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

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.

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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.

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.

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.