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Comeback story overshadows the A-Rod we used to know

The Associated Press

Alex Rodriguez launches his fifth-inning home run off of Jason Bulger during Game 4 of the ALCS on Tuesday.

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By MARTIN FENNELLY | The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 21, 2009

He's on an A-Roll.

With each winning swing, with each winning postseason stroke, Alex Rodriguez becomes the Bomber they always dreamed about in the Bronx.

With each moment this month, this month, October, where his game always went to die, the artist formerly known as baseball's answer to Michael Jackson moves away from his past, which nevertheless still hounds him.

And A-Rod squeeze Kate Hudson moves one step closer to her first Oscar: best performance, actress in a supporting role to one of the biggest head cases in sports history. Kiss me, Kate.

Wasn't it just eight months ago that A-Rod was a low-down dirty dog? We wanted this strutting egotist – and cheat – out of newspapers, TV and our lives – him and the cousin he rode in on.

Now A-Rod redemption plays out nightly. Once he was only about the stage, about celebrity. Suddenly, his head has come down from the clouds, and his game is reaching for the heavens.

A-Rod is the red-hottest Yankees hitter in these playoffs, oblivious to everything but the task at hand. He is talking less, thinking less, doing next to everything – and suddenly the Yankees are one win away from their first World Series since he arrived five years ago.

Rodriguez was at it again Tuesday night in Anaheim. He had three more hits, including a two-run homer, and scored three runs. That and power pitching by the beastly CC Sabathia led the Yankees past the Angels for a 3-1 lead in their American League Championship Series.

I remember his February news conference in Tampa, when news of his failed drug test years ago broke wide open and he admitted he'd used performance enhancers.

He tried to tell the truth, but everyone knew it wasn't the whole truth.

His Yankees teammates, if you could call them that back then, sat off to the side, with looks that bordered on profound disinterest.

He had a lot to prove to them, too.

Then came the book, which painted A-Rod as – what! – self-centered. It contained charges by ex-teammates about all sorts of things.

A-Rod was in trouble. His career was questioned, and his character. The Hall of Fame seemed in doubt. And he was hurt on top of that.

Yeah, this dude was going down for good.

But a funny thing happened. A-Rod went off for hip surgery, then to rehab. He disappeared. We'd see him at minor-league games, playing before three or four dozen fans. He did his work and not say much to media. He kept his mouth shut.

The Yankees unveiled Sabathia and the other big offseason signing, Mark Teixeira. A-Rod re-entered the picture in the shadows, or as much as you can be in the shadows when you're A-Rod.

"I came in with lower expectations after all the things that happened," he said after Tuesday's game.

He missed a month of baseball, but still managed to hit 30 homers and drive in 100 runs, thanks to his two-homer, seven-RBI game against the Tampa Bay Rays to end the season. (The Rays, you remember the Rays, don't you?)

With each game, it really does look like A-Rod took a look in the mirror and saw more than just a pretty face.

There is a certain what-the-hell quality to his baseball right now. The man doesn't look like he's wondering how he should look or act or like he's thinking what we're thinking when we look at him.

He actually looks like a good teammate right now. There have even been a couple of moments during these playoffs when A-Rod has been the first to greet a teammate who hits a homer, traditionally the job of Yankees shortstop and captain Derek Jeter, who seems to be fine with the new A-Rod, who doesn't look like he's pretending to be excited – he really is. What about that?

It still wouldn't matter if he wasn't hitting the crud out of the ball.

Understand, the guy had practically been the Nowhere Man every postseason since coming to the Yankees for a cool quarter-billion or so in 2004. In A-Rod's first Yankees postseason, New York became the first team in baseball to blow a 3-0 series lead when it lost the ALCS to Boston, with Rodriguez throwing in his famous girlie-man slap in Game 6.

The man had produced exactly one RBI in the 16 postseason games preceding the start of these playoffs. Now he cannot be stopped, at least not yet. In seven games this postseason, he is hitting .407 with five homers and 11 RBI. He has hit three game-tying home runs, including the dramatic ninth-inning shot in the ninth inning to tie the Angels in Game 2. Suddenly A-Rod has three homers in his last three games.

A lot of this comeback story should drive us mad. A-Rod seems to have gotten off clean after what was clearly a half-confession about drug use. So, for that matter, have Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz and a lot of other guys.

I'd still have a problem voting Rodriguez into the Hall of Fame.

It's as if one morning everyone got up and didn't care about what steroids have done to this game. It's crazed, but it's happened.

I think the biggest thing A-Rod has going for him is that he was such a nut case, such a narcissist, such a loon, that anything that even begins to resemble normalcy has made him seem more genuine, maybe more than he is.

It still wouldn't matter if he wasn't hitting the crud out of the ball.

That's all it takes, I guess.

It's still one of the great comebacks you'll ever see.

A-Rod couldn't have landed any better if Sully the Pilot had been flying him.

Hey, wait a second.

Hudson River.

Kate Hudson.

Oh, never mind.

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