The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
March 8, 2009
Alex Rodriguez didn’t want to surrender to a surgeon. For the glory of the pinstripes, he was ready to play with pain, an indication he was hoping that fate had a much smarter plan for the restoration of A-Rod’s image than his army of well-paid spin merchants.
Alex Rodriguez with Derek Jeter, who has brought a type of leadership to the Yankees that Rodriguez seems to lack.
But the labrum tear in his right hip will require arthroscopic surgery on Monday and a prolonged stay on the disabled list. For the Yankees, a vacation from A-Rod may be just what the proverbial doctor ordered. If only temporarily, the face of the team will again belong to Derek Jeter, not Rodriguez, whom we have come to recognize in a variety of poses as the deer caught in the limelight.
Maybe the Yankees will hold their own with improved pitching, for which there was no shortage of off-season expenditure, and the brand of baseball that won them four World Series during a five-year stretch almost a decade ago. This is not to say that A-Rod is fundamentally unsound; it’s more his all-thumbs approach to life, his exceedingly unsubtle presence as the reigning clubhouse hub.
One day, he is mobilizing his public-relations machine in response to steroid revelations. Another he is deploying his children as props in a training camp photo opportunity. Rodriguez’s chronic transparency and heavy-handedness has become a metaphor for the Yankees’ inelegance and inconsistency dating to the American League Championship Series in 2004, when they dominated the Red Sox for three games only to be ghost-busted into a state of championship-identity disrepair.
The story of the Yankees since has been 16 runs one night, one run on three hits the next. What they need now is a better appreciation of nuance and timing. They need Mark Teixeira and C. C. Sabathia to add to what Jeter has brought to the ballpark for 13 years, qualities so difficult to quantify. You just know them when you see them, or hear them, because they galvanize rather than self-glorify.
For the first glaring example of what Jeter has that Rodriguez sorely lacks, go back to spring training 2001, when A-Rod was with Texas and he made the startling claim in Esquire that Jeter — at that point considered his good friend — was a player who is “never your concern” and who “never had to lead.”
In one of life’s delicious ironies, Jeter was presented with the opportunity to demonstrate precisely why he has most often been the opposition’s concern, primarily because of his capacity to lead.
“I’ll ask him tonight,” he said when cornered by reporters. “I’ll talk to him and let you know.”
By embracing restraint, saying nothing, Jeter passed responsibility for the uproar back to Rodriguez, where it belonged. He gave Rodriguez a chance to edit himself — as A-Rod had to do again after recently implying to reporters that he’d rather have José Reyes playing for his team than Jeter — and defuse a potential public feud between two of baseball’s glamour players. It was the verbal equivalent of laying down the perfect sacrifice bunt to put the winning run in scoring position.
Alex Rodriguez during a spring training game against the Cincinnati Reds last week
Many people would argue the public genius of Jeter is really just a strict policy of avoiding incendiary issues. Some members of the news media have extrapolated on that to call him boring. But boring is in the eye or ear of the beholder. To me, Jeter is not boring. When it comes to quotations, he just isn’t obsequious, or self-destructively dense.
His aura says: if keeping the back-page headline writers on 24-hour alert is the shallow measure of one’s commercial appeal, we can elect someone else most popular in class.
If asked a thoughtful question, Jeter will invariably provide a printable answer. But that’s only part of an overall evaluation. We live in a video culture, and when you think of Jeter, provocative imagery comes to mind — the flip play to nail Jeremy Giambi in the playoffs, the headfirst leap into the stands to catch a foul fly against the Red Sox, a thousand slides into second followed by a hard clap of the hands.
What is talk if you can’t be believed? Last summer, Rodriguez charmingly entertained waves of reporters for the full 50-minute player availability session before the All-Star Game at the retiring Yankee Stadium. Just a few feet away, Jeter made his exit in half the time.
Both repeatedly extolled the Stadium as a baseball shrine — but on the night of the game, A-Rod left well before it dragged into extra innings, while Jeter ran on the field like a delirious 12-year-old when the American League finally won in the bottom of the 15th.
No one will ever accuse A-Rod of not playing hard, but he does so with a self-imposed burden that weighs on people around him. That Seattle and Texas improved immediately after he left is hardly empirical evidence. But after all that has happened since the turn of the year, something tells me the Yankees won’t crumble while A-Rod is recovering for six to nine weeks. Given a break from all things A-Rod and good pitching, they may even thrive.
E-mail: hjaraton@nytimes.com
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