NEW YORK -- For a player who has admittedly made many mistakes over the course of a 20-year career, Alex Rodriguez has remarkably done everything right since he began his second act 18 months ago.
Last season, Rodriguez hit his way back into the hardened hearts of Yankees fans who always found him a poor second choice to the beloved Derek Jeter, and he has slowly but surely worked his way back into the good graces of Major League Baseball and commissioner Rob Manfred, the man who, as former commissioner Bud Selig’s attack dog, doggedly prosecuted him in the Biogenesis investigation.
He made a good impression on TV viewers last fall as a postseason analyst, and judging by the soft landing he and the Yankees negotiated for the end of his career in pinstripes, he has sowed a considerable amount of goodwill with managing general partner Hal Steinbrenner, who is forking over $27 million for A-Rod not to play for him between now and the end of the 2017 season.
And throughout a month of humiliation, when he was forced to ride the bench while lesser players remained in the Yankees' starting lineup, he has never been anything less than a good and loyal soldier.
Now, all the 41-year-old needs to do to cement his reputation as a changed man is to make good on his word at Sunday’s news conference.
That is, take his money and go away quietly. And, if he feels like it, show up at spring training next year, ride around in a golf cart, run a couple of drills with the kids and shoot the breeze with some of the beat guys. (But don’t, under any circumstances, become a bitter old coot a la Goose Gossage.)
Rodriguez talked about it “not being in the cards" for him to play as a regular for the Yankees anymore, but if he plays the cards he has been dealt the right way, he might even find himself at the threshold of something that has seemed beyond his reach -- a plaque in Cooperstown. Presumably, a younger, more permissive class of Hall of Fame voters is on the horizon. A-Rod could easily court their votes with the right course of action.
If not, he could find himself right back where he was in August 2013, when, on the strength of Manfred’s investigation, baseball slapped him with an unprecedented 211-game suspension: a pariah, almost universally loathed, an outsized villain on a par with Pete Rose and Barry Bonds.
Already, A-Rod is walking a fine line -- he repeatedly used the phrase “the organization’s decision" to describe the determination that Aug. 12 would be his last game in pinstripes, making it quite clear he had no intention of "retiring," but stopping short of asserting he was forced out -- and he may cross that line altogether if he decides he would like to play again.
I know that will be a tough thing for Rodriguez to resist -- in conversations with him over the past month of his exile from the starting lineup, it was evident that reaching 700 home runs and beyond is a goal he would desperately like to achieve (he currently sits at 696) -- but if he answers that siren’s call, it will send a terrible message to all of those who have been impressed by his personal transformation and moved by his emotional words at Sunday’s news conference.
It will say that a numerical goal -- already tainted by not one, but two admissions of using performance-enhancing drugs -- is more important to him than a carefully nurtured but still fragile image.
People want to believe the Alex Rodriguez they see now, the humble and self-effacing A-Rod who professes to be "at peace" with the Yankees' decision that he no longer fits into their plans, is the real one.
Spurning the chance to mentor the Yankees' young players, an assignment he has spoken of as almost a divine calling for him, in order to pursue an individual goal with, say, the Miami Marlins, would reveal all of that as a sham.
And in the minds of many, it would reinforce the negative image of Rodriguez that was built up through the first 18 years of his career: Self-centered. Narcissistic. Phony.
The Alex Rodriguez who spoke movingly of his mother and daughters, of his love for baseball and the Yankees, and who seemed to accept that his days as a big league ballplayer had come and gone is one that even the most hardened skeptics can come to accept as a changed man.
But if he reveals himself to be just another player who can’t help but overstay his welcome for the sake of reaching a goal that is meaningful only to him, all of that goodwill dissipates.
Make no mistake, what Rodriguez said in June -- “You haven’t heard the last of me" -- is no doubt true. Unlike Jeter, who walked away from the game into an inscrutable private life, Rodriguez isn’t going anywhere.
We are going to see him on television working as an analyst -- maybe even for the YES Network. (In some ways, Steinbrenner may view him the way his dad viewed Reggie Jackson, as a maddening but irreplaceable part of his team’s history.)
In the future, we might see him as an owner, or a manager, or a hitting coach, or just an ambassador for baseball, because if there is one thing not in dispute it is Rodriguez's knowledge of, and love for, the game.
And if he chooses to abide by the letter of his agreement, we will see him around Yankee Stadium quite a bit, the way Yogi Berra and Whitey Ford were in an earlier generation, and the way Jackson is now. After all, incredible as it may seem, Rodriguez has been a Yankee for 12 years now, longer than his tenures with the Seattle Mariners and the Texas Rangers put together. He and the Yankees will be intertwined for as long as both are remembered.
But how Rodriguez is remembered here is now entirely up to him.
He can accept the inevitable end of athletic glory and move gracefully into the next phase of his life.
Or he can continue to chase a dream that only he thinks is still alive, and in the process unravel all of the good he has done himself over the past year and a half.
The choice is up to him. In the second act of what has been an incredible and improbable career, he has done everything right.
It would be wise for him not to mess up the third act.
