Read the New York Times recent piece on Alex Rodriguez's struggles with the New York Yankees. A-Rod was a big league ballplayer for nearly ten years, 1994- 2003, when he moved his baseball skills to the town that never sleeps. Rodriguez was signed away from the Seattle Mariners. Texas Rangers owner Tom Hicks signed A-Rod to an enormous $252 million dollar contract to play, a deal that as "big as Texas" and maybe the beginning of the end for the one of the greatest athletes to cross the the chalk white lines. I saw A-Rod play a few times in Arlington in the 2001-2003 seasons. Tom Hicks would position himself just a row or two back from the batting circle but the scrutiny did not effect Rodriguez in a negative way. A-Rod averaged 52 home runs per season and played an extremely graceful shortstop for a guy standing 6 ft. 3 in.. Rodriguez later admitted to taking steroids during the Rangers years but the enormous skills cannot be denied. What has happened in the years since has the feel of a Greek tragedy.
Rodriguez hungered for baseball immortality and legends are built in places like Yankee Stadium. The Yankees always hunger for the best that money can buy and they took the pricey contract off Tom Hicks's hands and brought the superstar to New York. Derek Jeter, a Yankee legend not to be displaced, played shortstop and so A-Rod became the starting third basemen in what should/could have been a great run of Yankee championships. Instead, the Yankees won a single championship in the near decade Rodriguez has been with the club. So what went wrong?
Alex Rodriguez does not flourish under post-season playoffs pressure. The allows two options: 1) play for a second tier team that rarely gets into the playoffs, 2) play for a dominant team like the Yankees and please fans and writers during the regular season but draw their ire during the post-season. The psychological explanation for why a player performs at unbelievable high levels during the regular season but folds into a mockery of his usual capable self is very complicated. Everybody has their level of optimum performance and many people hit a wall of fear, and possibly a collapse, a Peter-principle level of failure. The Peter-principle, though, is based on the notion that we get promoted to our level of incompetence and stay there. A-Rod's talents seems to belie any possible level of incompetence; the guy has skills unmatched by his peers. The problem, though entirely in his head, is very real.
I remember attending a Cooperstown traveling show, a little mini-version of the Cooperstown Hall of Fame museum being exhibited at the Museum of Natural History in New York City. The most interesting baseball object was the thick spiral notebook compiled by baseball uber-agent Scott Boras on behalf of Alex Rodriguez, the notebook that may have closed the deal on the $252 million dollar contract. Boras compiled three entire sections of the notebook to a comparison of Alex Rodriguez's statistics to the other American League shortstops-- 1) Alex Rodriguez vs. Nomar Garciaparra, 2) Alex Rodriguez vs. Derek Jeter and 3) Alex Rodriguez vs. all other Shortstops. A-Rod, no doubt, dwarfed all the others in terms of numbers, but numbers do not tell the whole story.
Hopefully there is a happy conclusion to the enigma that is A-Rod. He may have arrived on the American baseball scene at the worst possible time-- a perfect storm of obscene money, horrible drugs and a society too focused on results. The golden years of modern Yankees history- the Fifties and Sixties with Mantle, Maris, Berra, Whitey Ford, culminating in 1961, occurred at the birth of television way before the ESPN era of sports fetishism. A-Rod maybe would have struggled with success in 1961. The Yankees had Tony Kubek at shortsop, surely no A-Rod, but he got the job done. Maybe A-Rod would have been better with an Ernie Banks career, a fantastic personal record played on the fringes of the spotlight. He could still be respected and admired, even if under-represented in World Series history. Under the present circumstances he has a Sisyphus-like struggle trying to roll a massive baseball uphill against the squawking of social media, lame-stream media and whatever psychological pressures are self-implosed. Maybe he will find a way back to a smaller pond and play another five years of a game he likely once enjoyed.
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