A-Rod is retiring as a Yankee. His final game will be as a Yankee, his World Series ring was won as a Yankee, the majority of the drama in his long career was as a Yankee, he’s spending the next year-plus in the employ of the Yankees, and that’s almost exclusively how he’ll be defined for eternity … as a Yankee.
Too bad. Alex Rodriguez the Mariner was a lot more fun, and a lot easier to like. As he walks away from his complicated major-league career, that A-Rod shouldn’t be forgotten.
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And yeah, the fun A-Rod, the likable A-Rod is a big deal — because being liked goes to the core of who he was and who he wanted to be, and why he did the things he did, for better or worse. In that light, no one should apologize for admitting they liked that A-Rod, the one at the beginning, more than the one at the end.
It’s kind of an innocence thing, but that’s a word that shouldn’t get thrown around so casually — not with A-Rod, and not with baseball or professional sports in general. Face it, the year he made his Mariners debut, 1994, was when the strike canceled the World Series. How’s that for foreshadowing?
But when his life was all glorious present and shining future, it sure felt innocent.
Baseball is into myth-making, and manufacturing the illusion of innocence is a big part of that. How A-Rod is remembered is going to come down to how you and I decide who’s right and wrong, and those are both hazy concepts, too. He was wrong a lot, but of course, baseball is constantly, persistently, stubbornly wrong on lots of things.
Yet, it’s pretty hard to find anything wrong with the Seattle portion of Alex Rodriguez’s career.
At the beginning, he was a promising prodigy, the No. 1 prospect and No. 1 pick in baseball, who turned boundless potential into breathtaking stardom.
When you list the teenage icons who actually fulfilled the wild expectations for them, A-Rod is on that list, and he’s really high on it. LeBron is up there, and Lew Alcindor, and Serena and Venus Williams and a small group of others.
Ken Griffey Jr. is on it. They played together in Seattle. That’s insane.
Those two, and Randy Johnson and Edgar Martinez … and it didn’t matter what time zone you were in, you wanted to see those Mariners play. A-Rod was 20 in 1996, in his first full big-league season, he was playing shortstop, and he was second in the AL MVP voting. Junior, at 26, was fourth.
Yes, they all ended up leaving, one after the other three years in a rows, making those Mariners the face of the endless big-market vs. small-market fight (which, realistically, was Yankees-Red Sox vs. Everybody Else.
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A-Rod was the last to go, and the way the world saw him changed the moment he cashed in with the Rangers. It really shouldn’t have, but you can’t tell fans that, or the so-called guardians of the game who keep telling us that money is evil and that guys like Rodriguez should stay in places like Seattle out of sentiment and loyalty. (Good things those days are over, right, Kevin Durant?)
But A-Rod’s identity became his contract; “252 Million” became his uniform number. Everybody knows how the story went from there, Texas to almost-Boston to the Bronx, from short to third, and the sordid rest … although it’ll take a while to sort out exactly what it means.
It seemed simpler in the Mariners days, when A-Rod really was just a ballplayer. Not the one who won any of his three MVPs, or who got a ring, or who got the monster payday. Just the best young ballplayer many had ever seen, and the best they thought they’d see for a long, long time.
Before, as he said Sunday afternoon as he announced his approaching departure two decades after the Seattle heyday, he became “someone who tripped and fell a lot, but kept getting back up.”