



People who knew him in Seattle accepted that as the flaw in that apparently perfect equipment -- the willowy shortstop with power, who worked so hard and innately understood the game but not life. He went from earnest to clueless, with no warning light -- "always on the outside of whatever side there was," as Bob Dylan wrote about the gangster Joey Gallo.

Barely into his 20s, Rodriguez once told a reporter a poignant tale that in his spare time on the road he visited college campuses, like Harvard, asking students how they chose the college, and what they studied. He had once feinted toward taking a few courses at the University of Miami, probably as a negotiating tactic with the Seattle Mariners, before taking their huge bonus. Now he claimed he was sampling that alternative life -- but common sense, self-protection, could not be grafted on by visiting a campus or accumulating elegant business suits.

Many athletes, many people, grow up without a parent or two. Some get through it. But Rodriguez stands on the brink of the suspension that could take him out of baseball, perhaps through the 2014 season, or forever. It is quite safe to say he would not be paying his newest set of lawyers -- he is always changing authority figures -- if baseball did not have a huge case against him. In the rational age of Michael Weiner, the players union needs to protect the bulk of its constituency, the players who stay clean.

The labor-management agreement on testing, the bans on certain stimulants and bodybuilding drugs, may seem like the restraint of free will, but the rules keep many athletes and aspiring youngsters from gobbling down unknown pills and potions. Baseball seems to have evidence on Rodriguez, going back to his admission that he used the stuff from 2001 to 2003 -- when he was young and foolish, he later contended.

Now A-Rod is like the title character of the Woody Allen movie "Zelig," showing up in the spotlight on the busy Canadian doctor, Anthony Galea, who helped bulk up U.S. superstars. He is unable to bury his tracks leading to the defunct anti-aging clinic, Biogenesis in Coral Gables, Fla. He was a five-tool player. Now he is a multitool cheat, rejected, like a badly grafted body part, by the main corpus of the New York Yankees.

One does not have to be a Yankees fan to understand that there are two kinds of Yankee stars: Rent-a-Yankees Yankees and Real Yankees. Roger Clemens, that swaggering bully, apart from any drug or legal issues, was not a Real Yankee. Wade Boggs was just seeking the brass ring on the merry-go-round. What about Dave Winfield? Ask the Bleacher Bums to take a vote. But Paul O'Neill and Hideki Matsui became Real Yankees, instantly.

Maybe A-Rod never had a chance to be a Real Yankee, but he ruined his image permanently with his scandals and machinations and posturing. He missed the voice in his childhood saying, "Alex, cut that out."

"Dad left us when I was 9," Rodriguez told Bob Finnigan of The Seattle Times in the spring of 1998. "What did I know back then? I thought he was coming back. I thought he had gone to the store or something. But he never came back. ... It still hurts."

His father ran a shoe store, but after moving from New York to the Dominican Republic to Miami, he suddenly left.

"He had been so good to me, actually spoiled me because I was the baby of the family," Rodriguez told Finnigan, adding: "I couldn't understand what he had done. To this day, I still don't really know how a man could do that to his family: turn his back."

His mother remarried and did well in business, but Rodriguez said he was still upset over the split.

"After a while, I lied to myself," Rodriguez said. "I tried to tell myself that it didn't matter, that I didn't care. But times I was alone, I often cried. Where was my father? To this day, I still can't get close to people."

By contrast, Derek Jeter has a father, Charles, who was a drug counselor and a mother, Dorothy, who was an accountant, as well as a sister. The family seems to have sent him a message: "Derek, whatever you do, don't be a jerk." Which he never has been.



In March 2001, A-Rod moved to Texas for that infamous contract of $252 million for 10 years. Just as infamous was an interview with Esquire, in which Rodriguez blabbered that Jeter was "never your concern" when playing the Yankees, and that Jeter "never had to lead" his team. They patched it up superficially, but they never waltzed after that.

When Rodriguez arrived with the Yankees in 2004, for another infamous contract, I got a call from my daughter Laura, who had been a sports columnist in Seattle and had a kind of big-sister affection for him.

"Dad," she said, "he's always asking what it was like to have a father in the same business. He doesn't have a father. You ought to talk to him."

She was talking about my making human contact, perhaps picking up the sliver of insight, nothing more profound. I introduced myself in spring training, and he was polite, but the next time I saw him we were crossing paths in a corridor at the ballpark. No eye contact. Strange bird, I thought. So did his teammates.


In February 2009, Rodriguez made one of those ritualistic explanations of his adventures with drugs. Jason Giambi had staved off the posse in 2005 and Andy Pettitte had charmed us with his spiritual confession in 2008. Now A-Rod was supposedly coming clean. His old pal Jeter looked sick as he made the mandatory response to A-Rod's comments about how common drug usage was back in the olden days, a few years past.

"One thing that irritates me is that this was the steroid era," Jeter said. "I don't know how many people tested positive, but everybody wasn't doing it."

Without sounding sanctimonious, Jeter said he had been counseled by his parents as he was growing up. "You're educated," he said, adding, "If you do some things, eventually the truth will come out."

In a polite way, Jeter was heightening the barricade between himself and his teammate.

During the 2007 World Series, Rodriguez opted out of his contract, making himself available to other teams, but the Yankees re-signed him to a higher infamous contract, the one ticking over the team today. His broken marriage and his escapades are well-known. So is his testing of the Yankees' front office. All that is left now is for Rodriguez to save as much as possible of the approximately $95 million that remains on his contract.

He is heading for the dreaded Sargasso Sea of sports, where banished athletes wait, becalmed, hoping for winds of pardon. Shoeless Joe Jackson, who never ratted on the plot to throw the 1919 World Series, never reached the Hall of Fame. Pete Rose hobbles around on his aging stumpy body, paying for being a knucklehead when baseball caught him betting on his team's games, as a manager. Lance Armstrong is downsizing his life in Texas. Many behemoths of the past generation are hoping baseball writers forget why they aren't voting all those fantastic career statistics into the Hall. And good luck with that.

Alex Rodriguez, just turned 38, is about to fade away. He never had that stern voice in his ear that said, "Alex -- don't!"