Mission 27, page 13
At the age of 33, A-Rod wasn’t contemplating retirement despite the ambiguity regarding his physical status. With nine years remaining on a 10-year, $275 million contract—not to mention 553 career home runs and a legitimate chance to break Barry Bonds’ all-time record of 762—Rodriguez prepared to do whatever it took to get back on the field. “I felt like I had to give it a shot,” Rodriguez said. “I have this responsibility of many more years on my contract. I’m young and I felt like I was strong and healthy. I was really hoping that I would not be disabled because I knew that was an option. I was hoping that I could get better.”
Rodriguez underwent arthroscopic surgery on March 9, creating a slew of new questions. How long would his rehab program last? Would he have the same torque in his hips that had allowed him to drive the ball so well during the first 15 years of his career? Could he still handle everyday duty at third base? “There was concern,” Joe Girardi said. “Any time you start talking about wrists or hips or backs for position players, there’s a huge concern.”
“We didn’t know how long he was going to be gone,” Jorge Posada said. “They told us he was going to be back, but we didn’t know when. We were thinking more after the All-Star break.”
Dana Cavalea, the team’s strength and conditioning coach, played an integral role in structuring Rodriguez’s rehab plan. With input from the doctors and team trainers, Cavalea designed a program that would help A-Rod build strength and regain his form. “He was definitely open to anything you gave him to get back on the field,” Cavalea said. “That was his biggest thing: ‘What do I have to do to get back on the field? Give me the program, give me the structure, and let’s get going on it.’”
A month after surgery, Rodriguez returned to the team’s facility in Tampa, Florida, to continue his rehab. There was one thought Rodriguez couldn’t shake: Bo may have known greatness, but he was a mediocre baseball player after hip surgery, hitting .248 with 32 homers and 102 RBIs for the Chicago White Sox and California Angels.
Rodriguez’s first week of rehab games in Tampa gave the Yankees and A-Rod hope that this would not be a reprise of that sad exit. With the big league team off to a sluggish start, the lineup needed his powerful bat. Hitting coach Kevin Long was among those getting daily updates from Tampa while poring over video and written reports. “As much as I had hoped he would be the monster he was, you don’t know,” Long said. “You kind of wait and see, go through his drills. I remember thinking, Oh boy, he’s not there, then there becomes a point where you go, Oh, he’s back. You could see his hip was responding, his body was responding, and he got through it. There was some uncertainty. There was a part of me that thought, I hope this isn’t the end.”
The Yankees won four straight as April turned to May, the last of which was a walk-off win against the Angels on Posada’s two-run single. At 13–10 the Yankees seemed to be holding their own, but the team went into a tailspin, losing five in a row, including a pair of two-game sweeps at the Stadium at the hands of the division rival Boston Red Sox and Tampa Bay Rays. “I don’t think it was just Alex, but missing Alex didn’t help things,” third-base coach Rob Thomson said. “With any team when you add a bunch of new players, there’s a period where you’ve got to adjust to each other and get to know each other. It took a little bit.”
At 13–15 they faced a five-and-a-half-game deficit behind the Toronto Blue Jays in the American League East. With a six-game road trip about to begin in Baltimore—and finishing in Toronto against the first-place Jays—the lineup needed a boost. The Yankees needed Rodriguez’s bat in their lineup, not with their Class A team in the Florida State League.
The decision was made. It was time to get Rodriguez on a plane. He had gone 7-for-36 (.194) against minor league pitching with three homers. If capable of hitting the ball out of the park, it was better he do it in the big leagues. On May 8 Rodriguez joined his teammates in Baltimore, arriving at Oriole Park at Camden Yards for his first major league game in more than seven months. The national media descended upon the Inner Harbor to chronicle A-Rod’s first game since Sports Illustrated had outed him as a former performance-enhancing drug user.
This wouldn’t just be the biggest story in baseball. It would be the biggest story in sports. For some unbeknownst reason Rodriguez felt serene as he walked through the concrete corridor underneath the third-base grandstand, offering a smirk to a crush of photographers as he made the hard right turn into the visiting clubhouse. “I was oddly the calmest I’ve ever been in my entire career, walking into a storm,” Rodriguez said. “I guess I’m used to that.”
