DIRECT HIT! Alex Rodriguez is hit by a Ryan Dempster pitch during the second inning of the Yankees’ 9-6 victory over the Red Sox last night at Fenway Park. A-Rod got his revenge in the sixth when he got to celebrate a solo shot off Dempster. (
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BOSTON — Now, about that theory Alex Rodriguez was going to divide and destroy the Yankees’ clubhouse because of his extracurricular battles?
Hey, these Yankees are desperate enough to rally around just about anyone.
And so it was last night that A-Rod delivered first the lightning and then the thunder to arguably his team’s biggest win of the season, 9-6 over the Red Sox at Fenway Park.
A known target because he’s appealing his 211-game suspension for illegal performance-enhancing drugs — a reality that has upset many players from the Red Sox and other teams — A-Rod got hit by a Ryan Dempster fastball in the second inning, the fourth straight inside pitch in the at-bat. That episode got manager Joe Girardi ejected by home-plate umpire Brian O’Nora, which meant Girardi was in his clubhouse office when A-Rod crushed a sixth-inning home run to centerfield, career number 649, igniting a four-run rally that made the difference.
“It was awesome,” A-Rod said. “I was pretty excited. It was the ultimate payback.”
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Said winning pitcher CC Sabathia: “I think Alex did the best retaliation by going deep. There’s not much more to say. A guy drills you, then you go deep off of him, he gives up seven, we get the win. That’s all you can say.”
The Yankees have won three straight series now in their attempt at a miracle playoff run, and this one, over the American League East-leading Red Sox, was the most important. The players showed, with their reaction to the Rodriguez-Dempster skirmish, that they had all of their teammates’ backs, even a teammate who is spending much of his time engaging in verbal warfare with Yankees superiors.
Boston’s Dempster, meanwhile, showed himself only to be a thuggish clown. Girardi ripped thoroughly and deservedly into the right-hander for blatantly trying to drill A-Rod before succeeding on the fourth pitch.
“I don’t think that’s up to him to determine, (to) throw at a guy because he’s going through what he’s going through,” Sabathia said of Dempster. “Maybe it was something different. But I don’t think it’s up to Dempster to police that.”
This episode of “Life with Alex” provided a particularly ugly lesson: The more you make A-Rod’s situation personal, the quicker you’ll sink well beneath his reduced status.
Bud Selig might receive a similar comeuppance in due time. We should learn later this year how independent arbitrator Fred Horowitz feels about the record-breaking 211-game suspension Selig gave to A-Rod for his alleged involvement in Biogenesis. While we don’t know yet whether MLB investigators have the goods on A-Rod, anyone who watched Selig gab with David Letterman last month knows that the former Brewers owner loathes the Yankees’ beleaguered third baseman.
For now, though, the jury is out on Selig. On the other hand, the Dempster verdict arrived suddenly and shockingly. Many, many fans in the Fenway crowd of 37,917, meanwhile, cheered Dempster as he worked methodically to plunk A-Rod, at whom they yelled, “You’re a cheater!” Pathetic. It brought to mind a 2006 Giants-Astros game when Houston fans applauded pitcher Russ Springer for drilling A-Rod’s fellow villain Barry Bonds.
Look, it’s understood why many of A-Rod’s fellow ballplayers detest him. He always has possessed an off-putting personality, he has admitted to using illegal performance-enhancing drugs early last decade and now he is accused of doing so again more recently. He has a true gift for alienating people, and Red Sox Jonny Gomes and John Lackey were among the dummies who publicly complained about A-Rod getting to stay on the field as he waited for his appeal hearing. It also wouldn’t surprise us if players believed the “60 Minutes” report that A-Rod dimed out his Yankees teammate Francisco Cervelli and Milwaukee’s Ryan Braun.
Nevertheless, that doesn’t give pitchers the right to go after him. Let Selig and his lieutenants take care of deactivating him for a while. Given how successful star MLB witness Anthony Bosch proved to be against Braun and 12 other players, it’s reasonable to think that MLB has a good chance of at least some of its punishment sticking to A-Rod.
Earlier yesterday, Yankees general manager Brian Cashman went to town on his highest-paid player, accusing him of repeatedly lying and saying that, to avoid litigation, he limited his exchanges with A-Rod to “Hello” and “Goodbye.”
Cashman acknowledged how odd it was for him to root on a player who has repeatedly lobbed verbal grenades at his employer.
“These are unique times,” Cashman said with a smile.
Unique indeed, yet some truths travel from one episode to the next. The best way to treat A-Rod is to treat him as just another player, just another appellant. When your emotion fuels your treatment of him, then A-Rod gets the last laugh yet again.