The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
February 8, 2009
Ray Stubblebine/Reuters
Alex Rodriguez, playing for the Rangers, hits a home run in a game against the Yankees on Aug. 6, 2003.
The essence of Alex Rodriguez is a consuming desire to achieve. He craves the best statistics, the biggest contract, the most attention. He is a friend of the career hits leader in baseball, the man who may be the richest in the world and the most enduring pop celebrity of the last two decades.
But beyond the text messages from Pete Rose, the financial advice from Warren E. Buffett and the headlines from his connection to Madonna, Rodriguez is a baseball savant. When he strips away his corporate sheen, he reveals a deep and abiding baseball intellect. Those rare moments are when a player sometimes called A-Fraud seems most genuine.
A few years ago, I casually mentioned to Rodriguez that his knowledge of the game could make him a good television analyst, if he ever wanted the job. He startled me with his response, saying bitterly that when he retires, nobody in baseball will see him again.
That may happen in a way he never intended. With the news Saturday that Rodriguez tested positive for steroids in 2003, he could end up like Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire and Rafael Palmeiro — shunned from the game and taking denials into a lonely retirement.
“His legacy, now, is gone,” one Yankees official said of Rodriguez, speaking on condition of anonymity because the organization had no public comment. “He’ll just play it out. Now he’s a worker. Do your job, collect your paycheck and when you’re finished playing, go away. That’s what it is.”
Several other front-office officials declined to comment Saturday, but the Yankees were clearly blindsided. Just like that, the questions about Joe Torre’s book do not seem so distracting anymore.
“If he did it, he’s got to flat-out admit it, like Giambi,” the Yankees official said. “Just come out and say, ‘I did it. I’m sorry. I lied.’”
Rodriguez has been hardened by the waves of criticism that have come over him steadily since December 2000, when he left Seattle for a two-fisted grab of Tom Hicks’s cash to play for the Texas Rangers. But he still reads his news clippings, internalizing slights and thickening the wall around him. It is harder than ever to tell who he really is.
He has a streak of self-pity that did not exist in Seattle, where Rodriguez made his debut at 18 and shared a spotlight with veteran stars. By the time he was 30 — in spring training of 2006 — he was all but whining about the scrutiny he lived under.
“My whole life is about getting crushed,” he said.
Until Saturday, though, Rodriguez had never been directly linked to steroid use, and that will change his carefully crafted image forever.
There had been inferences from José Canseco, but nothing like the revelations first reported on SI.com, the Web site of Sports Illustrated.
The general assumption was that Rodriguez was clean. When the Mariners scouted him before picking him first in the 1993 draft, they were struck not just by his talent, but by his diet. While teammates scarfed down pizza, Rodriguez chose chicken and vegetables.
Five years later, Rodriguez joined Canseco and Bonds as the only players to hit 40 home runs and steal 40 bases in the same season. After his 40th homer, Rodriguez found a bottle of Champagne waiting for him at his locker. It was a gift from his friend and teammate David Segui, who has since gained infamy for his steroid use.
In 2000, Segui told ESPN the Magazine his nicknames for Rodriguez: Mr. Milk and Cookies, and Mr. Clean. That article, by Dan Le Batard, was a glowing recitation of Rodriguez facts that made him seem almost saintly. Rodriguez often steers his personal story line to his work ethic, a tactic Clemens used for years.
“Michael Jordan told me the way he kept the crown was by always outworking everyone else because he knew everyone was always coming after him,” Rodriguez told Le Batard. “You can sneak up on people when you are 18, 19, 20. It’s tougher when you’re established.”
Rodriguez was well established by 2003, and when he joined the Yankees the next season, he was widely considered the best player in baseball. He has continued to pile up stats, build his fortune and advance his celebrity, but the Yankees have not won a pennant with him.
For all of his regular-season success, Rodriguez’s October failures have reinforced the sense that he lacks an intangible. Now, even the tangibles — his power to all fields, his unmatched infield arm — are in doubt.
Rodriguez has always wanted it all, and now he has another distinction.
No player will enter spring training with more hostility and negativity hovering over him. His legacy, if not his whole life, is getting crushed.
