The Nightmare Next Door

I remember Alex Rodriguez's first spring training with the Yankees. The press coverage was unimaginable. Every day I'd collect my copy of the Daily News hoping to see a story about a Met on the back page, and virtually every day I was disappointed.

Instead, the headlines crowed about A-Rod's first-anything as a Yankee: his first workout, his first batting practice, his first awkward interview. You name it and the New York tabloids were there to cover it.

At the time I dismissed the A-Rod fascination as the result of novelty, but even back then I knew there was a little hint of envy in my dismissiveness. Like virtually every other Mets fan out there, there was a time when I desperately wanted A-Rod in orange and blue.

It was Y2K. The Mets had just been to the World Series, but their flaws were evident. Everyone knew Mike Hampton was gone, so our pitching was going to be weaker in 2001. Meanwhile, nobody really had faith in our offense, where Met legends Benny Agbayani, Jay Payton and Timo Perez were clearly producing on borrowed time. Robin Ventura had fallen off a cliff, Rey-Rey was Rey-Rey, and Todd Zeile, family man that he was, was not your prototypical first-base power guy.

The answer was A-Rod. He'd grown up a Mets fan, we all knew that. We all read that interview where he said the happiest memory of his pre-professional baseball life was watching the Mets win the World Series in 1986. His cherished memories were ours, and that means a lot to a fan.

All the goodwill wasn't worth a damn in the end, and though we agreed he didn't deserve a private jet (even if we knew the line between reality and Steve Phillips' spin was blurry), we still thought we were worse off for passing.

Here we are now some seven years later and none of us would have traded the course of events that transpired in A-Rod's absence for whatever might have been if he'd signed here. But what about A-Rod? I wonder whether he wishes he could go back to that offseason in 2000 and do it all over, maybe sign for less money and come to the Mets.

I'll admit I never much followed the guy when he was with Seattle. I knew he was out there and he was nasty, but I don't follow American League ball too closely, and the Mets and Mariners never directly competed against one another so A-Rod was always on my periphery.

The point is that any feelings I have for him, uniformly negative, emerged that offseason. Before then he was just another great ballplayer, a mid-90s Frank Thomas type who you knew was really good but didn't have any real concept of.

That offseason was the decisive moment in A-Rod's public reputation, both for me and for a lot of other fans around the country. We knew he was making substantially more for substantially longer than any other player in baseball. We had been told that he was a me-first (24-plus-1) guy. Perhaps most damaging, we knew that he'd been a Mets fan growing up, but that wasn't enough for him to sign on the dotted line on, only $252 million was enough.

I really think that last element, which is rarely discussed in the discourse about A-Rod, is as important as any other factor in his tarnished reputation. Baseball fans see players sign for mega contracts all the time and for all sorts of reasons and they emerge unscathed whether they produce or not; for his part A-Rod has produced a lot better than a ton of other big-money guys (Hello, Mike Hampton).

But as much as we know about ballplayers, we rarely know which teams they rooted for growing up. Really, we only know it when the player ends up with that team or when he ends up with that team's big rival. Failing those conditions it's not widely discussed.
With A-Rod it was. The tabloids dubbed him "Shea-Rod", and his signing with the Mets was considered a foregone conclusion. The Mets were a big-money club, and between that and his childhood affinity for the team, it was just a matter of time.

When Steve Phillips publicly announced the Mets were out of the running, I was stunned. I remembered asking myself how it was possible to lose out on a guy who wants to play for you?

In the end I decided it wasn't the Mets' fault, that it was just something about A-Rod, a certain disingenuousness. He says he's like you, that he wants to play for the team he rooted for growing up just like you always wanted to, but in the end he's just about the money or the celebrity, or whatever it is. He's not about playing the game for the joy that we associate with the game as fans or as former little leaguers. It's a critical disconnect.

I think all of it was evident when he signed with Texas, and I think it's no coincidence that it's been all downhill for him, public perception-wise, since there.

Sure there's the money thing, but there are a lot of guys who have the money thing who aren't despised. There's a more fundamental disconnect at work.

And for me, it all started that offseason seven years ago, when a young A.F.O.M.G. was so desperate for A-Rod to be a Met, and so confounded when he wasn't.

I remember how desperate the young A.F.O.M.G. was to have A-Rod, but here we are seven years later and A-Rod isn't my luxury, he belongs to the other New York team and I have to read about him every day in my local papers, and in spite of it all I couldn't have been happier with how things played out.

Seven years later, I wonder if A-Rod feels the same way.

- A.F.O.M.G.

(Images courtesy of mlb.com, seattlepi.nwsource.com and usatoday.com)