Alex Rodriguez didn’t want to celebrate prematurely, he knows better, but he couldn’t help himself, couldn’t keep his arms from flying in the air and his mouth from opening wide, couldn’t keep the roar from spilling out of his heart and through his tongue and into the frosty New York night. Not now. He watched the baseball bound along on the ground toward second base, saw Robinson Cano scoop it up, flip it to first baseman Mark Teixeira, and now it was OK to act however he pleased. He’d seen this final act on television many times before, but it always had been someone else’s party, someone else’s celebration.
And now it was his. Now it was theirs. Now it was time for the New York Yankees to gather at the pitcher’s mound and jump for joy and join their fans in an explosion of noise and happiness that would spill out of Yankee Stadium and fill five boroughs and beyond. The scoreboard was frozen forever — Yankees 7, Phillies 3 — and so were the results of this 105th World Series: Yankees 4, Phillies 2. For the twenty-seventh time, the Yankees would finish a baseball season on top of the sport and on top of the world.
And for the first time in his career, Alex Rodriguez would be a part of it.
“I can’t tell you how much this means, to be a part of a team comprised of so many great players and so many good people,” Rodriguez would exclaim soon enough, outside the Yankees clubhouse, his hair a sticky mess of champagne and beer, his uniform a sweaty mess, his face a picture of relief and triumph.
“I’ve never been around a better group of guys, ever. We’ve had such a long journey and we’ve stuck together since Day One.”
And he meant that literally, too.
*
THE first time they’d all gathered in public, there was no champagne, and there were no hugs, and there were very few smiles. This was the morning of February 17, and every member of the Yankees had filed into a tent behind the right-field line at Steinbrenner Field in Tampa. They weren’t there to hear a preseason pep talk from their manager, or to receive fire-and-brimstone marching orders from their owners. No, they were there as spectators to a spectacle, silent observers to the ordeal of their highest-profile teammate.
Quietly they stood off to the side as Alex Rodriguez took his place at a dais-like table, in front of a microphone, and confirmed the worst-kept secret in the city and the sport: He had taken performance-enhancing drugs. The story had broken a few days before. Now he was here for a public confession.
“We knew we weren’t taking Tic-Tacs,” Rodriguez famously said.
“I’m here to take my medicine. After today I hope to focus on baseball. We have a very special team here.”
Soon enough, he would discover just how special. But first, there would be another difficult bit of news, there would be discomfort in his hip once he reported to the Dominican Republic’s training camp for the World Baseball Classic, and there would be a flight to Colorado and the diagnosis of an injury that at first looked to sideline him for much of the season. One more time, Rodriguez was shrouded in turmoil and his teammates were left to answer for it.
“We will miss him, because how do you not miss a great player like that?” catcher Jorge Posada said on the day Rodriguez had what was termed a “successful” procedure by renowned surgeon Dr. Marc J. Philippon. “Injuries happen in this game. It’s on everybody else to pick up the slack.”
And that was more likely for the Yankees than it might have been for others, because there’d been such an influx of talent to a clubhouse that already boasted Posada, Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera and Andy Pettitte, the four surviving members of the Dynasty Boys who’d won four titles in the five years from 1996-2000. In the offseason the Yankees had spent $450 million to sign CC Sabathia as the ace of their staff, A.J. Burnett as the No. 2 and Mark Teixeira as the starting first baseman. An offseason trade had brought Nick Swisher in from the south side of Chicago.
“I think we’re a team with balance, and balance is what gets you through the rough spots,” said Yankees manager Joe Girardi, whose maiden campaign had yielded the first playoff-free season since 1993 and who entered 2009 with as much to prove as anyone. “And any team, no matter how talented, will have rough spots, and will struggle.”
Struggle they did. But on the evening of Friday, May 8, with the team in Baltimore and sitting at 13-15, languishing in third place, something interesting happened: Rodriguez returned, far sooner than anyone could have hoped when he’d left. He spoke of focusing exclusively on baseball.
