Three months ago, one week before the baseball trade deadline, I wrote a column called The Ballad of A-Rod where I laid out why people were stupid to think A-Rod wouldn’t help their team. I still believe this, though I have softened on the idea that it’s stupid not to want him on your team. After six months of watching Jose Reyes and David Wright perform on the left side of the Mets’ infield, there’s no way I would want to insert an overpaid diva into either of their positions either. Besides, in baseball there’s always something to be said for a guy who came up through your farm system.
The Yankees lost sight of this around 2001. I don’t know what happened. After 2001, the Yankees turned in a direction that saw them need to make a huge free-agent signing each off-season. This strategy, in the last few years, has been enough to artificially inflate their record in the regular season, but hasn’t netted them that 27th World Championship quite yet. What it has netted them is a bunch of untradable, albatross contracts (much like another, less-successful New York franchise) and has depleted their farm system. Since 2001, the Yankee farm system has really only netted them Melky Cabrera and Robinson Cano. Everyone else has been imported.
And, the man who has become the figurehead for this overspending is Alex Rodriguez. A highly touted trade at the time, A-Rod has come to New York and done just about everything right except 2 things. First, not being Derek Jeter and second, not being able to produce in October. This has led the fans to declare him a waste of money and long for the days of Alfonso Soriano who, if they remember correctly, couldn’t get out of town fast enough when the original trade was on the table. (Funny story, my friend Mike and I were talking about this and he mentioned that Yankee fan revisionist history would be in full force when talking about the Soriano for A-Rod deal in 2003. He guaranteed the same fans who were ready to kill Sori for his .227, 9K performance in the 2003 World Series loss to the Marlins would rush to say how they never wanted A-Rod and wished they’d kept Soriano. Within days of the World Series loss, this started happening). And now, the same thing has happened to A-Rod. After a .071 ALDS performance, the Yankees are adamant that they are not looking for a trade. Brian Cashman has come right out and said “I expect A-Rod to be a Yankee next year.” For those not paying attention, that’s GM-ese for “make me an offer, I’m not trading him for 40 cents on the dollar.” When I wrote the original column mentioned above, I had the Houston Astros as the number one destination for A-Rod in 2007.
Things have changed.
In the original column, I had the Cubs at number two. I chose the Astros as first because they have become perennial contenders, need a shortstop, had trade-bait the Yankees would want (Roy Oswalt, Aubrey Huff, Brad Lidge, etc), have freed up money with Jeff Bagwell’s contract off the books, desperately need a power bat in the lineup, and Minute Maid Park is a bambox for right handed hitters. The Cubs, on the other hand, have a culture of losing, wouldn’t likely be willing to trade off their ace (Zambrano) for a bat in a losing cause, and would have to sell A-Rod a bill of goods that they’re going to “build the franchise around him.”
Today, the Cubs officially introduced Lou Piniella as their manager from 2007 – 2009. Lou was Alex’s manager in Seattle, before the days of 252, and has already made it clear he wants the Cubs’ management to aggressively pursue a deal to bring Alex Rodriguez to Chicago. Lou’s hiring alone pushes the Cubs to number one on my list of destinations and pushes every other location down as distant seconds. A-Rod will play for the Cubs next year for five reasons.
1) We know A-Rod has a fragile ego. At this point, accepting a trade almost anywhere will be admitting he was an abject failure in New York. By accepting a trade to a team Lou Piniella is managing, he can likely sleep at night thinking he left on his own terms. He didn’t leave New York because they wanted him gone, he left New York because he wanted to be re-teamed with his former manager who he, by all accounts, has a father/son relationship with.
2) The Yankees need to get rid of him and will likely accept any moderate trade from the Cubs because it’s the only place, at this point, A-Rod won’t veto immediately. The Yankees will probably be able to get Aramis Ramirez to fill in at third and Mark Prior who, at the very least, can join Carl Pavano in Florida and learn how to duck major league starts. Ramirez, Pavano, and prospects”¦ two of those three will get this deal done.
3) The Roy Oswalt deal is off the table. The Astros signed him to a huge deal and A-Rod hurt his stock enough in the offseason that the Yankees won’t get an ace for him. A 2-or-3 starter or an injury prone ace is the best they can hope for.
4) They want him out of the American League entirely. The Angels already own them, they don’t need to give them another karma chip. There’s no possible way they trade him within the AL East which eliminates Boston.
5) The Cubs are one of the 10 major league teams that can eat $66 million (What the Yankees owe on the 252) without blinking.
The best way to close this post is by re-iterating what I said originally.
The fallout from all of this is that the Yankee fanbase will have run a guy out of town who, if he stays healthy, has a pretty good shot at reaching 755 (or wherever Bonds stops next season), an almost guaranteed member 3,000 club, an outside shot at being the third guy ever in the 4,000 club, a fairly solid chance at driving in 1,001 (as of Sunday 7/26) more RBI and being first on the All-Time RBI list, and very possibly, the best player we’ll ever see in this generation.
And why? Because of this misguided notion that he isn’t a “clutch” hitter, even though he led the league last year (Yes, even ahead of David Ortiz) with 20 game winning RBI, he has a league-leading 14 thus far this year season? Because of some comments he made about Derek Jeter 6 years ago after signing a 10-year deal with another franchise and assuming he’d never be playing on the same team as him (He called Derek Jeter over-rated. Newsflash: most people who aren’t fans of the Empire agree with that assertion)? Because the Yankee fan, in their infinite wisdom, thinks Jeter really IS a better shortstop than A-Rod, simply because Derek was fortunate enough to be on one of the best-assembled teams in baseball history in the late 90s? Because he was supposed to turn down a quarter-billion dollars because, obviously, everyone would have turned it down with an “I can’t possibly accept this money. It’s just too much”?
At the end, the real reason is because A-Rod simply gets no support from the city of New York and no support from his teammates. When Jason Giambi was struggling last year with all of the steroids falling out of his system, Derek Jeter rushed to his defense. This year, Alex is struggling with no one telling the fans in Yankee Stadium to back off. Now, A-Rod is likely going to play out the rest of his career, and win his rings, elsewhere. When he breaks records, it will be in a different hat, and Yankees’ fans will have the gall to say it’s not that big a deal, even though in the 3 years he’d played for them, one of them was an MVP season. This year, anything short of a World Series victory will mean A-Rod leaves the team in the offseason; hopefully to a group of fans will appreciate the fact they are very likely watching history every time he’s up to bat. Yankee fans, on the other hand, who have become so spoiled since 1996 that they can’t deal with the idea of a lean year, will be able to watch some inferior third baseman and smugly declare “That A-Rod was good, but not good enough for us” as they watch the team of senior citizens they’ve assembled in the last few years continue to break down. Meanwhile, in about 2020, A-Rod goes into the Hall of Fame with a little C on his hat instead of an NY.
But hey… I’m sure he’ll be right along-side Miguel Cairo or Nick Green, right?
