Houston Astros: Alex Rodriguez’s advice from his own bitter experience
After learning the hard way about changing the narrative when caught doing wrong, Rodriguez says the Houston Astros haven’t learned yet.
Among all the players and former players having their Astrogate say, it’s tough to determine whether Alex Rodriguez was one of the less likely. He may be one of the more jarring, considering how simple it is to see his weigh-in as CBS Sports‘ Mike Axisa does, writing, “He is perhaps the most infamous cheater in baseball history, so this is a case of the pot calling the kettle black.”
Rodriguez probably knew it going in when he decided to let the Houston Astros have it on Tuesday afternoon, while working aboard ESPN’s broadcast of an exhibition game between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. But he probably also knew that sometimes the pot’s learned the hard way and has something profound enough to say about it:
More from Call to the Pen
- Philadelphia Phillies, ready for a stretch run, bomb St. Louis Cardinals
- Philadelphia Phillies: The 4 players on the franchise’s Mount Rushmore
- Boston Red Sox fans should be upset over Mookie Betts’ comment
- Analyzing the Boston Red Sox trade for Dave Henderson and Spike Owen
- 2023 MLB postseason likely to have a strange look without Yankees, Red Sox, Cardinals
You cheat, you win a championship, there is no suspension, and then there’s no remorse. The last one is probably the worst one. People want to see remorse, they want a real authentic apology, and they have not seen that thus far. From a guy who has made as many mistakes as anybody on the biggest stage—I served the longest suspension in major league baseball history, it cost me well over $35 million, and you know what? I deserved that. I came back. I owned it after acting like a buffoon for a long time. I had my apologies, and then I went dark. And I wanted my next move to be contrite, but I also wanted to try to go out and play good baseball, and change my narrative. And the way you change your narrative is, you have to be accountable. You’ve earned all this negative talk. You’ve earned whatever comes your way, including whether it’s hit by a pitch or negative press, you have divorced yourself from having the ability to protect yourself . . . I felt the hatred from the people and I earned it.
Even Axisa knows A-Rod didn’t just shoot from the lip, however unprompted was his commentary. “Once he returned from his suspension, he did own it, he did apologize, and he did try to change the narrative,” Axisa writes. “Many fans didn’t forgive Rodriguez and never will, but he made an effort to be contrite. The Astros have been anything but. They’ve been combative if anything.”
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.
light. More. The Houston Astros will be must-watch television in 2020
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.
Houston Astros: Alex Rodriguez’s advice from his own bitter experience
How A-Rod Turned it all Around
Once upon a time, Alex Rodriguez was a young man of supernatural baseball talent and equally supernatural insecurities. When he approached his first free agency, he itched to play for the New York Mets for whom he’d grown up rooting for. That prospect was killed in its crib when his then-agent Scott Boras handed the Mets a laundry list of perks over which the highest-maintenance diva would have quaked.
More from Houston Astros
- Julio Rodriguez doing it all for Mariners, including playing peacemaker against Astros
- MLB Trade Deadline: AL West roundup with Rangers, Angels, Astros wishlist, A’s and Mariners for sale
- Grading Dana Brown and the Houston Astros front office at the season’s midway point
- Houston Astros: Houston, we have a Martin Maldonado problem
- Stock Up, Stock Down: Red Sox, Cardinals, Blue Jays and Astros
Rodriguez was all but about to sign with the Mets for a decade and not even close to the dollars he finally did get from the Texas Rangers. No one knew for certain whether Boras drew up the list based on A-Rod’s wishes or did it entirely on his own. But it provoked then-Mets general manager Steve Phillips to misspeak just enough when he said the Mets weren’t about to have a “24 man plus one” roster.
Phillips walked the comment back too late and, as he admitted in due course, the label stuck to the player. Then it was the Rangers bidding purely against themselves for A-Rod. Causing one and all to wonder just where a team whose the direst need was overhauling its pitching staff got the idea that they could solve the riddle of a team 5.52 ERA, and a team 5.21 FIP rate, by spending the near-equivalent of a solid pitching staff on . . . one shortstop.
Even if that shortstop was a Hall of Famer in the making until he ran into, you know, the other stuff. A bundle of insecurities who questioned privately whether he was really worth the money he’d just been handed, and whose quiet desperation to prove he was led him by his own eventual if testy admission to the netherworld of actual or alleged performance-enhancing substances.
Rodriguez has learned a lot the hard way during his public life. Including how to own up and admit he’d screwed up. It’s to wonder what he thinks when he allows himself about Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Alex Wood‘s recent declaration that he’d rather pitch to “a steroid guy” than an Astro Intelligence Agency-like stolen sign hitter.
light. More. Houston Astros: The decline of Justin Verlander to begin
Even the guy using actual or alleged performance-enhancing substances still has to hit what’s coming and, unless he, too, is given pilfered intelligence in advance of the pitch, he’s still exercising his mind in the box and having to guess what’s coming up to the plate.
Alex Rodriguez knows what he cost himself, in baseball acknowledgment and in the public perception, and he’s painfully aware that he alone was the reason he learned the hard way. He also knows that no amount of candor and self-awareness will open the doors to the Hall of Fame for him despite the credentials that would make him a shoo-in otherwise.
Next. Garrett Whitley shows dangers of foul balls. dark
The Astros are learning the hard way what Astrogate’s costing them. We’re not wrong to wonder when they’ll reach the point A-Rod reached well before he commented Tuesday. The point at which they realize only they can change the narrative, and that the change begins with un-defensive, un-combative acknowledgment of and remorse for screwing up.