Why I’m Rooting For A-Rod

Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez made his much-ballyhooed return to Boston over the weekend. It’s no surprise the Fenway crowd mercilessly booed his arrival.

Not here.

I admit, it’s a strange predicament to find oneself in, rooting not only for the enemy, but arguably the most universally-disdained athlete of our generation. Yet, here I am. Team A-Rod.

Rodriguez made his presence here known over the weekend, with an historic home run on Friday night, the 660th of his career, tying Willie Mays for fourth on the all-time list. It was the first pinch-hit home run of his career, and it came on a 3-0 offering from Red Sox relief pitcher Junichi Tazawa thanks to the call from catcher Sandy Leon, who admitted after the Red Sox’ 3-2 loss, “I didn’t think he was going to swing.”

Rodriguez went 3-for-10 over the course of the Yankees’ three-game sweep of the Red Sox. He’s only batting .241 with an .881 OPS this season, not exactly the numbers the Yankees would have hoped paying him a cool $22 million, but he is fifth in the American League with his six home runs, fairly impressive on its own after sitting out all of 2014 with a year-long suspension for the use of performance-enhancing drugs.

Despite the disastrous weekend, Red Sox fans should find great joy in all this.

Rodriguez is due a $6 million marketing bonus for hitting home run No. 660 on Friday night, a check that Yankees general manager Brian Cashman said the team will not be writing due to the fact that the hated A-Rod simply isn’t marketable thanks to his sordid past. The bonuses were negotiated as part of the 10-year, $275 million deal Rodriguez signed with the Yankees back in 2007, a possible $30 million that the team seems intent on never giving to their third baseman.

I suppose we’re supposed to think the Yankees are choosing to do this on some sort of moral ground?

If A-Rod isn’t marketable, then maybe that 2009 World Series title he helped them win shouldn’t be marketable, either. Let’s put an asterisk on that as well. Oh, the Yankees are retiring former pitcher Andy Pettitte’s number this summer you say? I wonder how they’ll end up marketing that day, particularly since Pettitte has his own past issues with PEDs. I mean, the Yankees pitching staff isn’t exactly “marketable” either, but they don’t seem to have a problem pushing that disaster.

No, the Yankees don’t want to pay A-Rod simply because it makes them complicit in the asinine decision to hand out such bonuses in the first place. What the Yankees envisioned was a great home run chase with A-Rod assaulting the record books, where Hank Aaron once held the top spot with 755, only topped by Barry Bonds in 2007 with a number that nobody cares to remember. Yet a few, short months after Bonds hit his final career home run, a pursuit so bereft of joy, the Yankees decided it a good call to figure they could market Rodriguez’s chase in a Yankees uniform. How, exactly?

Bonds had already made the number meaningless like Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa had done in their own assault on Roger Maris’ 61 home run mark. Seven-fifty-five and 61 were numbers ingrained into the memories of every young baseball fan at one point. Now, the digits that replaced them, 762 and 73, respectively, both by Bonds, are ingrained for a steroid era that Major League Baseball was too slow to address. Now it pays the price by having its hallowed records remain a farce for generations to come.

Bud Selig and friends saw the ratings. They saw the gate receipts. They saw how popular baseball became in the years following the debilitating strike, and they chose to ignore the fact that Greg Vaughn looked like he’d been sculpted by the gods. It’s the game’s fault just as much as it was the players.

The Yankees, just like everybody else, kept their heads in the sand and instead enjoyed winning five World Series over the past two decades. They didn’t seem to have a marketing problem when Roger Clemens won 83 games for them over six seasons, likely believing his ageless performance was thanks to the miracle vitamin B-12.

Which is all why their treatment of A-Rod seems hollow, especially since they are the ones who helped dig this hole to begin with.

Now they want to play high and mighty. Stop it.

“We have the right, but not the obligation, to do something — and that’s it,” Cashman told reporters Saturday when addressing the Yankees’ stance on the matter. “It’s not ‘you do this and you get that.’ It’s completely different. If we choose to pursue something, we’ll choose to pursue it. If we choose not to, it’s our right not to. And that means in both cases we’re honoring the contract.”

Huh?

The Players Association told Newsday that it is prepared to intervene on Rodriguez’s behalf, which means the whole issue is likely headed to an arbiter. Oh, what fun.

Yes, the whole thing feels dirty, but it’s not like I’m alone. Aaron himself said earlier this year that he’s rooting for Rodriguez, and Grantland’s Michael Baumann makes the case why you should be too.

“It’s difficult to imagine a scenario in which Alex Rodriguez is in the absolute moral right, but the Yankees have found it,” Baumann writes. “When you strip away all the PR, this is a story about a company refusing to pay an employee for work he performed, so if you’re going to be outraged and hold forth on morals and the bedrock of an American institution, remember that men can do worse things than cheat at baseball.”

Babe Ruth’s 714 home runs is the next mark for Rodriguez to try and squeeze another $6 million out of his fraudulent employers. He’s got another two years and $42 million in order to give it a go, and the awkwardness with which Rodriguez chases after history says as much about the Yankees and Major League Baseball as it does about him, a guy everybody wished had just gone away, back for more, not relenting to any public perception.

Go, A-Rod.