Sometimes the best deals …
. . . are the ones you don’t make.
All right, so that’s a textbook case of a baseball cliche, right there with “We gotta play it one game at a time,” and anything else Crash Davis tried to impart on Nuke LaLoosh in “Bull Durham.”
Still, it stands as the consensus conclusion among Red Sox fans when considering how close the club came to acquiring Alex Rodriguez from the Texas after the 2003 season. The deal would have sent Manny Ramirez and a promising Single A lefthander named Jon Lester to the Rangers, while the Sox also would have sent incumbent shortstop Nomar Garciaparra to the White Sox for outfielder Magglio Ordonez.
The deal collapsed because the players’ union wouldn’t permit the salary restructuring the Sox wanted in A-Rod’s deal (it wouldn’t be the last time Gene Orza whiffed on A-Rod’s behalf). You know how it played out from there:
Incumbent Yankees third baseman Aaron Boone blew out his knee playing hoops. The Yankees swooped in, convinced A-Rod to move to third to accommodate his best old ex-friend Derek, and sat back with that familiar feeling of smug satisfaction, having pulled one over on the Red Sox yet again.
At least until . . . well, until A-Rod was exposed as a throat-clutching, narcissistic master of self-inflicted melodrama. To put it nicely.
Anyway — yes, we are getting to the point here — we bring this up right now not only because the Yankees are in town tonight, with someone named Cody “Sub-Replacement Level” Ransom at third base in place of the ailing A-Rod, but because our old friend Gordon Edes played the “What might have been” game today over at Yahoo! Sports, writing whimsically about what might have been had the A-Rod-to-the-Sox deal actually happened in the winter of 2003.
Cleverly, he took an approach slightly different from the one you or I might envision. He writes it as if it would have worked out for the Sox. Alex Rodriguez, beloved teammate and Red Sox savior? We all know ol’ Gordo is a remarkably talented writer, but who knew he had such an imaginative eye for fiction:
There was never any question that A-Rod would fit in with the Red Sox. Not after the first day of spring training, when [Kevin] Millar, wearing A-Rod’s uniform jersey and with a sock stuffed in his protective cup, pantomimed A-Rod’s home run swing, then stuck a cream pie in his face. “You’re with the idiots now,” Millar said.
The tension of Garciaparra brooding at his locker over his contract, or the uncertainty of whether Manny would feel like playing on a given day, was gone. A-Rod basked in the attention, but surrounded by outsized personalities like [David] Ortiz and [Johnny] Damon, Pedro Martinez and [Curt] Schilling, there was plenty to go around. Ortiz was like a big brother, Millar the constant needler. And when A-Rod approached Schilling about working together on the charity dear to the pitcher’s heart, Schill was won over.
Yeah, either that, or it would have been the biggest collision of swollen egos since A-Rod and his reflection first spied themselves in the mirror.
Actually, I have to admit, in that excerpt, Edes does lay out a perfectly reasonable plan for how it could have worked for A-Rod here. The “Idiots” would have been good for him, joyously puncturing his pretensions and pumping him up at the same time. But I’m sorry . . . knowing what we know about A-Rod, I just can’t suspend my disbelief quite enough to believe he would have fit in, even under those ideal circumstances.
In the end, I figure had the Sox acquired A-Rod that fateful winter, the magical 2004 season would have played out this way: A-Rod spurs the Yankees out of a midseason slumber by rumbling with a glove-wielding Jorge Posada at home plate during a mid-July slugfest, a game New York goes on to win in its last at-bat. Naturally, the rivals meet again in the ALCS, and after A-Rod leads a Sox charge to a 3-0 series advantage, his bat falls silent, the never-say-die Yankees rally, and A-Rod helps seal the Sox’ miserable fate by illegally slapping the ball out of Jon Lieber’s glove in Game 6 of the ALCS.
The Yanks win in seven. The ghosts mock us again. The misery lives on.
Yeah, the fiction is fun to ponder. A-Rod in Boston. Imagine that.
But you know what? I think I’m going to stick with the reality here. When Alex Rodriguez is concerned, the truth is not only stranger than fiction, but to a Red Sox fan, it’s also so much sweeter.
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