So, who wants A-Rod? Certainly not the Red Sox -- right?
The news, such as it was, really wasn't. It was the eighth inning of the last game of the World Series, the Colorado Rockies had exhausted their sandwich bags of tricks, Fox was running out of promotional tie-ins to hammer into the body of their broadcast, and the time was right to obliterate the event with news of Alex Rodriguez.
He was opting out of his contract with the New York Yankees, and his agent Scott Boras knew this was the last best stage to leak the news to as many outlets as he could find before the cameras went cold. I mean, the clock for the deadline for Rodriguez to declare his intentions hadn't even begun yet, but the practical deadline was essentially upon Boras and the Rod of A.
So the World Series, such a it was, was hijacked, and the story everyone thinks they'd rather have took front and center. Very Kobe-esque, with the added benefit of being a long-planned contrivance -- as transparently cynical as Royce Clayton's dugout conversations about the Great Free Taco Deal on successive nights. I mean, you'll never convince me he wasn't given some sort of honorarium to talk to helpless teammates about something neither of them could give a damn about, but that's just me.
As for Rodriguez, well, it worked. The Series was a sweep, and a particularly one-sided one at that, between a telegenic team and a regular old baseball team. There wasn't a lot of drama left, at least none that anyone seemed to want; the mood in the booth and we presume elsewhere was that this needed to end. And Boras spotted a vacuum he deftly filled, because he had deftly planned for it.
So Rodriquez will no longer be a Yankee, unless the Yankees change their mind about getting into a bidding war with some other as-yet-undisclosed team. Strange, too, given that he has typically (and hysterically) been blamed for the destruction of the Yankees -- it's as if the big news from Game 4 was actually the impending free agency of Typhoid Mary.
What's worse, though, than Boras' cynicism (only to be expected, really) was the identity of the first team on Rodriguez's shopping list that came to people's minds. The Boston Red Sox.
There it is, the final proof that in our cowardly new world, a team championship is just a prop to the needs of the individual supernova. The Red Sox, as seamless a team as you'll find in the free-agent era, need Alex Rodriguez because they're not interesting or powerful enough. They are already the New Yankees, in scope, in money expended, in Pavlovian media response -- and yet we think they need more? Isn't this the equivalent of sending a Lamborghini to Mark Cuban because he must be tired from all that dancing?
Better yet, the Rodriguez story was getting legs while MLB was counting the votes to determine that the man who would be Rodriguez's predecessor, Mike Lowell, would be World Series MVP. And not in that Brian Doyle way, either, but as a seriously important member of the best team in baseball. In other words, hell of a year, here's your trophy, we'll mail you your ring. Take off.
Well, even allowing for the fact that we as a nation are confronting the beginning of our geopolitical decline by rooting more and more for those sports teams that already have everything, this is pretty preposterous. Lowell is a free agent, but we have heard nothing to suggest that the Red Sox are dissatisfied with him, let alone dissatisfied enough to can him for someone who will earn about five times as much to do roughly 1½ times as much as Lowell did.
And why? Because Rodriguez is out there, available and alluring. The Red Sox have won two World Series in four years and have spent about $700 million to get there, but only A-Rod can make them more Yankee-like? They need to spend 20 percent of their 2008 budget to fill an absolute non-need, when they're already filling their building and making every dime it is conceivable for them to make, all in the name of New England's continued sports hegemony?
I mean, how bored are we that we watched the Red Sox grind through the rest of baseball and still want more glitz from them? They're not the San Antonio Spurs, whose excellence we have decided to hate for some reason. They've got personalities that amuse/amaze/annoy us, which seems to be the way we evaluate our sports heroes these days. David Ortiz, Manny Ramirez, Curt Schilling, Josh Beckett, Jonathan Papelbon and for, you David Eckstein fans, Dustin Pedroia. And yet, they need Alex Rodriguez? Why? How?
But Scott Boras knows that, too. That's why the eighth inning of Game The Last was the perfect time to remind us that whatever we may say about the virtues of a well-constructed team and the timeless verities of group achievement, we're still suckers for a single set of pretty legs. So in the end, Boras trumped the best team's biggest stage with news of his guy.
And we bit. As illogical, nonsensical and even crass as the news is, we bit, as he knew we had to. Hey, it was Alex Rodriguez. What's a World Series compared to that?
Ray Ratto is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.
