All along, we knew Alex Rodriguez’s legacy was bound to look, and sound, hyperbolic. In a more innocent — or naive — time, we assumed that meant that by the time he was done playing baseball, he’d have taken the career home-run record and obliterated it.
How high would he go? Eight hundred? Eight-fifty? He was the youngest man, by almost a full year, to reach 500, the youngest to get to 600. By the time he was done he’d be Secretariat, Barry Bonds would be Twice A Prince and every other slugger ever born, from Ruth to Foxx to Mays to Aaron, would be left in the mud.
So in that sense, nothing’s changed.
Rodriguez still has an unmatched capacity to be bigger, so much bigger, than anyone else … just in a different realm. In a separate category. Because let’s be honest: Is there anything left that would ever make you shake your head in wonder and muse, “A-Rod said/did what?”
There are no corridors in Cooperstown devoted to that special gift, but it does mean A-Rod has achieved a level of pop-culture ubiquity that would make seven generations of Kardashians sigh.
Think about it: This is someone who has already done time in the public docket for cavorting with strippers, for going bare-chested in Central Park, for kissing himself in a mirror, for having a PAINTING OF HIMSELF AS A CENTAUR, and this was before he set the one record for which he is likely to be officially credited forever, the longest steroid ban in the sport’s history.
Let’s back up a bit in case you missed it: The man had a painting commissioned with his head on a horse’s body.
So if you were going to wager which American athlete would have himself attached to these three words — mid-urine stream — which one would you have picked?
That, of course, is part of the confession Rodriguez gave the DEA earlier this year, according to a story in the Miami Herald. That was Anthony Bosch’s advice to A-Rod on how to beat the drug testing: Exclude the stream at the beginning and the end of each, um, testing session. And short of turning into Painfully Awkward Rob Lowe, it was as foolproof a method as anyone could’ve asked. It worked.
Of course, Rodriguez still got busted, and now it seems he paid protection money to his cousin (which doesn’t even qualify as his most useless expenditure, when you consider the cartoonish legal and PR advice he’s been paying for) and he may actually roll over on said cousin, and oh yes, by the way, he is a member in good standing in both MLB and on the Yankees’ 40-man roster.
And this is the amazing part:
This should make you feel … something, no? Shock, horror, outrage, even pity if you are a forgiving type. But do you really feel any of that? Can you? Can you even be remotely annoyed that he so boldly lied about his PED use before the DEA got him to put his hand on a Bible? I mean, outside of a few paid protesters and blind media acolytes, who believed a word of this before?
Again: CENTAUR.
No, this is what Alex Rodriguez is now, the Sultan of Caught, the Pay-Hey Kid, the man who was going to hit so many home runs they could’ve retired the record books, now sentenced to an eternity of low comedy and high infamy. At a point where you no longer wonder, “What now?” but almost gleefully ponder: “What next?”