After taking some hits, A-Rod lands biggest blow

PHILADELPHIA -- From behind the punching bag, Alex Rodriguez punched back.

From underneath years of baggage, A-Rod made them pay.

From out of the shadows of steroids and from under the weight of baseball's richest contract comes a sentence that never before has been written:

The suddenly broad-shouldered A-Rod has moved to within one victory of earning a World Series ring thanks to the Yankees' 7-4 mugging of the Phillies in Game 4 of a Fall Classic that is increasingly becoming covered in pinstripes.

A-Rod's reaction?

Ouch!

And: I'm not talking about the fact that the mean Phillies drilled me with pitches three times in two games here in Philadelphia.

And: Let me tell you a story. ...

"I will say this," Rodriguez said as Sunday turned into Monday, the day that Rodriguez finally could earn his holy grail. "That's the one time I got hit in [Saturday's] game, my first at-bat, kind of woke me up a little bit and just reminded me, 'Hey, this is the World Series. Let's get it going a little bit.'

"So it worked out."

Hear that Phillies? You snapped him out of his slumber. Good work.

It isn't often that you see both benches receive warnings for hitting batters in the first inning of a World Series game, but that's what we got Sunday after Rodriguez was drilled in the back with a Joe Blanton fastball on the first pitch he saw in the first inning.

The plunking was a replay of one night earlier, when Cole Hamels hit Rodriguez with the first pitch he threw in A-Rod's first at-bat.

Odd thing was, at the time Hamels hit him, Rodriguez was 0 for 8 with six strikeouts in the series.

Rodriguez answered Hamels by blasting a two-run homer in his next at-bat in Game 3.

And he wound up having the last laugh in Game 4 Sunday, when he snapped a 4-4 tie in the ninth by walloping an RBI double against Phillies closer Brad Lidge. The hit also moved Mark Teixeira -- who had been hit by a Lidge pitch one batter before A-Rod in the ninth -- to third, and both Teixeira and A-Rod scored when Jorge Posada drilled a base hit up the middle.

"There's no question I have never had a bigger hit," Rodriguez said.

The Yankees clearly were not happy with the Phillies taking target practice at their cleanup hitter, nor were they thrilled with plate umpire Mike Everitt issuing the first-inning warning to both benches -- which could have taken away the inner half of the plate for New York starter CC Sabathia, were he the nervous sort.

"I don't necessarily think it's intentional, but Alex has been hit three times and Tex has been hit twice, and we don't necessarily like that because we need those guys," Yankees manager Joe Girardi said. "I mean, it's pretty hard to hit people intentionally when there's runners in scoring position. But you can talk about if you're going to miss that you miss in, and we get concerned about that."

Phillies manager Charlie Manuel is as old school as they come. He believes there are certain ways to do things on the baseball field, and nobody -- not his coaches, not the umpires, not broadcaster Tim McCarver -- is going to change his mind.

Alex Rodriguez gets hit again in Game 4 but gets his revenge later. (US Presswire)

We saw this when he declined to put runners in motion in Game 2 with Chase Utley at the plate against Mariano Rivera with two on and one out and the Phillies behind two runs.

And we're hearing it with every thunk! that occurs when the baseball meets A-Rod's flesh.

This is not to say that the Phillies are throwing at A-Rod, because I don't believe they are.

Few people know as much about hitting as Manuel, and one thing he knows for sure is that the more important the hitter is, the more uncomfortable you need to make them.

The Phillies followed the same blueprint a year ago in the NL Championship Series against the Dodgers. Brett Myers raised eyes when he fired a fastball behind Manny Ramirez -- one pitch after he knocked Russell Martin to the ground with a pitch up and in.

Manuel always has believed the most effective way to pitch Manny -- a hitter he coached for years in Cleveland -- is to "move him around" in the box.

It's exactly what the Phillies are doing -- or attempting to do -- with Rodriguez now.

They'll be screaming about it in New York, hollering about how the Phillies are blatantly throwing at Rodriguez. But there's a difference between throwing at someone and trying to move that someone around in the box.

Right now, the Phillies are having difficulty executing it, and you can't blame the Yankees for being angry (even if Rodriguez admittedly has been juiced on steroids in the past and currently wears an elbow pad the size of a small, backup infielder).

This season, Rodriguez was hit with a pitch just eight times in 124 games.

This World Series, he's been hit three times in four games.

At that pace, over a 162-game season, A-Rod would be hit with a pitch an intensive care-inducing 122 times. Perspective? The major league record for being hit by a pitch during a season is 50, set in 1971 by Ron Hunt of the Montreal Expos.

So, yes, when Rodriguez was drilled by the first pitch he saw for a second consecutive game, you can understand why he would give a long, hard, exasperated stare into the Yankees' dugout. Had someone placed one of those cartoon bubbles above his head at that moment, the language surely would have been R-rated.

"I don't want to comment about being hit," he said afterward.

He said he was OK, but "the one to the thigh [Saturday] left a little bit of a bruise."

As for why, in his very first World Series, it took until he was hit by a pitch in Game 3 to wake him up -- his words -- that's a mystery even larger than his elbow pad. But who knows what really goes on in the mind of A-Rod?

His explanation for going 2 for 5 with a double, homer, three RBI, a walk and three hit-by-pitches over the past two games is that he simply realized he had to reset himself and only swing at pitches in the strike zone.

"One thing about the postseason, if you want to hit, you've got to swing at strikes," Rodriguez said. "And if you don't swing at strikes, you're going to expose your weakness."

It's taken him awhile -- five postseasons now with the Yankees -- but in the past two games, he finally seems to have learned it.

In his key ninth-inning at-bat against Lidge, he picked an 0-and-1 pitch to launch toward the left-field wall. And it was a pitch that followed the Phillies' blueprint of pitching him in.

"I think it was actually a decent pitch," Lidge said. "We've gone in there a lot. And you've got to give some credit to him, too."

The Yankees certainly do.

"He's the reason we're sitting here and we're in Philadelphia right now," outfielder Johnny Damon said.

Fitting location. In the town of Rocky Balboa, Rodriguez, the perennial autumn disappointment, continued fighting back.