NEW YORK — Look: If you dare defend Alex Rodriguez in any fashion, you bother people. I get that, but I don’t fully get why, as it seems extremely obvious to me, as an adult, that ballplayers are human beings and human beings make mistakes constantly, and that none of us can accurately guess exactly which mistakes we’d make ourselves in the same situations. I know full well that this post will inspire some total randos from the internet to dig up my email address and write nasty things about my credentials, or tweet at me unironic comparisons of A-Rod and Hitler. For real, that happens.
And it messes with you. You get to thinking that you need to dig in behind your defense, and that every single thing you write about A-Rod needs to include caveats and qualifiers of his PED use and subsequent lies.
But ultimately, I don’t care. I don’t watch ballplayers for moral guidance. I watch ballplayers to see them hit home runs, and A-Rod did that 696 times before his final game Friday. And I strongly suspect, based on the incredible reception Rodriguez received from the Yankee Stadium crowd — from the thunderous applause and actual thunder that accompanied his pre-game presentation to the standing ovations that came with all his at-bats to the ongoing chants of “We want A-Rod” to the way the ballpark exploded when he took the field to play third base to start the ninth and again when he left the diamond for good one out later — that I’m just not alone here.
That’s all a long way of saying that if you can’t appreciate the things Alex Rodriguez did on baseball fields for the last 22 seasons, what follows here is not for you. Click away, and don’t engage me. Shut up, shut up, shut up. I won’t listen. This post is not for the haters or the judgers or those who yell, “nay,” and it’s not for the cynics on the internet or around me in the press box.
This post instead means to celebrate without further qualification one of the greatest ballplayers I have seen in lifetime, the best player of a generation and one of the most fascinating American athletes of the last several decades.
That is to say: Thank you, Alex Rodriguez.
Thank you, first and foremost, for all those triumphant home runs. Maybe it’s a function of my age that I never appreciated small ball the way it seemed so many in past generations did. I’m here for big ball, son. And A-Rod, for most of his career, manned a position traditionally reserved for scrappy slap-hitters and made it one for strapping sluggers. In his heyday, he played great defense and ran the bases well, and he hit like none at his position — and few at any position — ever did before. Divorced from all the off-field nonsense we came to associate with the man, it was a spectacular thing to behold.
Thank you, also, for making good on the promise. Everyone loves a Cinderella story, but baseball’s so darn difficult to predict that it seems rarer for a guy anointed the next big thing to actually become that. Ken Griffey Jr. and Chipper Jones were incredible players in their own rights, and deserving first-ballot Hall of Famers both. But no first overall draft pick before or since A-Rod proved quite as dominant in all phases of the game. True, transcendent lasting greatness like his is, obviously, not a common phenomenon.
And hey, thanks for being kinda goofy throughout it all. While some of A-Rod’s antics — from trying to slap balls out of defenders’ hands or yelling to distract them on pop ups to publicly courting Madonna — might have made him a villain to some fans, they always seemed funny more than anything else to me. Baseball is for entertainment, and A-Rod never once failed to provide that. We do this for fun, and A-Rod, in the grand scheme of things, made for some very good fun. He was fun to root for and fun to root against in a sport where too many players seem dedicated to being as boring as is humanly possible.
Thanks, too, for being human. I know I said I’d spare the PED vitriol and defense, but Rodriguez’s mistakes and fall from grace and fallout with his own team seemed so vast and comprehensive that there’s something extraordinarily redeeming about the warm treatment he got in his last game. Even in a sports landscape dominated by black-and-white hot takes and rapid reactions and uninformed oversimplification, A-Rod brought out the good and the forgiving in Yankees fans Friday. It’s heartening to see there’s a way to find favor after fouling it up so badly, and reassuring to know it somehow doesn’t have to take more than the even .200 batting average or .598 OPS he posted in 2016. People — some people, at least — can always empathize, or at least let it go.
(Photo by Drew Hallowell/Getty Images)
And finally, I guess, thanks for appearing to love baseball as much as I do. Even A-Rod’s most egregious real or purported sins against the sport can easily be attribute to his obvious, desperate desire to be the best at it, and few in the game can match his enthusiasm for its players and its particulars. Guy killed it as a postseason analyst for FOX last year. Friday, when someone asked him about the dirt he collected off the Yankee Stadium infield after the final out, he reached into the pocket of his uber-dapper tailored suit and produced a Ziploc bag of infield dirt. It hardly seemed like any sort of scripted thing, so even the cynical among us must allow that it reflects an actual passion and appreciation for the sport he’s now (probably) leaving forever.
I don’t really know where to go from here except to reiterate how excellent it has been to watch A-Rod play baseball for the last 22 years, and to turn it over to someone who knows the man a whole lot better than you and I do:
“I’m going to miss him,” Yankees manager Joe Girardi said near the end of a tearful postgame press conference. “I’m going to miss this guy. This guy did a lot of great things. I got to see a lot of neat things, and he helped us win a lot of games. People that I really appreciate in life are the people that really have a passion for what they do. And he’s got that. So, yeah, I know that sometimes I backed him, and maybe people thought, ‘What are you doing?’ But I know how much he loves this game. And I feel for him…. I’m going to miss him.
“We all make mistakes. All good people make bad decisions; that’s the bottom line. None of us is immune to bad decisions…. This is a guy that, I tell my son, ‘Watch him hit, watch him swing, watch what he does — his mechanics are really, really good. Watch how he was a complete player.’ He was a complete player for a long, long time. He was a great defender, he was a great baserunner, he knew how to play the game, he knew how to make adjustments, he knew how to hit for average, power, everything. He knew how to play the game.”
