TAMPA — Embrace it.
Shed your shame. Abandon the moral high ground. Toss out your inner snob.
Alex Rodriguez will play in a televised Major League Baseball game Wednesday at Steinbrenner Field, albeit a mere exhibition, and this is a wonderful thing. Great for baseball, great for the human race. So join the party for as long as it lasts.
“I think people are curious how he’s going to do,” Joe Girardi said Tuesday morning of his returning slugger. “There’s probably a lot of people who are pulling for him to do well.”
Sure seems that way. As the Yankees kicked off their Grapefruit League schedule by playing the Phillies in Clearwater, A-Rod stayed back with most of his fellow veterans, took batting practice and fielded some grounders at third base. Then he signed dozens of autographs for the diehards on site. In the workouts leading up to this point, Rodriguez received by far the most cheers of any active Yankees player.
“It’s certainly felt good,” A-Rod said Tuesday of his reception. “It was surprising a little bit, for sure. I didn’t know what to expect.”
“Everyone’s going to look at it differently,” Girardi said. “Some people are going to look at: ‘He was caught, he paid his time and now he’s back, and he’s a Yankee, and we’re going to cheer for him.’ Some people say, ‘You know what? I might have a hard time cheering for him.’ And some people are just fans and they fall in love with the player and no matter what they do, it doesn’t matter.
“I’m not really surprised [by the cheers], necessarily. He’s one of the guys that has been here a long time. He was part of our championship in 2009. And I think people still understand that.”
Think it’s a coincidence A-Rod’s Grapefruit League return comes on a home game? It’s a sound business decision for the Yankees, who surely will sell more tickets and draw more eyeballs to YES than if they fielded a lineup without their most interesting player. Or if this didn’t mark his first game back after missing all of last season due to a suspension for illegal performance-enhancing drug usage and obstruction.
“I’ll be a little nervous, for sure,” A-Rod said. “I haven’t been in front of our fans for a long time. I’m excited about that. I have some challenges ahead.”
The Yankees’ biggest challenges will come further down the road in this camp. They’ll find out whether Michael Pineda, CC Sabathia and Masahiro Tanaka can make it intact to Opening Day. They’ll get a better feel for the likelihood of Carlos Beltran and Mark Teixeira enjoying rebound campaigns. By design, A-Rod does not rank among the club’s top on-the-field issues.
Yet virtually everyone in the organization holds a stake in A-Rod’s comeback. From the bean counters who wonder whether they’ll owe him all $61 million (plus the disputed home-run milestone bonuses) or whether his surgically repaired hips will land him on the disabled list with insurance picking up much of the tab, to Girardi as he brainstorms lineups, to the players preparing for media storms, back to the bean counters tallying what sort of impact a healthy and productive A-Rod could have on the bottom line, the 39-year-old occupies a special place in so many people’s thought processes.
For whatever it’s worth, he appears to be in superior condition to when he came back in July 2013, with a hip surgery in his recent past and the suspension in his near future, and wound up as the most productive Yankees third baseman of the season (.244/.348/.423 in 181 plate appearances).
“That was a crazy time. To be honest with you, I don’t even know how I did what I did,” Rodriguez said. “It was a blur. I remember that I hit a grand slam against San Francisco [on Sept. 20]. I was like, ‘Wow, that’s pretty cool.’ I couldn’t believe that. I think I’m in a much better place today. I’m in better shape. And hopefully the results will be a little better.”
After so much time away, “At-bats are key for me,” he said, and he surely will spend some time in minor league games if he can stay on the field.
It’s going to be awesome, no matter the outcome. If you get caught up in emotion-fueled notions such as condemning A-Rod for “cheating the game,” or for his legacy being “tainted,” that’s your loss, not his. This should be viewed as a story not of redemption but rather of attempting to silence critics in the best possible manner. Through output.
“Ready to go,” Rodriguez said, smiling. “Not sure how ready, but I’ll give it a shot.”
What more, what else, would you want?