A-Rod Booed Loudly By Fenway Faithful, While Joe Girardi Contradicts Himself On 'Farewell Tours'
By Matt Dolloff, CBS Boston
BOSTON (CBS) -- Red Sox fans got their wish Wednesday night, as massive chants of "We want A-Rod" morphed into a tsunami of boos when Alex Rodriguez stepped to the plate in the top of the seventh inning and felt the wrath of the Fenway boo-birds as much as any player in recent memory.
It was a fitting send-off for Rodriguez, who flew out to deep right field and looked visibly upset he didn't shut the Fenway faithful up with a home run. He has been one of the biggest villains in baseball for over a decade, especially in Boston, so he was clearly going to get a different kind of curtain-call.
Watch his seventh-inning at-bat below:
Must have felt good for the crowd to get that out of their systems.
After the game, Yankees manager Joe Girardi was pressed on the issue of keeping A-Rod mostly on the bench during his final week as a major-league player. In response, he delivered a dumbfounding double-talk, a contradiction of epic proportions: "My job description does not entail a farewell tour. My job description is to try and win every game and put everyone in the best possible position, and that's what I'm trying to do."
A perfectly fair comment to make; nobody would expect Girardi not to try to win the game. Problem is, he played Derek Jeter for 145 games during his final major-league season in 2014, when he batted .256 with a .617 OPS. He batted second in the lineup for 566 of his 581 at-bats that year. Girardi's explanation for Jeter's obviously forced farewell tour only made things worse.
"Part of that is, when you talk about moving people, we didn't have anybody hitting that year," he said. "I didn't really have a replacement. So this year we have people that we want to try, we have replacements, and that's the biggest difference."
Apparently, Girardi considered Aaron Hicks a worthy replacement for A-Rod, even though he's had 19 more at-bats and still has a worse batting average (.191 to A-Rod's .203) and only four home runs to A-Rod's nine. Clearly, A-Rod has always been a better option than Hicks and should have been in the lineup more often.
It's obvious that A-Rod's benching in his final week as a player is a personal thing between the player and organization, but Girardi did his damnedest to cover that up. Can't expect him to just admit that, but he could have gone a better route than saying the Yankees don't do something that they literally just did for an entire season two years ago.
But hey, Girardi gave the Boston crowd what they wanted, and as is usually the case at Fenway, the fans delivered. A-Rod is scheduled to start Thursday night, so expect at least one more round of "fond" farewells.
Matt Dolloff is a writer for CBSBostonSports.com. His opinions do not necessarily reflect that of CBS or 98.5 The Sports Hub. Have a news tip or comment for Matt? Follow him on Twitter @mattdolloff and email him at mdolloff@985thesportshub.com.
