After a dozen years of acting more like a pinhead fool than a pinstriped hero, Yankee third baseman Alex Rodriguez is finally quitting baseball.
The .200-hitting, $20 million-a-year slugger — who suffered the shame of a yearlong suspension in 2014 for performance-enhancing drugs — announced Sunday that he will play his last game for the Bronx Bombers on Friday.
It was a sudden, anticlimactic end for a major-league superstar who joined the team in 2004 with the expectation of record-setting glory but wound up flaming out with a series of underperforming seasons and the taint of steroids.
“This is a tough day. I love this game, and I love this team,” Rodriguez, 41, told reporters at Yankee Stadium, frequently choking up. “And today I’m saying goodbye to both.”
The struggling Bomber said he chose Friday as his last day because he wanted one more chance to play before a Bronx crowd.
“I think Friday was logistics,” he said. “I asked for an opportunity to play one more game in front of our fans, my mother, my daughters, the folks at the Boys & Girls Club. There will be a lot of people that are flying from all over the country to get here. Just glad it worked out.”
A-Rod’s announcement comes less than a week after Yankee first baseman Mark Teixeira said he will retire after this season — and as the team languishes in fourth place in the American League East.
It also comes as A-Rod was batting an anemic .204 and still being paid his full $21 million for this year. He will get paid that much next year as he takes up a front-office job as adviser to the Yankees’ farm teams.
“He gets everything he deserves, the contract he negotiated in full force,” general manager Brian Cashman said. “Every aspect he’s owed will be paid.”
The massive salary and extended decade-plus contract seemed like a great deal for the Yankees in 2004, when the team used its financial muscle to wrest him from the Texas Rangers, where he had won the MVP in 2003.
One of the hopes was that he would break what was then Hank Aaron’s home-run record of 755 homers in pinstripes. He now has 696, good enough for fourth all-time but a mark tarnished by performance-enhancing drugs.
He was also expected to lead the team to a new championship dynasty. And while the team did win one title in 2009, A-Rod hit only .250 in the six games of that series.
He did win MVP titles as a Yankee, in 2005 and 2007, but, like his home-run total, the award will always have an asterisk.
Rodriguez was suspended for the 2014 season after testing positive for testosterone and human growth hormones.
A-Rod also wound up becoming a scandal machine, embarrassing himself both on and off the field with a series of bizarre antics.
On May 30, 2007, the married A-Rod was spotted entering a Toronto hotel room with a stripper, prompting The Post to dub him “Stray-Rod” and leading his wife to file for divorce the next year, citing “extramarital affairs.”
A-Rod reportedly started dating Madonna before the divorce was even finalized.
The third baseman’s affairs were just the biggest in a series of reports of his bizarre arrogance and vanity — such as when he was seen sunning himself topless on a rock in Central Park on a game day, or when word leaked that he had a picture of himself as a centaur painted on his bedroom ceiling.
He even alienated the most popular Yankee player of the modern era, reportedly claiming a few years before joining the team that he deserved more money than Derek Jeter because Jeter “never had to lead.”
Even on the field, A-Rod made himself look like a buffoon, never more so than in the 2004 American League Championship Series, when he slapped the ball out of the glove of Red Sox pitcher Bronson Arroyo during an attempted tag at first base.
He was called out for interference, and an altered image of A-Rod making the slap while holding a purse became an internet meme.
He also showed bad sportsmanship at a game in 2007 in Toronto when he screamed, “Ha, I got it,” as two Blue Jays converged on a pop-up and they let it drop. Toronto manager John Gibbons called it “bush league.”
Some Yankee fans were not exactly sad to see A-Rod go.
“My only thought when I heard the news was, why wait until Friday? I say get him off the team today,” Mike Robinson, 65, of Bayside, Queens, said Sunday. “He’s been nothing but a leech on the Yankees’ finances and morale for years, and I just wish there was a way to opt out of paying him next year’s salary. It’s like someone who dies but keeps haunting you beyond the grave.”