A-Rod’s every move was chronicled. How did teammates react to his return? Was he favoring one leg over the other? Was the ball jumping off his bat during batting practice the way it once had? For a change Rodriguez intended to let his on-field performance do the talking.
For years he had a proclivity for putting his foot into his mouth, often saying something he believed to be innocuous only to see it explode into a headline—or several days of them. In the last calendar year, Rodriguez had endured a divorce, a high-profile dalliance with Madonna, and a steroid scandal. He was also only a few months removed from an ill-advised photo shoot for Details magazine, during which he’d agreed to kiss himself in a mirror, a decision that prompted snickers when bemused teammates passed the glossy publication around the Steinbrenner Field clubhouse.
Rodriguez also had to sidestep the noise accompanying an unauthorized biography. Selena Roberts, one of the Sports Illustrated reporters who broke the steroids story in February, scored a substantial advance from HarperCollins to publish A-Rod: The Many of Lives of Alex Rodriguez. The book said that Rodriguez used performance-enhancing drugs as early as high school and occasionally tipped pitches to friendly opponents in lopsided games; he denied both claims.
As Rodriguez prepared to return, the 33-year-old heeded the advice bestowed upon him by Jason Zillo, the team’s director of media relations. As Zillo told Rodriguez, most people wanted to hear more from the players on the Yankees. He had become an exception to that rule. “Talk less, play more—that was our thing,” Zillo said. “He kept the outside noise at a bare minimum and stuck to the script. It’s like compounding interest. He’s like, ‘Wait a second, this is working. Let’s keep doing it.’ That’s what we did.”
Wearing a plain white T-shirt and his road-gray uniform pants, A-Rod was all smiles as he sat on the dugout bench and said that he was where he belonged. He spoke of having nine years remaining on his contract, during which he intended to become a better player and a better person. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my career, and they have been well-documented,” Rodriguez said that afternoon. “I think I’ve paid the price. I’m really excited about the present and the future. Those are the only things I can control from here on out.”
For Rodriguez, watching his team scuffle through five weeks had been torture. He was a self-professed baseball junkie, frequently watching West Coast matchups after returning home from his own games. He was surprised to learn that not everyone was wired that way; Rodriguez was once taken aback when he learned that Derek Jeter hadn’t sprung for the TV package that delivers out-of-town games.
Now, he would have another opportunity to make an impact, the way he had since reaching the majors in 1994 as an 18-year-old who—in his words—went from his high school prom to facing Roger Clemens at Fenway Park. It had been a weird ride, but as his eyes scanned the pregame activity in the Baltimore outfield, Rodriguez said, “I still have an opportunity to have a happy ending.”
After the media gaggle began to dissipate, Rodriguez granted an interview to Kim Jones of the YES Network, the team-owned television outlet. Jones, who had witnessed her share of A-Rod drama since joining YES in 2005, sensed something different that day. “It was a contrite Alex,” Jones said. “I remember thinking that he said a lot of the right things. It was a big moment overall—obviously in his life—but for that team and for the Yankees organization. It had a big feel to it, even though at that time of year those games never had big feels to them, necessarily. But that one did.”
Girardi penciled Rodriguez into the lineup in his customary cleanup spot, playing third base. Cody Ransom’s time as the starting third baseman had lasted 15 games before a strained quadriceps muscle forced him to the disabled list. Most recently, the Yankees had been giving starts to journeyman Angel Berroa—whose claim to fame was beating out Hideki Matsui for the 2003 AL Rookie of the Year Award—and light-hitting rookie Ramiro Pena. “We were whole as a team, and I think that’s what every team wants to feel like,” Girardi said. “There are so many days you go through a season that you’re not whole, but it was the first time all year that I felt like we were whole and we looked different.”
The manager cautioned against setting expectations too high for Rodriguez, though there was no hiding the fact that the Yankees’ limping lineup needed an infusion. Jeter led off the game with a ground-out, and Johnny Damon and Mark Teixeira each drew walks against the Orioles’ Jeremy Guthrie.
