Whichever way it was supposed to end, it was not supposed to end like this.
Alex Rodriguez announced at a joint press conference with the New York Yankees on Sunday that he would play his final game on Friday at Yankee Stadium, against the Tampa Bay Rays, and that after the game he would be given his unconditional release from the club – at which point he would sign a contract with the Yankees to return to the team as a special adviser and instructor through the 2017 season.
“We all want to keep playing forever,” said a tearful Rodriguez on Sunday. “But it doesn’t work that way. This is a tough day. I love this game and I love this team. And today I’m saying goodbye.”
The immediate ramification of this – the end of Rodriguez’s career as a baseball player – is not entirely unexpected. The writing has been on the wall for months now: after a miraculous 2015 season when the then-39 year old played in 151 games, hit 33 home runs and was pretty much the only reason to tune in to Yankees baseball in what was otherwise a lost season in the Bronx, Rodriguez has spent 2016 playing a young man’s game like he’s 40 years old. Already restricted to being a designated hitter, A-Rod’s ineffectiveness at the plate has seen him only start three games since July 21, and with New York having fully dispensed with the fiction of competing this year, there’s not going to be any last September hurrah for which his veteran presence might have been an asset.
Still, generally speaking players of Rodriguez’s caliber – guys who have been in the league for a couple decades, who draw massive fan interest (if not always support) and who have become essentially synonymous with their franchise – don’t retire in the middle of the year. They have their retirement tours and victory laps, they see all their old rivals’ stadiums one more time, then they have a nice event during the last homestand of the season. That’s nothing new to the Yankees; it feels like they’ve been conducting one retirement tour or another for some Bronx legend every year this decade. Announcing a press conference on a Saturday night in early August for the next morning, and then announcing in that press conference that the team’s most iconic remaining player will be retiring after the game on Friday is not how those scripts generally go.
In fact, that’s the sort of thing a team does when they’re trying to force a player out with a minimal loss of face for everyone involved – there is, after all, the important distinction that Rodriguez is going to be released before he retires, meaning he will collect the $21m he is due from the Yankees next year. New York has resigned itself to paying him that money, at this point; they tried to get out from under Rodriguez’s contract during the Biogenesis scandal and only managed to shave a year off of it. A-Rod’s quotes from the press conference – that he’d “have had an unbelievable, fun time” chasing milestones such as his 700th career home run, but that “those are not the cards I was dealt” – certainly suggest that this abrupt mid-August “retirement” was not wholly his idea.
And that too wouldn’t be a surprise, if not for the rider on the tail end of Rodriguez’s release: becoming an adviser for the same organization that tried, publicly and passionately, to get him banned from baseball for life. If you went back to 2013 and told anyone covering Biogenesis that A-Rod would end up as a roving adviser and instructor in the Yankees system by 2017, we’d have laughed in your face. The idea of the Yankees willingly putting Rodriguez around their prospects would’ve seemed farcical. Yet here we are.
What 2013’s baseball reporters would have missed in the intervening three years, of course, was the emergence of Rodriguez as one of the best clubhouse presences for young guys in the league. Part of this was image rehab for A-Rod, for both his and the Yankees’ sake, but it merely highlighted something that he was already doing anyway. Anyone who’s watched him in spring training or during his minor league rehab stints knows how well Rodriguez gets along with the kids in the Yankees system, and the interest he has in mentoring them and helping them succeed. Whether he’ll be able to translate that enthusiasm into actual results has yet to be seen – Rodriguez is a generational talent, a wunderkind of hitting, and there are major components to that kind of greatness that just can’t be taught. But there’s no doubt that the temperament is there.
There will be time to relitigate A-Rod’s past – oh, will there be time to relitigate A-Rod’s past, especially as 2021 approaches – but as the book closes on his career, it closes amicably, and with an affirmation that Alex Rodriguez is, was, and will always be a New York Yankee. And that’s the biggest surprise of them all.
