A year ago, Alex Rodriguez showed up here unannounced to even the New York Yankees, his first news conference an impromptu event on the sidewalk outside their minor league complex and his first steps back into baseball from a yearlong drug suspension awkward and uncertain.
So when he sat at a table recently and addressed the news media after being showered with adoration by fans at his first workout at Steinbrenner Field, it was hard not to notice the difference — especially for him.
“It’s certainly liberating coming into this season not carrying all this luggage with me all offseason,” Rodriguez said. “I’m at ease. I’m in a good place.”
Gone are the questions about whether Yankees management, with whom he had bitterly feuded, wanted him around. Or whether, after a year’s absence, he could still earn a place on the roster, let alone be the lineup’s anchor. Or whether he might be vilified even by Yankee fans. (Everyone else’s fans were pretty much a given.) The uncertainty has been replaced with something approaching acceptance.
A revived bat and a remorseful veneer allowed Rodriguez to experience what he called “in many ways a Cinderella season.”
As the Yankees approach this season, they may need another fairy-tale one from Rodriguez, who belted 33 home runs — his most since 2008 — and strayed from controversy, while drawing in his teammates with his knowledge of the game and his self-deprecating humor.
Although he is 40, Rodriguez, who has two years and $42 million remaining on his contract, is the Yankees’ lone fearsome right-handed bat, one that is important enough that the Yankees will not ask Rodriguez — long ago a Gold Glove shortstop and third baseman — to play in the field for fear of injury. The two gloves in his locker are only for ornamentation.
“It’s best that we don’t put him out there,” manager Joe Girardi said. “Physically, just to keep him healthy, it’s better to leave him at DH.”
Girardi jokingly said he did not know why Rodriguez picked up a glove and took it out toward second base after he was finished taking his cuts in batting practice. “I’m not sure it was his, though,” Girardi said.
Girardi, of course, was not the only one who noticed. Cameras and reporters tracked Rodriguez’s first day on the field — he stretched in the dugout, sat and waited for his group to hit, hugged the shortstop prospect Jorge Mateo and bunted the first two pitches before driving many of the ensuing ones deep around the field.
After each round, he was met with cheers and encouragement.
When Rodriguez was finished doing his runs from home to first, he walked beyond the first-base dugout to sign autographs as a couple hundred fans raced over in the hope of getting one. If similar exercises were hesitant a year ago, he was loose and engaged, offering a toddler a high-five when his mother said his name was Alex.
There was little attention paid to anyone else.
“I was kind of giggling today,” Girardi said. “He was standing at second base, and there were like 12 people taking pictures of him with his glove. Alex has always been a guy that’s been worthy of attention, and I don’t think it’s ever going to change.”
Not this season, anyway. With 687 home runs, Rodriguez is within reach of Babe Ruth’s 713, as well as 700. And the Yankees have planned May 14 as Alex Rodriguez Bat Day, an event that he said was unimaginable last year when he tussled with the Yankees over the first in a series of $6 million marketing bonuses tied to his milestone home runs.
When it came to expectations for him this season, Rodriguez gave a wide berth to the subject, saying he has never projected numbers. His goal is simply to help the Yankees win. But he also knows to do that he will have to perform better than he did in August and September, when his decline mirrored that of the Yankees, who watched the Toronto Blue Jays charge past them for the division title. Rodriguez batted .191 from Aug. 1 until the end of the season.
“I kind of went back and studied the season a little bit,” Rodriguez said. “I ran out of gas in August. My energy kind of picked up again in September; I just stunk. I’ll pace myself a little more.”
Rodriguez will also have the opportunity to burnish his role as a sage elder. He provided a comforting voice for shortstop Didi Gregorius when he struggled in Derek Jeter’s shadow early in the season before blossoming late and received rave reviews as a television analyst during the playoffs.
Changes have taken Rodriguez far in the last year. So far that the man who was not long ago the scourge of baseball was prodded about the prospect of one day leading a team.
“I’ll be managing probably my girls’ team, or volunteering at the Boys and Girls Club,” Rodriguez said. “But I won’t be managing. You can quote me on that one.”
About the Author