“I’m done letting other things distract me,” he said.
And in his first swing of the season, Rodriguez crushed a home run off Orioles starter Jeremy Guthrie. And it was as if a switch had been flicked on the season. Sabathia threw a shutout that night. Almost immediately, Teixeira went from an automatic out to where, by August, he would be discussed as a legitimate MVP candidate. The Yankees developed a lineup that would terrorize even the offense-heavy American League, and they would build an almost scary late-game toughness.
The Twins visited The Bronx a few weeks later and in three straight games the Yankees won in walk-off fashion. That became as much a trademark of this team as anything, and soon each walk-off would be punctuated by a whipped cream pie being smushed into the face of the hero du jour by Burnett. They also would pass around a faux championship belt after big wins, an increasing sign that not only did these players play well together, they liked playing well together.
Still, as well as the Yankees were playing, as clear as it seemed they were jelling, there was one looming problem: For the longest time in 2009, they had no idea how to beat their biggest rivals. The first eight times they played the Red Sox, they went 0-8, losing in excruciating fashion a couple of times, in blowouts a couple of times and all manner in between.
They fell as far as five games behind the Sox in late June, but took advantage of a post-All-Star-Break Sox slump (that coincided with their own streak of eight straight and 10 out of 11) to creep 21⁄2 games ahead of the Sox when Boston visited Yankee Stadium for games starting August 6.
A convincing 13-6 blowout (that also marked John Smoltz’s final start for Boston) finally got the Yankees off the schneid. And the next night, at the climax of a tense, taut pitcher’s duel that was still scoreless in the fifteenth inning, Alex Rodriguez clubbed a long home run off Boston’s Junichi Tazawa, giving the Yankees a 2-0 victory.
And that, in essence, won the American League East for the Yankees. They swept the four-game series. After starting out 0-8 against the Sox they would win nine of the final ten meetings.
“In retrospect,” Girardi would say in late September, “that might have been the biggest hit we had this year, and the biggest victory. After that, I think we realized just how good we could be.”
*
BY THEN, the Yankees were the clear-cut favorites to win a championship, and they played like it. Against Minnesota in the AL Division Series, there was but one scare, a two-run deficit in the ninth inning of Game Two at Yankee Stadium, a deficit erased with one swing of Rodriguez’s bat. It was the first harbinger of what would be a watershed postseason for Rodriguez, a player who’d been bottled up so many times in so many previous postseasons. But Rodriguez would be unleashed in this one.
Two days later, in Game Three, he hit another homer to turn a 1-0 Twins lead into a tie game. A week later, Game Two of the AL Championship Series against the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, he would do it again, clubbing a Brian Fuentes fastball over the wall to tie another game the Yankees would eventually win. And his remarkable season of redemption would be capped in the World Series, when his two-run homer helped turn Game Three around against the Phillies, and his ninth-inning double would break a Game Four tie and put the Yankees on the doorstep.
Through it all, he learned to enjoy baseball again, singing a familiar mantra game after game, week after week.
“All I want to do is play,” he said. “I enjoy this team, I trust my teammates. In the past I’ve taken too much on myself and I think I’ve been a lesser player for it. I just try to keep it simple. I swing at strikes, if I have to pass the baton I pass the baton. And it’s worked for me.”
In many ways, shockingly, Rodriguez almost became overlooked as the Yankees season grew more successful. Sabathia won the MVP of the ALCS, even though Rodriguez had posted staggering numbers in just about every game. And Hideki Matsui would win the MVP in the World Series after exploding for six RBIs in the Game Six clincher, hitting .615 overall in what may well turn out to be his last hurrah as a Yankee.
“How great is that?” Rodriguez said, genuinely happy for his teammate, and for his team. And, oh, yes: happy for himself, a member of that team.
Just one of twenty-five.
One of twenty-five champions.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com