Alex Rodriguez's Long Goodbye

This morning, I told a friend I was writing a column about Alex Rodriguez's recent intimation, quickly recanted, that he would retire following the 2017 season at the conclusion of his present contract. Said friend reacted by slapping a book in my hands titled, no kidding, The Wizard of Oz and Other Narcissists: Coping with the One-Way Relationship in Work, Love, and Family, by Eleanor D. Payson, MSW.

Now, despite what seems to be implied by my friend's choice of reading material, it would be the epitome of hackish quackery (or quackish hackery) for me to suggest that Rodriguez is a narcissist in the clinical sense—this despite centaur-based evidence in support of the proposition (and a good amount of less mythological evidence, too)—because I am not competent to diagnose him, being neither an A-Rod confidant nor a psychologist. That said, it does seem fair to say that my relationship with Rodriguez—and yours, and everyone else's—is reminiscent of the one any of us might have with a narcissist: he's getting a lot more out of it than we are.

One of the great ironies of narcissistic personality disorder is that the planet's most self-regarding humans live in a world that is functionally without mirrors—their need to remain the center of attention renders them incapable of seeing how their behaviors affect others. The result, for the non-narcissist in the relationship, is a liaison focused almost entirely on the lavish maintenance of the other party's self-esteem and the suppression of their own.

Rodriguez may or may not be a narcissist in his private life, but when he began his extensive experimentation with performance-enhancing drugs—that is, they were intended to be performance enhancing; results were mixed at best, if not wholly imaginary—he was indulging in narcissistic behavior. He already had all the money imaginable and a career that would entitle its bearer to instant admission to the Hall of Fame. What he lacked was the ability to remain one of the best players in baseball for a moment longer than the span of time his body had allotted to him.

As a result of his subsequent exposure and yearlong suspension, Rodriguez's accomplishments were, fairly or unfairly, forever tainted in the minds of many fans. And while it probably is unfair, in that during the years (that we know about) in which he was willing to swallow anything short of active uranium in order to Dorian-Gray his fading skills, he reaped only declining production and increasing fragility, a failed cheat is still a cheat; a transparent fraud is in no way morally superior to a convincing counterfeit. For a good portion of Rodriguez's former constituency, there might as well be a giant red VOID stamp filling the television screen whenever he hits a home run.

According to Payson, "Unhealthy narcissism is occurring when an individual excessively pursues admiration, attention, status, understanding, support, money, power, control, or perfection in some form." This individual "is not able to recognize, other than superficially, the feelings and needs of others. The rules of reciprocity are not operating in the relationship." In speculating on the timing of his retirement and/or his infinitely extensible post-2017 career this spring, Rodriguez was seemingly unaware of the many fans that might view the promise of his retirement as a mercy. Contra Neil Young, it would be better for him to fade away than to burn out.

As for a farewell tour, sure, it might happen out of a need for teams to try to capture every last lookie-loo and part him from his souvenir-cup dime, but the idea of holding a going-away party for a player who has so extravagantly overstayed his welcome falls somewhere between pathetic and grotesque. If the rules of reciprocity applied, it wouldn't even be a consideration, but it's about A-Rod and his desires, not ours.

Rodriguez already has over 2,000 runs scored and RBI, more than 3,000 hits, and is 28 home runs away from sailing past Babe Ruth on the career list. If he could be taken purely on the basis of these hefty counting stats and his other gaudy numbers, he would have had one of the ten or twenty best careers of all time. But (and again, the efficacy of his cheating has nothing to do with it) his place in history has been vacated. Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and the other PED poster boys have been cropped out of posterity's textbook with an efficiency that eluded proto-Photoshopping Soviet apparatchiks, and it seems likely that Rodriguez will share their fate. And so, even though the Yankees will no doubt crank up the hullabaloo machine when, 13 home runs into the season, Rodriguez becomes the fourth player to reach 700, the event won't really signify.

If Rodriguez plays past 2017 and is at all effective, he could threaten iconic records for RBI and runs scored belonging to Hank Aaron and Rickey Henderson, respectively. Even the career record for home runs, which belongs to Bonds in name only (the scarlet asterisk affects him too), could be in play—Rodriguez is 75 home runs away from a tie. However, there is reason to think none of that will happen. Though A-Rod put up his most productive, most durable season since 2009 last year, he faded badly down the stretch, hitting .191/.300/.377. He'll turn 41 on July 27. Maybe late summer was a mere slump, or perhaps it was a harbinger of the end, Rodriguez's human body catching up to him at last.

No doubt this all comes across as harsh. It's not personal. I'm not particularly outraged by PEDs, especially given how badly Rodriguez and most other players have been using them to enhance performance, and I'm as neutral on the man himself as I would be on any personality whom I don't know and whose impact, positive or negative, is so localized. Rather, the criticism stems from a deep impatience with both player and team. Because of the stigma attached to PED usage, Rodriguez has placed himself outside of baseball's continuity; he is, to borrow from Silver Age comic-book blurbs, a dream, a hoax, an imaginary story. That means he's blocking someone who could be a part of it. In this sense, the lowliest rookie is more interesting than he is. Similarly, though Rodriguez might or might not help the Yankees to the postseason this year, he, like the rest of the pinstriped cohort of aged mercenaries that surrounds him, stands in the way of a younger team that might not be as successful but will inevitably be more authentic. Seven of nine starting Yankees are 32 or older, and all but one established themselves elsewhere. Derek Jeter's heirs await their departure. Until they do, the Yankees offer only fan-service as a rationale for discontinuity—margarine, not butter.

If Rodriguez hadn't made his legacy a moot point, it would be great fun to root for him to keep on keepin' on. Geriatric baseball players can be fun. Julio Franco was out there wrapping his bat around his head until he was 47, knuckleballer Phil Niekro still gave a game effort at 48, and Jamie Moyer tried it on, for the Rockies no less, at 49. And although no one knew it at the time because he lied about his age, Jack Quinn pitched two games after his 50th birthday. He pitched so long that by the time he wrapped up in 1933, the country of his birth, Austria-Hungary, hadn't existed for 15 years. The idea of the ageless, forever-young ballplayer is enticing, and with modern medicine and conditioning it seems likely that one day soon we will have a Designated Methuselah batting cleanup. It just can't be Rodriguez.

Don't think of Rodriguez as a friendly Franco or Moyer, or even a self-serving Pete Rose, writing his own name into the lineup as Reds player-manager long after any other manager would have. Think of A-Rod as an actor who doesn't know when to get off the stage. That moment doesn't necessarily have to be now—we've gotten used to his October 2017 expiration date—but staying beyond that, which is the same as expressing further need, is an imposition. "Unhealthy narcissism," says Payson, "is a form of claiming too much for the self."

Having too much taken from you in service of someone else's outsized needs is ultimately enervating, and baseball, as an entertainment, should never be that. Payson offers a 14-point questionnaire to aid in determining whether you are dealing with a narcissist: "Do you frequently feel as if you exist to listen or to admire his or her special talents and sensitivities?" "Are you exhausted from the kind of energy drain or worry the relationship causes you?" "Are you in constant doubt about what's real?" Answering yes to too many of these may be a sign you need to get out.

The problem is A-Rod: he's got you and he doesn't want to let you go. "I'm thinking in terms of my contract which ends in 2017. After that, we'll see what happens. I've got two years and more than 300 games to play." That many, and the rest of his life—which means the rest of ours.