Houston Astros: Alex Rodriguez’s advice from his own bitter experience

Houston Astros: Alex Rodriguez’s advice from his own bitter experience

The Lonely Yankee

Hark back to 2014, which opened with Rodriguez staring baseball down while suing both its government and the MLBPA. It later closed with A-Rod having missed the season, after his original 214-game suspension was pared back to 162, essentially allowing each side to crow that the other guy blinked.

Then you hark forward from there, to 2016. And, to the day the news broke that Prince Fielder‘s career was about to end because it became, literally, a pain in the neck for him to swing the bat. On the same day, Rodriguez—who’d made a remarkable enough comeback in 2015, on the field and as a man while he was at it—let it be known graciously that he’d give in to the Yankees’ essentially firing him as a player while making him an advisor and field instructor.

Sometimes a little public humiliation can make a multi-millionaire suddenly seem lovable. In A-Rod’s case, it finished reminding him that he was only human, after all, and he’d spent his final year and a half as an active player letting himself be human among his teammates and in the public eye. The Lonely Yankee, as a 2006 Sports Illustrated cover story once called him, gave himself a little extra time to live the old cliche about learning how to say hello when it was time to say goodbye.

He had a solid 2015 season when all was said and done, playing baseball as good as you could expect from a very aging, often-enough-injured veteran with a few more blasts to spare. But then came 2016 and 65 games worth of a forty-year-old who’d been through too much and put himself through too much of it unnecessarily. Agreeing to the Yankees’ retirement request didn’t exactly make him lovable again.