On Sunday, Alex Rodriguez will likely step to a podium in the bowels of Yankee Stadium and tell the world he is leaving the great game of baseball.
The impending retirement has not been confirmed by anything but common sense. We do know Rodriguez and the New York Yankees do have a presser scheduled, with the reason not officially given, according to ESPN.
Rodriguez, 41, has been nothing more than a fan for much of this season despite being healthy. To this point, he has played in only 62 games, hitting .204 with nine home runs and 29 RBI. It has been a brutal season for both the Yankees and Rodriguez, who now sees the twilight of what once was a brilliant career.
Sadly, Rodriguez will leave behind a legacy of cheating an deceit. He lied for years about taking steroids, only to later admit – on two separate occasions – that he duped his fans and himself.
It will be on his baseball tombstone that the brilliant wunderkind who came up to the Seattle Mariners in 1994 was a fraud in an era of frauds.
Should this be the end of the road for Rodriguez, he leaves the game having been suspended as many times as he won the World Series – once. He walks away with a career bating average of .295 and a .380 on-base percentage to go with 329 stolen bases and 2,084 RBI. Rodriguez also hit 696 home runs, only eclipsed by Barry Bonds, Hank Aaron and Babe Ruth.
The New York native is a 14-time All-Star, a three-time AL Most Valuable Player, a five-time home run champion, a two-time Gold Glove winner and a 1996 batting champion. Few players have a career half as impressive as Rodriguez’s, including most of the folks who reside in Cooperstown.
And yet, when Rodriguez goes up for election at the Baseball Hall of Fame, he is going to have a brutal time earning enshrinement. While Rafael Palmeiro, Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire, Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds all have numbers that make them first-ballot Hall of Famers, none have even sniffed the mandatory 75 percent of the vote. Some of them, such Bonds and Clemens, were never suspended for steroid use and have outright denied the claims. It hasn’t mattered.
With Rodriguez being popped for them so publicly, after lying about them for years, it will be fascinating to see if he can break through. This writer would guess no.
In the final analysis, Rodriguez will always be thought of as unsatisfying. He played for three different teams and never had a defining moment on the field. Away from the field, he had far too many.
Rodriguez had all the natural talent money could never buy. It was talent he bought that was the problem.
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