BOSTON – He knows what’s said about him, and what’s written, and what’s believed by a sizable segment of the Yankees’ city. He realizes that every at-bat is a referendum on him, on his legacy, on his salary, on his career. Perhaps he even understands why all of this is so, even if he’s never quite said as much.
“It’s irrelevant, what people say about me,” Alex Rodriguez said last night, a little while after his three-run home run proved to be the deciding blow in a 7-5 Yankees victory over the Red Sox at Fenway Park. “I know what I can do. I’ve been doing it for a long time.”
Yankees fans are also well aware of what he can do, and that is why they’ve officially engaged in a love-hate relationship to end all love-hate relationships. In their hearts, Yankees fans know what they get to watch every day, they understand that in Rodriguez they have perhaps the most complete player of his generation, in the fat of the prime of his career.
But they know other things, too.
They know that twice against the Mets on Sunday night, Rodriguez had the chance to put the Mets away – once with the bases loaded, once with two on and one out – and he failed to deliver both times. The first was hard luck, a bullet that nearly knocked Cliff Floyd over. The second was something else altogether, a rally- and game-killing double play. Chapter one.
They know that, fairly or not, the knock on Rodriguez is that he only hits home runs when the Yankees are way behind or when they are way ahead. This is absurd, of course, but perception is a difficult thing to alter, especially when, Monday night, with the Red Sox ahead by about 30 runs, Rodriguez drilled a Keith Foulke meatball into the Monster seats. Chapter two.
Chapter three could have been last night, when Rodriguez smoked a Tim Wakefield knuckleball and hardly seemed to believe his good fortune. At first he couldn’t pick the ball up off his bat, looking skyward, as if he’d popped it up. Then he heard the crowd fall silent, and he noticed Wakefield staring off into the distance. At last he saw the baseball, just before it disappeared into a tangle of hands.
That made a 4-1 game into a 7-1 game.
And you could easily hear the chorus of scorn from here.
“Typical A-Rod . . .
Those who are inclined to rip A-Rod will ignore the small fact that without those runs, without that homer, the Yankees don’t win a ballgame they most certainly needed to win. They will dismiss what happened later as incidental. They are welcome to that opinion.
Other Yankees fans, smarter Yankees fans, will notice something else: For the first time since Opening Night, Rodriguez is swinging the bat like himself again, swinging it as he did so often during his MVP season last year. They may notice that A-Rod’s numbers are starting to fatten (.275, 11 homers, 35 RBIs) and that, no matter how irrelevant you wish to deem them, he has now hit homers in back-to-back games against the Red Sox, and three of the Yankees’ last four games against Boston.
“That was a big one for Alex,” Joe Torre said. “Especially under the circumstances, especially in this ballpark.”
Torre was referring to the fact that, as the old Fenway Park adage goes, you can never score enough runs here, and the Red Sox promptly proved it. Those were his specific circumstances. But he easily could have been referring to the other circumstances, the darker ones, the ones that not only surround Rodriguez but also clearly penetrate every now and again.
Great players don’t forget how to be great overnight, and sometimes a stretch like this really can ignite them in a different direction. The Yankees have to hope that’s what happened to A-Rod here, in what has long been less-than-friendly confines for him. It would be an added bonus if the same could happen for Randy Johnson, Rodriguez’ future neighbor in Cooperstown, when he takes the mound tonight.
Unless one righted immortal at a time is all the Yankees can ask for right now.