Palladino: Center Ring Of Yankees' Circus Will Belong To A-Rod
By Ernie Palladino
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Pitchers and catchers officially report to Tampa Friday. For the next five days until the circus comes to town, folks like Masahiro Tanaka, CC Sabathia and Michael Pineda will get a jump on working back from injuries and molding the six-man rotation pitching coach Larry Rothschild hopes to use during a brutal early-season stretch.
This is quality time. But, really, they should all look forward to next Wednesday when Alex Rodriguez brings his own walking, talking, dysfunctional big-top to George M. Steinbrenner Field.
Make no mistake, the media will swarm him the minute he walks in. Chase Headley? Fah! Mark Teixeira? Save him for later. The rotation? Deal with that another time.
It'll be A-Rod, A-Rod, A-Rod. And that, ironically, means good news for the pitchers and anyone else who doesn't wear No. 13 because, like any good three-ring circus, the spotlight remains primarily on the center ring. It may move occasionally to an outer ring for, oh, a clown car or dog act. But the trapeze artists, elephants and contortionists -- the high fliers, space-eaters, and benders of limbs -- that's center-ring stuff. The secondary performers get to do their work away from the glare and the zaniness of the center.
That belongs to A-Rod, right smack in the middle of it all. The rafters-high pay check would place him there by definition alone. But then add the Wooly Mammoth-sized controversy and his ability to twist even the simplest of truths into a pretzel, and it's only natural the spotlight should fall on him and him alone.
Try as he might, he can't avoid it. He actually has attempted it, and has failed miserably. For all the commotion he causes, he still remains more Cole Brothers than Ringling Brothers, a small-time imitation of those who truly do know what they're doing.
As if his legal antics of the past year hadn't already proved it, the events of the last few days drove home that exact point.
He wanted to apologize to the fans for his year-long, PED suspension. Good idea. So instead of explaining himself in a press conference, where reporters skilled in coaxing the real story out of their subjects, he wrote a hand-written letter to the fans. Bad idea.
It explained nothing. It offered no reasoning as to why he thought suing the world was the right way to go, or that using PEDs at all was the ticket. We only know for sure that he expects everyone to put the whole thing in the past so he can get on with the business of baseball.
If anything, it illustrated a light years distance between A-Rod and reality.
Then came the accounts of the J.R. Moehringer piece in ESPN The Magazine. It's a personal interview in which Rodriguez is never quoted directly. Not once. That's OK. It's a legitimate literary technique.
Yet, one thirsts for at least some of his words as the author relates his claims in metaphor that his Biogenesis PED supplier, Anthony Bosch, actually gave him placebos ("sugar and lies") instead of the real thing. If that's true, Bosch should have his four-year jail sentence cut in half, if only for successfully duping a PED pro.
The piece is about Rodriguez's year off. It's about him allegedly urinating on his cousin Yuri's wall as "some sort of gangster disrespect" for rejecting a confidentiality agreement about his PED use. It talks about Rodriguez enrolling in a marketing course, and needing to tell his 10-year-old daughter the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, about his problems.
But really, the whole thing is a "Poor me, why me?" deal. Misunderstood. Cheated in a fatherless life. Demonized by his extended family.
Another humongous misstep.
The media loves screw-ups, much more than those bland old pitchers and position players who will actually determine whether the Yanks return to the postseason in 2015. No one shines brighter there than Rodriguez.
The good thing is, the rest of them will have a chance to work out their problems in the relative calm of the outer rings.
Center ring will belong to A-Rod.