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A-Rod

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One of the greatest players in baseball history and the greatest player to play for the Yankees since Mantle has announced his retirement.

I’ve already written a lengthy piece about such nonsense as “A-Rod’s records accomplishments don’t really count because STEROIDS” and “he can’t be in the Hall of Fame because he was a CHEATER,” but such arguments remain really dumb. Cheating and the use of performance-enhancing drugs have been endemic throughout baseball history, encompassing many Hall of Famers. And assumptions that the PED use by sainted boomer icons is somehow different in kind is without any rational basis. Mickey Mantle, who ruined his knees as a young man and was…not a fanatic about conditioning, hit 303/423/591 in a pitcher’s park in a league dominated by pitching at age 32. It strikes me as enormously unlikely that he could have done this without amphetamines, and it’s entirely possible that the liberal distribution of greenies played a role comparable to the role PEDs played in the 90s. And certainly, the idea that baseball as pure and authentic until 1995 and then everything went to hell is just empty-headed nostalgia, nothing more.

Another alleged negative about Rodriguez that has come to define him is the idea that he’s been egregiously overpaid. This is also mostly wrong. His first free agent contract was excellent value for the Rangers (and then the Yankees), and the fact that they were unable to build around him is neither here nor there. The extension he signed was less wise, but I still think the idea that it’s the worst contract ever is silly. The very worst contracts are never going to be “a resource-rich organization overpaying for elite performance.” “Overpaying” Rodriguez won the Yankees a World Series, and it didn’t stop them from doing anything that they otherwise wanted to do.

There is, I suppose, something a little churlish about the way the Yankees let his career just peter out, and Socca makes the obvious comparison:

And yet…it doesn’t bother me. There are multiple reasons why a washed-up Jeter got a somewhat tacky season-long Grand Farewell Tour, and it’s not just about anti-PED hysteria — he was a lifelong Yankee and the lynchpin of the Torre dynasty teams. And in addition, there’s always been an element of protesting-too-much about the New York media’s excessive fawning over Jeter, a tacit acknowledgement that for all his rings on the best-shortstop-of-his-generation question Jeter couldn’t carry A-Rod’s jock. Keeping Rodriguez out the Hall of Fame for a decade or two will be an asinine act of moralizing, but it also doesn’t change Rodriguez’s accomplishments. If a bunch of hacks think he’s less worthy of Cooperstown than Jim Rice or Jack Morris, it says a lot more about the hacks than it does about Rodriguez.

A-Rod was never beloved but he was one of the very greatest, and that’s enough. As with Ted Williams, his greatness will only become more evident over time while the feuds sportwriters had with him will seem increasingly trivial.

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