Nine More Years of a Marriage Not Made in Heaven
By HARVEY ARATON
Sports of The Times
February 8, 2009
Nine more years. Nine long, bold-headlined years. That is how much longer the Yankees are contractually obligated to put up with always-something Alex Rodriguez. With his celebrity distractions, his need to be noticed, his clubhouse-integration issues, his Derek Jeter envy and, yes, his prime-time failures.Nine years, and now, it appears, without the authentic historic payoff that Hank Steinbrenner and the Yankees were so seduced by, they couldn’t wait to sign A-Rod to a deal that would carry him well past his 40th birthday and could cost them $300 million.
Even after Rodriguez’s agent Scott Boras pulled his shameless 2007 World Series stunt — claiming his man wanted out of New York before the Red Sox could pop a Champagne cork in Denver — the Yankees were ready to retie the knot the minute A-Rod picked up the telephone to say, Just kidding. He had Hank at hello, and soon after, it was till 2018 do they part because somewhere along the way, the Yankees would dress the next great baseball moment in pinstripes, delivering a clean-as-a-whistle home run champ.
A Yankee would be the one to strike Barry Bonds from the record book, wash away the testimonies and memories of Mark McGwire and all the other sultans of steroids.
And now, in the aftermath of the A-Fraud uproar from Joe Torre’s book, on the eve of spring training, they have on their hands a report that originated Saturday morning on the Web site of Sports Illustrated linking A-Rod to a positive test for anabolic steroids in 2003, a 47-home run M.V.P. season. That was when baseball granted players immunity while it conducted survey testing with the hope that the number of cheats would be infinitesimal and that the whole sordid performance-enhancement problem would go away.
Instead, there was a list of 104 players who were sloppy enough to be caught or who didn’t care enough if they were because the union geniuses guaranteed them that the results would be confidential forever, if not destroyed. Then came José Canseco’s second book, the Balco revelations, a Congressional backlash and big-name hunting via government raids.
Based on the report, add another. Add A-Rod, who was held up as the hope and the heir 20 minutes after belief in Bonds was something that only partisans and the pathetically naïve could sustain.
A good number of baseball people, including a fair amount in the news media, apparently do not learn from experience. Whatever his personality flaws, A-Rod was different, you kept hearing, because he is possibly the most naturally gifted player ever to step onto a major league field. And his work ethic is off the charts. How many times have we heard that one? How many times did we hear it about Roger Clemens? How many times did Clemens credit his trusty winter training program for those extra miles that suddenly appeared on Andy Pettitte’s fastball?
The Yankees were the most ardent admirers of Rodriguez and are also positioned to be the biggest suckers, given the contract they gave him, along with promises of bonuses for every home-run hero he passes. They convinced themselves that A-Rod was the man for the 21st-century reclamation of baseball’s tarnished record book — except they conveniently forget he was taking major league swings as early as 1994.
As much as anyone, he is a product of a decade in which the sport took a pharmaceutical path that, for too many reputations, has become the road to ruin.
Rodriguez, according to the Sports Illustrated report, tested positive for Primobolan and testosterone while playing for the Texas Rangers, but does it really matter where it was or when, or for how long? Unless he or baseball, or both, can effectively counter another damaging blow, Rodriguez takes his place in the ever-expanding enhancement holding pen, a shadow cast across his career.
Unlike McGwire, Bonds and Clemens, he isn’t going away anytime soon. A-Rod will play on, the way Jason Giambi did after it was leaked that he had come clean about steroids to a federal grand jury, the way Pettitte did after telling a Congressional investigation that he had used human growth hormone. It will be fascinating to see what strategy A-Rod embraces: silence, denial, attack or a Pettitte-like confessional.
Of course, Yankee fans will forget, as much as they can for a player they seem to love only when he hits the ball 450 feet. The Yankees will forgive because given the terms of the marriage, what else can they do except hope that A-Rod’s skills don’t erode at the chronological rate more common for ballplayers before they began spiking their spinach.
Even if he doesn’t slow perceptibly as he advances deeper into his 30s, if he continues to hit home runs at the same pace, it will all lead to another shallow celebration if it is true that he wasn’t always clean, if he really was A-Fraud.
You have to wonder: is that why his teammates and coaches called him that? Because they always knew he was too good to be true?
E-mail: hjaraton@nytimes.com
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