YOU the fans stood up here. Understand that. Believe that. You were heard here. Understand that. Believe that. You weren’t alone. There were other serendipitous circumstances. But that’s OK. That’s fine. All you hear, relentlessly, is that the fan’s voice doesn’t matter, that it’s ignored, that it’s irrelevant in our sporting world.
Mostly, that’s true.
Just not this time. Alex Rodriguez heard you. He felt your wrath. He absorbed your scorn. If negotiations with the Yankees head where it appears they’re heading – with Rodriguez returning, with the Yankees scoring a major coup against Scott Boras, bringing A-Rod back on their terms – then you are allowed a moment to stand up and take a bow.
Because you helped make it happen. Understand that. Believe that.
The Angels helped out, and the Dodgers and the Mets and every other would-be big-market fish who either laughed at or tuned out the figures Boras was floating about in the past few weeks, numbers that passed $300 million and roared toward $350 million. No one was willing to play poker with Boras, and that is surely the biggest reason A-Rod sought out the Steinbrenner family, with his interlocking-NY hat placed firmly in his hand.
If someone had paid him, he would have let his ears burn forever.
But make no mistake, those ears were burning. Sources familiar with Rodriguez’s thinking say he was stunned at the ugly backlash that greeted the news he was opting out of the final three years of his Yankees contract; that greeted the piggish timing of that announcement, which came via Boras during Game 4 of the World Series, overshadowing the very showcase of the very game that has made A-Rod rich beyond his or anyone else’s wildest dreams.
In a sporting soundtrack that often is so fractured, often so splintered with a thousand different opinions and a thousand different voices, the take on that was virtually universal and virtually unanimous. This wasn’t just angry newspaper columnists burning up their laptop keyboards, and it wasn’t just furious talk-radio patrons blazing airwaves, and it wasn’t just agitated bloggers filling cyberspace with million-word screeds.
This was fans like Joe Luna, 76 years old and retired to Boca Raton, Fla., who e-mailed me the day after the opt-out and said simply, yet elegantly, “I have always been proud of three things: my family, my military service and my loyalty to the Yankees. Until today, I never would have questioned any of those things. Today, thanks to that ingrate, I do.”
This was the fourth-grader I talked to at a Modell’s Sporting Goods in New Jersey a few weeks ago, who had asked his father if there was any way he could take back the No. 13 jersey he got for Christmas last year only to be told by his dad, in one of those harsh life-lesson lectures, that there’s no warranty on baseball stars and greedy intentions.
This was for all the Yankees fans who managed to overlook the fact they were staring at having 54 homers and 156 RBIs amputated from their batting order and instantly began moving on. Good riddance, so many of you said; now, maybe, you wonder if you should be so quick to welcome him back.
No need to wring your hands over that. You should want him back for the same reason the Yankees wanted him back: because it’s good for business, and good for the team. The Yankees were wise not to burn the olive branch A-Rod extended them. Revenge is fun. It’s also short-sighted. The Yankees did the right thing.
And so did you. Because this morning you can see there is still power in being a fan and in lifting your voice when stirred to action. Someone was listening. Rodriguez’s eyes may have seen a landscape barren of $350 million contracts. But his ears also heard a different message. Your message.
Good for you. It’s about time.