A-Rod HRs help, hurt Yankees

For Alex Rodriguez, there are just moneyball milestones ahead now. Home runs larded with achievement — but also uncomfortable bonus checks and even more uncomfortable questions.

Rodriguez hit homer No. 630 yesterday as part of the Yankees’ thorough 5-0 home-opening defeat of the Angels. That tied him with Ken Griffey Jr. for fifth on the all-time list. Those in front of him now need nothing more than first names: Willie, Babe, Hank and Barry.

Yet here is the strange dichotomy facing A-Rod and the Yankees: It would be best for both team and player if Rodriguez gets in the left lane and passes every one of those historic figures while it also looms as a dreadful proposition for all involved. It sums up the back-and-forth, good/bad emotions of Rodriguez’s Yankees tenure in many ways.

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The diverse emotions for the Yankees are tied to Rodriguez’s record contract. He began this season with six years at $143 million left on his 10-year, $275 million monstrosity. It is so much for so long that the Yankees cannot simply have Rodriguez’s power vanish. They need the homers to keep coming and coming and not stop before the end of the 2017 season and his 42nd birthday (audible gulp).

However, the Yankees saw this contract as much for YES as for the team. They envisioned Rodriguez chasing the legendary figures and providing extra programming and mega-ratings for the organization-owned channel. So the Yankees also gave Rodriguez the chance for $6 million bonuses for reaching Willie Mays’ 660 homers, Babe Ruth’s 714, Hank Aaron’s 755, Barry Bonds’ 762 and also the 763rd that would make him the all-time champ.

That $30 million seduction looked bad then — to blend immortality with a payday — and worse now for two reasons: 1) The Yankees are trying to get under the $189 million luxury-tax threshold beginning in 2014 to gain the financial benefits that are part of the new collective bargaining agreement. Those $6 million bonuses, if triggered, would count toward the payroll in the season they are earned. 2) The 2009 revelation that Rodriguez used steroids at least during his Ranger years devalued A-Rod, the TV Show, for the Yankees/YES while assuring Rodriguez that the accomplishment is as regretted as celebrated.

You got a preview of, at the least, how little joy and fanfare there will be should Rodriguez keep climbing on the homer list by the minimalist reaction yesterday. It was not long ago that becoming the fifth-leading homer hitter ever would have unleashed a standing ovation, wall-to-wall coverage and the further elevating of a reputation. Instead, when A-Rod took Ervin Santana deep to open the third inning, there was, well, not much.

The home crowd mainly was just pleased Joe Girardi’s strategy, to flip-flop Rodriguez to third and Robinson Cano to cleanup for the foreseeable future, had an instant payoff in stirring the slumping Rodriguez. There was no confetti. No sustained applause. No waiting call of congratulations from Griffey.

When Rodriguez hit his first homer, June 13, 1995, he was teammates with Griffey in Seattle. He called Griffey “special to me” as “a teammate, brother and mentor all in one,” though people involved with the Mariners at the time said the relationship was more distant than that. Rodriguez was 19 when he hit that first homer, batted ninth and took Kansas City’s Tom Gordon deep.

Rodriguez is 36 now and Gordon’s son, Dee, is the Dodger shortstop. Griffey was on the DL when A-Rod went deep for the first time. But he was still just 25 and already had 179 homers. There was general consensus that he was the one who was going to track down Mays and Ruth and Aaron. But Griffey, who is viewed as pristine when it comes to illegal performance enhancers, broke down.

Bonds inflated his body and his homer total. And Rodriguez now has made up that 179-homer disadvantage completely. Now he has a 205-homer edge on Albert Pujols, who is more than four years younger, but is struggling at the beginning of his own 10-year contract with the Angels.

It will be interesting to see if both, one or neither reaches 700 and beyond. Rodriguez said, “it is all about health and feeling good” when asked about continuing up the list.

So the Yankees need that good health, need a guy they are paying so much to keep clearing fences. But even with that success there would be bad with the good. For team. For player. Such is life with the Yankees’ version of Alex Rodriguez.