-Rod. There’s not a lot more new ground to cover. Rodriguez admitted his PED use and served his time, albeit without a failed drug test. He’s not the first nor will he be the last athlete in any sport to ingest a substance to help his body perform at a higher level.
Baseball can try to ignore A-Rod — or pretend an entire era of baseball never happened — but short of pulling a move out of the NCAA playbook and vacating wins (or in this case home runs), what is going to happen? Some players from the 1990s and 2000s won’t be enshrined in Cooperstown. That’s about it.
Let’s remember A-Rod’s been in the majors since he was 18 years old back in 1994 with the Mariners. Fantasy leagues were won and lost because of his amazing early-career stats at shortstop. Home runs were hit. Contracts were signed. Again, we can bury our heads in the sand and act like none of this stuff ever happened or that Barry Bonds didn’t hit all those homers, yet the fact remains baseball dragged its feet on PED testing. MLB leaders also couldn’t contain their excitement about the McGwire-Sosa home run chase post-1994 strike.
The about face by MLB is hypocritical, punitive and most discouragingly, very selective.
All of this makes it easy to single out A-Rod, who often feels like a man without a country. Neither the Mariners, Rangers, nor Yankees (even with the 2009 World Series heroics) really want to celebrate that one of the all-time greatest players in the sport’s history played for them.
PEDs are a divider in sports. Some fans can’t look past them, others shrug them off. The fact the public will never know with 100 percent certainty who is or isn’t clean clouds the already murky waters, leaving it altogether subjective.
Even with his admissions of PED use, it’s hard to paint Rodriguez into a convenient good vs. evil morality play mostly because A-Rod doesn’t outwardly seem like that “bad” of a person. When you think of A-Rod away from the field, your mind tends to drift toward the infamous kissing himself in the mirror picture or getting fed popcorn by Cameron Diaz at the Super Bowl. (Yes, there were rumors he was cheating on his wife with a stripper, too, although most professional sports martial indiscretions aren’t made into front and back page news.) Mostly A-Rod’s transgressions, if you want to term them that way, are being dumb, not necessarily evil by definition.
To me at least, A-Rod has made people laugh much more than he’s made people — Selig, Hal Steinbrenner and Red Sox fans notwithstanding — angry. He probably profiles more as a “dumb jock” compared to some nefarious role model for children. I’d wager a lot of this is because baseball is all he knows from his days as a youth prodigy in Miami to debuting in the big leagues as a teen.
If there’s a “crime” A-Rod ever committed, it’s getting a lot of money to play baseball. A-Rod’s career earnings will top $378 million. Some get mad about this, as if given the same circumstances and natural talents of Rodriguez they wouldn’t do the same exact thing. Until the Yankees began to turn him into George Costanza at Play Now Sports, Rodriguez wasn’t exactly sympathetic, but that’s what happens when a team valued at $2.5 billion starts quibbling over $6 million.
Of all the dumb things said or written about Rodriguez in the last couple years, it’s hard to top someone taking time to buy a newspaper ad asking for an asterisk next to his name in the record books. Lest we forget, the genesis of the whole “asterisk” nonsense rises from former commissioner Ford Frick wanting to denote the difference between most home runs hit during the 154-game or 162-game season circa Roger Maris in 1961 compared to Babe Ruth. (There might never have even been an asterisk, in fact.) At least there was some baseline logic in that.
The Yankees are on the verge of retiring countless numbers — Andy Pettitte, for example, who is an admitted user of HgH, will not receive A-Rod treatment for sullying any milestones. Via their in-house YES Network propaganda, the team will celebrate any moment — great or small — to further the pinstripe brand, but calling his 660th homer a milestone and paying A-Rod $6 million is a bridge too far.
Logic, as applied otherwise to Rodriguez, is a rare commodity, far rarer than Yankee milestones.