Rodriguez has had the tough part of immortality locked down for years—if he hadn't moved, without complaint, from shortstop to third base after joining the New York Yankees in 2004, he'd be regarded as the best shortstop ever to play the game; he probably is anyway. He has won three Most Valuable Player awards, five home run titles, and has a decent chance—he'd only need to hit 23 per season over the next five years—to hit more homers than any player ever to play baseball. Per Baseball Reference's formula, Rodriguez has been worth 111.4 Wins Above Replacement over his career; Albert Pujols, his nearest active competitor, has been worth 22.9 fewer. Rodriguez is not only one of the best prospects ever, he's one of the greatest baseball players in the history of baseball players. Everyone knows this, and it still doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter because whatever the other, ineffable things we seek in our all-timers are, Rodriguez not only lacks, but exemplifies their opposite. All-timers are allowed to be virtuous ciphers whose robo-hearts pump whole milk, but A-Rod, a buff android coated in marzipan and inauthenticity, can't even clear that low bar of dull verisimilitude—it's easy to imagine RoboCop (he works in private security now), John Tesh, and Mitt Romney chuckling together on Skype about how deeply inauthentic and distant and weird A-Rod seems when he's asked to answer even basic baseball player questions.
All-timers are also, under certain circumstances and within different generations' parameters for colorful-ness, allowed to be total weeping whiskey-filled garbage bags—from Babe Ruth to Mickey Mantle, the Yankees have had a special fondness for these sloshing four-finger pours of virtuosity. But, for all his travails—which include ill-advised dabblings in performance-enhancing drugs, a frosted-tip hairdo, and actual physical sex with Madonna—A-Rod can't quite pull that off, either. In all circumstances and in every way he comes off alien and affluence-perverted and so perversely and simultaneously self-regarding and oblivious that only the word "Miami" seems capable of summing it all up. His soul is upholstered in teal leather; his whole life is an overly air-conditioned and excessively security-guarded VIP section. This, for better or worse, is the best baseball player most fans presently alive have ever had the opportunity to watch play baseball.
In some ways, this is the fault of all those old, silly baseball biases—A-Rod has been simply too good at this sport, his mastery of it too transparently and transcendently fluent, for the necessary struggle to scan. He hits home runs, and the natural response, upon watching the swing that launched the bomb, is "of course." It was once this way with all those graceful gliding plays at shortstop; it was this way as recently as his outlandishly great 2007 MVP season, during which he was 31 years old. The first sin that Alex Rodriguez committed was an original one—he was born effortless, and fans have never quite forgiven him for that. This is almost a poignant thing, until Alex Rodriguez himself comes into play.
by David Roth, Vice | Read more:
