Alex Rodriguez, the Fox pregame-show version of himself, was sitting on a black couch in a trailer outside Citi Field talking about the World Series. This is a new role for Rodriguez, an unexpected diversion in a journey of athletic greatness tainted by performance-enhancing drugs, and one he is excelling at.
So he looked happy to be talking about baseball as he peered into his interviewer’s eyes, answered some questions, avoided some others and posed a few of his own. He discussed his love of preparation, his note-taking, his working with Pete Rose (“When it comes to baseball, he has an Ivy League mind”) and his admiration of Keith Hernandez.
Rodriguez previewed what he would later say on the air about the physical strength of New York Mets starter Noah Syndergaard and the possibility that the Mets could beat the Kansas City Royals, who were up by 2-0 going into Game 3. If the New York Yankees could sweep the Royals in the Bronx earlier this season after dropping two of three, he said, the Mets could win.
This has been a rather remarkable evolution: Rodriguez, a noted baseball transgressor, working for one of baseball’s network partners, talking to a national audience in the lingua franca of baseball before and after each postseason game. He’s probably been more observational than analytic — describing, with bat in hand, how the Mets’ hitting coach, Kevin Long, has rebuilt Daniel Murphy’s power stroke (before his home run skein ended); how making contact with Matt Harvey’s fastball “feels like a bowling ball”; and how Syndergaard’s bench-pressing power has helped him add torque to his slider.
Mike Weisman, a former top baseball producer at NBC and Fox, said that Rodriguez had been very effective in the “protected” studio setting, where comments can be rehearsed and there are “all sorts of expertise around him.”
Rodriguez was suspended for the 2014 season after an investigation by Major League Baseball of the Biogenesis scandal concluded that he had used performance-enhancing drugs. He denied those accusations. He fulminated. He sued. Then he backed down, ended the spectacle and returned to the Yankees. He made a sort-of admission of his sins and played at an unexpectedly high level (33 home runs, 86 runs batted in), given his time off and his age.
And during the past two weeks, he has performed so well for Fox that it is reasonable to assume that his TV work is an exercise in image rehabilitation.
Here, then, was someone who instinctively understood how to act in a studio; how to easily engage the people he worked with; and how to analyze baseball succinctly.
“At heart,” he said, “I’m a teacher.”
But this is, after all, A-Rod, who has a way of evoking suspicion about his actions. You want him to spill the strategy behind gauging Fox’s interest in him and his assessment that if he excelled at talking knowingly about pitching and hitting, he would be able to extend the era of good feelings he generated by having a surprisingly strong season, performing unusually well and saying nothing that could provoke or upset anyone. That won back some fans and a bit of the heart of Yankee management and, perhaps, offered hope that he might be a productive hitter in the final two years of his contract.
If that was the plan — if there was any TV plan at all — he was not saying.
“I’m the wrong guy to talk about image,” he said. He willingly brought up the terrible image choice he made in 2009, when he was asked the other day by Jimmy Fallon on “The Tonight Show” what the 40-year-old A-Rod would say to his younger self.
“If you ever do a photo shoot, don’t kiss any mirrors,” he said, referring to the one he did for Details magazine that portrayed him as a narcissist.
Working for Fox was not Rodriguez’s idea. Fox approached him. It was willing to accept his past and move on — a decision like the one the network made when it hired the (still) permanently exiled, bow-tied, white-booted Pete Rose to the show.
Rose arrived during the season and has played the cranky coot to A-Rod’s smooth straight man. Fox clearly saw the benefits in hiring stars who were making news this season: Rose’s reinstatement is being considered by Commissioner Rob Manfred, and Rodriguez had a very good season.
“We certainly considered the pros and cons of what Alex has gone through, but at the end of the day it really wasn’t going to be a part of the decision to make him part of the broadcast,” said John Entz, president for production for Fox Sports. “Whatever he did and went through is in the past. We feel we’re trying to make a show that’s informational and entertaining, and we feel that we’ve done that and Alex is a huge part of it.”
Rodriguez’s conversation is filled with expressions of humility — about being hired by Fox; about his time with Rose; about the generally positive reception to his television work; about the difficulty of doing television work. Asked about his biggest challenge in working in the Los Angeles studio or on outside sets at Kauffman Stadium and Citi Field, he said, “I’m a novice, so everything is hard.”
Asked if viewers should be surprised that he is showing off the sophistication of his baseball side to an audience that might be more accustomed to bland sound bites, he said, “Yes, because I’m surprised.” After a pause, he added: “All kidding aside, I love baseball. I’ve been watching multiple games on television since I’m 7, 8 or 9. Thousands of games.”
Asked about the best advice he had received before he started his Fox work, he ticked off general praise for the Fox game announcers Joe Buck and Harold Reynolds; lauded Michael Kay of the YES Network, which televises Yankees games; and circled back to Buck, who, he said, told him to be himself, to speak to the audience as he had done to Buck over the years during private conversations over dinner.
He recalled that he was as nervous in his first day in the Fox studio as he was when, as an 18-year-old Seattle Mariner, he faced Roger Clemens. Now, he is less anxious, but he defaulted to self-deprecation when he assessed his performance.
“The luckiest thing,” he said, “is the bar is set extremely low.”
You wonder, though, if he can ever fully atone for the actions that have tainted his on-field accomplishments. Is seeing him before American League Championship Series and World Series games a constant reminder of what he has lost — or an affirmation of the baseball savvy that he is known for but that has often been obscured by the nonsense that has surrounded him? Is working with Rose as part of an exiled dynamic duo yet another symbol of his sins — or a sharp career move with an eye toward his future?
Why did he accept Fox’s offer and not slip quietly into offseason workouts?
“I don’t know,” he said. “Look, five years ago, I never would have thought of doing this. I would have been too shy and uncomfortable in front of a camera. You know I’m not the best speaker in front of the camera. It’s been a magical season for me. I’m incredibly humbled by the way I was welcomed back by the franchise and the fans, so when I was told Fox wanted to talk to me, I said, ‘Why not?’ "
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