LET’S MAKE A DEAL: Alex Rodriguez, it was reported last night, is talking about a deal that would be something less than the lifetime ban commissioner Bud Selig (inset) is considering. (AP, Reuters)
Most of his life, Alex Rodriguez has all but obliterated scouting reports. He made grown men do double-takes by the time he was a sophomore in high school, so taken were they by his precocious skills as a baseball player. He always graded off the charts. And he was a pretty good football player, too.
This one wasn’t quite as glowing, but it might be especially useful for A-Rod now, more than any of the five baseball tools he mastered as a teenage prodigy. This is Jean-Robert Bellande, a renowned poker player and Long Island native, talking on the NBC show “Poker After Dark” a few years ago, handicapping A-Rod who, by then, was known as a high-stakes poker player, usually playing $50-$100 no-limit games.
“I thought he played fine,” Bellande said. “I wouldn’t say he plays great, I wouldn’t say he plays awful.”
Translated, it hearkens Matt Damon’s opening line in “Rounders”: “Listen, here’s the thing. If you can’t spot the sucker in your first half-hour at the table, then you are the sucker.”
Bud Selig certainly hopes so, as this protracted stare-down with Rodriguez approaches the zero hour, the Commissioner and the one-time Best Player on the Planet engaged in an epic heads-up game of hold-em. Reports began to trickle out yesterday Selig does, indeed, plan to use a lifetime suspension as a cudgel to deal an epic blow to Rodriguez, the climactic maneuver in this Biogenesis end-game.
Other reports indicate Rodriguez’s deep team of advisers, which has steadfastly maintained he will fight — to the death (of his career) if necessary — the kind of Draconian punishment that seems sitting in the middle of the table now, will indeed ponder a deal to shorten that suspension to something that could salvage a smidgen of Rodriguez’s career — and the pile of cash still owed him.
Either way, this is the most important hand Selig ever has examined in his long stewardship. And he better be right. He better be right about the evidence his investigators have collected, both in its damning quality and its damnable quantity. He better believe if A-Rod calls his hand, the arbitrator baseball employs now renders a more satisfying verdict than the one produced by the Ryan Braun case.
He better believe he can win.
Or A-Rod, all-in, mucks his cards.
Because the ramifications if Rodriguez does decide to fight back — and if his lawyers can successfully throw enough mud on Anthony Bosch to actually win in arbitration — are so potentially ruinous to the sport it gives you the bends just thinking about it.
Look, it is pretty clear Rodriguez is at the point where he has nothing to lose. He has admitted past steroid use. At the very least, he has allowed himself to stand far closer to Bosch than he ever should have, regardless of the nature of their relationship. There is no salvaging his reputation. The Hall of Fame is a lost cause. His future in the game is murky at best.
But baseball itself? It doesn’t need a protracted war, and certainly doesn’t need the muddy battles of attrition this campaign surely will bring. It’s bad enough baseball finds itself in bed with a star witness, Bosch, whose very name makes most reasonable people want to find the nearest shower.
But Bosch under cross-examination? Baseball under cross-examination?
For a sport that relies so heavily on its place alongside apple pie, hot dogs and Chevrolet in the rarefied realm of Americana, such a public circus would be catastrophic. And baseball would be all alone, too. When Roger Clemens skated and Barry Bonds squirted free in past years, it was the feds who took the hit for those prosecutorial failures. And people never much mind treating the feds like piñatas, no matter how egregious the target.
This would be different. This is different. This is a 79-year-old commissioner and a 38-year-old shortstop-turned-third-baseman, both of their legacies lying in the middle of the table. Selig better be right here.
He better not be the sucker.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com