‘AFTER’ THOUGHT: Brett Gardner’s 10th-inning walk-off single celebration (inset) was reduced to Yankees footnote after Mariano Rivera’s blown save and the fanfare surrounding Alex Rodriguez’s return to The Bronx. (
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This is the Yankees season now: How many different places will Mariano Rivera be cheered and how many different ways will Alex Rodriguez be booed?
We already know at Fenway Park, of all locales, Boston fans tabled their hostilities to honor Rivera. And last night, even at home, A-Rod’s reception grew from a mix of cheers and derision at the outset to enmity with each empty at-bat. Apparently a segment of Yankees fans will tolerate alleged drug use — but not strikeouts.
Rivera heard his familiar thunderous cheers last night in The Bronx. Also the crack of Miguel Cabrera’s lethal bat and then a sellout crowd going dead silent as the Tigers star’s two-out, two-strike, two-run homer to dead center tied the score in the ninth. It was the second time this week Rivera was within one strike of finalizing a Yankees victory and didn’t.
That the Yankees came back to win 4-3 in the 10th felt like a footnote on the evening. The Yankees avoided the indignity of falling to .500. For now. Even in victory, their righty hitters remained historically abysmal, going 0-for-17, including 0-for-4 with three whiffs by an overmatched A-Rod. In CC Sabathia, Andy Pettitte and Phil Hughes, the Yankees have three of the AL’s 10 worst qualified ERAs.
This is why this season seemingly has been reduced to chronicling the amount of respect one man can engender and the amount of revulsion another can amass.
The Yankees generated just their fourth sellout of this season for A-Rod’s Bronx debut last night and might not get another until Rivera’s home exit on Sept. 26. At this point, mass interest in the Yankees comes down to their most reviled and most revered.
A Yankees game now: A-Rod bats, fans react then there’s a bunch of waiting around until he bats again. And it is actually a blessed distraction for these Yankees, who would be making a hard left-hand turn toward irrelevance, not to be heard from again, if not for Rivera and A-Rod.
We mark time on this Yankees season now with boos and bravos. We watch team after team fete Rivera with parting gifts, one visiting stadium after another cranking up his theme song before rising to honor not just the accomplishments but the man.
And we see A-Rod hit by a pitch and an antagonistic crowd in Chicago cheer. We wonder just how bad it can get for him, home and away, as fans hammer not just the transgressions but the man.
Rodriguez did not make himself available to the media before or after last night’s game. But when he does speak publicly now, his words — more than ever — stick to a pre-packaged script conceived by lawyers and spin doctors designed to protect his rights and project a sense of humility. Nothing real comes out of his mouth, nothing that takes us inside his truest thoughts and feelings.
But how can Rodriguez not see how the baseball world is reacting to Rivera and wonder how he ended up here, as Most Loathed Man in the Game? How things spun this far astray? Maybe there always was going to be too much ego and insecurity and greed revealed over time for him to feel unreserved admiration and adoration.
But this? All-out hate?
Rodriguez excels at delusion. He literally whistled by about 20 cameramen and 20 more reporters lined near the Yankees dugout on the way to batting practice, blank-stare ahead and bemused smile on his face. Just another day in A-World, attempting to make zany normal.
He also is pretty good at seeing himself as victim, as if the whole world met with torches and pitchforks to conspire to undermine his pristine life.
Yet with all of the delusion and lack of accountability, Rodriguez is too much the baseball junkie, too much the glory hound and, yes, too much of an admirer of Rivera not to see this. How does he miss Rivera’s humility, self-confidence and controversy-free nature have led to this unique moment in time when he is cheered and celebrated everywhere? That all the attention and glory Rivera shunned for two decades is coming to him now in a tidal wave.
Everything Rodriguez has been the past two decades is coming back to him now, as well. The player who might have been the greatest ever, the man who was once launched toward being the Clean Homer Champ, took a bunch of turns that have led him further and further away from the Rivera ideal.
Instead, we have this dichotomy accentuating a sinking moment in Yankees history: Most Beloved and Most Bedeviled. Cheers and jeers. A hero and A-Rod.