"I'm telling you, he's gonna be one of the greats. I mean, look how amazing he is on the field! And he's not even 21 years old yet."
"Oh, for God's sake, Terri, will you please just shut up? I'm tired of hearing about Alex Rodriguez."
"Okay, but remember this conversation in the future when he becomes one of the biggest superstars the game has ever seen."
That was the scene in my ancestral home that Fourth of July weekend of 1996. In retrospect, maybe I was suffering from an obnoxious abundance of enthusiasm. After all, over the holiday weekend Seattle was playing the Texas Rangers – the closest major-league team to the small town in Oklahoma where I had grown up. And that meant that while visiting from Seattle, I got to watch my beloved Mariners on TV every day.
Those were heady days for Mariners fans. Ken Griffey, Jr., Randy Johnson, and yes, that young phenom Alex Rodriguez were among the players who had led the team to its first-ever division championship the previous year, in that magical, Refuse-to-Lose season of 1995. In 1996, we saw nothing but glory days stretching far into our future.
But that was before our heroes started breaking our hearts.
Beginning with Griffey in 2000, we lost three of our superstars within just a couple years, when their contracts came up for renewal. A lot of fans were bitter about Griffey leaving for Cincinnati; we could understand that he wanted to be closer to his roots, but there were suspicions about whether that was the real reason, and many fans felt betrayed. Griffey was synonymous with baseball in Seattle, and we couldn't believe he didn't feel the same way. I will shamefully admit to a reluctant sense of schadenfreude when his career began its downhill slide his first season with the Reds.
The departure of The Big Unit, Randy Johnson, was more complex and nuanced. He was having back problems, and management seemed all too ready to let him go when his contract expired. Many of us thought they were giving up on him prematurely, that he stil had some really good years left in him. But as the contract dispute wore on, his performance tanked. We all knew he was a sensitive guy whose emotions had always impacted his work, but the mutterings started -- was he doing it on purpose because he was understandably upset with management's lack of belief in him, and he wanted out?
Most Seattle fans have long since forgiven whatever level of betrayal may or may not have been present in the circumstances of Griffey's and Johnson's departures from the team. But there is a reason Alex Rodriguez is still booed every time he sets foot in Safeco Field.
Alex's betrayal was the unkindest cut of all. But what makes his story so sordid is that his decision to leave Seattle for the most lucrative deal ever signed in baseball up to that point was not just a simple sellout for money. It was one incident in a career spent chasing all the wrong mirages in all the wrong ways. Today's denouement was as inevitable as the final scene in any Greek tragedy.
It didn't have to be that way.
In yesterday's Seattle Times, baseball reporter Larry Stone captured both the promise and the fall of A-Rod (Pay-Rod, A-Fraud, A-Roid):
Of all the outcomes that seemed to be unfolding in front of the sweet, innocent teenager who arrived in Seattle in 1994, who could have foreseen disgrace and shame and ridicule?. . . .
In the original narrative, Alex Rodriguez was going to become the successor to teammate Ken Griffey Jr. as the face of the game. He was going to be the superstar we could believe in.
But, We learned long ago that A-Rod was neither as sweet, nor as innocent, as it first appeared. In fact, he wrapped himself up in so many layers of phoniness, so many facades, listened to so much bad advice and chased so many false trails he thought would lead to adulation, that somewhere along the line he lost who he really was.Now Rodriguez is just a desperate 38-year old with bad hips, an aching quad and the world closing in on him.
A-Rod had assured us, during that last year of his Seattle contract after we had already been burned by Griffey, that his decision wasn't going to be about the money. And now, looking back, maybe that was ultimately true, at least in part. To be sure, he and his agent Scott Boras made certain that the money was there -- the contract he signed with the Rangers when he left Seattle was by far the richest ever in the history of baseball -- more than a quarter of a billion dollars over 10 years.But maybe it wasn't about the money. Maybe it was all about the fame and the glory, and the money was just a means toward that end. A quarter of a billion bucks probably buys a lot of space in the history books. But if it wasn't about the money, it's hard to understand why he signed with a team like Texas as his first stop, rather than heading straight to New York.
In any case, whether it was about fame, money, becoming the ultimate babe magnet, or some other, more deeply hidden motivation, Rodriguez is a case study in ruthlessness: doing whatever it takes to get where you're trying to go. Lies, manipulation, cheating, substance abuse -- these things are what Alex Rodriguez will always be, to me and to many other baseball fans who have watched with dismay and revulsion what he has done to himself and to the game over the years.
As I said above, it didn't have to be this way. A few days ago, an interviewer asked some sports expert, "Was he really that good?" Good enough to be worth all the money, all the fame, all the hoopla? The expert's response was the same one I had silently given in my head as soon as I heard the question: "Yes, he was that good."
And he was. Watching Alex Rodriguez play baseball was a thing of grace and speed and agility and beauty that could bring tears to your eyes. If he had just concentrated on his game instead of the artificial enhancements, if he'd been honest as far back as the Seattle days about why he was making the decisions he made, if he had relied less on manipulations and more on his own astonishing talent, he could have had it all: the fame, the glory, the adulation, the money.
And he could have had something else that he hasn't had for a long time and never will: he could have had our respect.