Rodriguez strolled to the plate accompanied by a loud chorus of boos, though that was hardly a novelty for him. Fans behind home plate waved rubber syringes, making the stands nearly as entertaining to watch as the action on the field. A 30-year-old right-hander who was beginning his third full big league season, Guthrie challenged A-Rod with a 98-mph fastball, the type of pitch Rodriguez admitted that his hip had not allowed him to handle down the stretch in 2008.
Rodriguez turned on the heater and launched it in the air to left-center field, sending Baltimore’s Luis Montanez racing to the warning track with his glove outstretched. Oh my God, Rodriguez thought. My superpower is back.
The drive cleared the 364-foot marker and landed about six rows deep into the seats, delighting the hearty contingent of Yankees fans who had made the 200-mile trip from New York. Drama always seemed to have a way of following Rodriguez around, but this was almost too much—even for him. “I remember saying to John [Sterling], ‘Well, so much for needing spring training,’” said Yankees radio analyst Suzyn Waldman.
The Yankees dugout erupted as Rodriguez’s awestruck coaches and teammates marveled at his flair for the dramatic. Nearly a decade later, they remain amazed at what they saw. “This ain’t real life,” A.J. Burnett said. “I’m like, ‘There’s no way I just witnessed this.’ I mean, I’ve seen some cool things in my life, but are you kidding me? First swing? If you can tell me that swing didn’t jolt our season, I don’t even know what to tell you. I knew this guy was good, but are you kidding me? Really? I mean, come on. We all just loved it, like kids at Christmas, three years old with a bike under the tree.”
“When he hit that ball, the dugout went absolutely apeshit,” Long said. “We’re like, ‘He’s back! He’s back!’ It was a big day for our team, knowing that we had No. 13 back. To hit a home run, it was just typical Alex Rodriguez fashion: the spotlight, his first game back, and it wasn’t a single or a double, but a home run. It was big for us to know that he still had that in him.”
To nobody’s surprise, Nick Swisher was more excited than anybody else. Had someone asked at that moment, Swisher would have given the okay for the Yankees to print postseason tickets. “There’s no stage that’s too big for a guy like that,” Swisher said. “There was an explosion. I was kind of like, ‘Oh, by the way, we’ve got this guy, too. He’s been lying in the weeds for the last five weeks, but we’ve got this motherfucker, too!’ It was just like, ‘Oh my God, this is it.’ Things started to feel really, really good at that point in time.”
The Yankees had three quick runs on the scoreboard, but the advantage seemed larger, especially because it was their first lead in six days. “It felt like it was a fucking 13-run homer,” CC Sabathia said. “I don’t think we were playing that good; we hadn’t been scoring any runs. He hit the homer, and I just remember the dugout was going crazy. First pitch off Jeremy Guthrie. I mean, we went nuts. I felt like we had won it in that moment. It was just so much excitement.”
As encouraging as A-Rod’s big swing had been, there was an even bigger reason for the Yankees to be confident. A 6’6”, 300-pound reason, to be specific. Sabathia’s Yankees career hadn’t begun well; the key signing of their winter was 1–3 with a 4.85 ERA through six starts for his new employer. “We felt like CC was going according to script,” Girardi said. “He always struggled in April. I still don’t know why he struggles in April. I don’t get it.”
New York lost four of those six games—hardly the result the club expected when sending its new ace to the hill. Sabathia said he wasn’t worried, but he needed the losing to stop. “I didn’t want it to get out of control, I guess, where it started compiling and I started thinking that I can’t pitch in New York,” Sabathia said. “I think that’s where guys get in trouble.”
For one night, at least, Sabathia wasn’t going to be the story. Once Rodriguez hit the first-inning home run, it was difficult to focus on anything else. “A lot of people don’t even remember ‘C’ from that game,” Burnett said. “But he dealt.”
Still feeling the adrenaline from Rodriguez’s big swing, Sabathia gave up hits to the first two Orioles hitters he faced, though neither came around to score. With rookie Francisco Cervelli flashing fingers behind the plate, Baltimore wouldn’t have another hit until the ninth inning. “I remember I was nervous; it was Cervelli’s first start, Alex coming back,” Sabathia said. “I just remember once Cervy got back there and was calling a good game, I was like, ‘Oh, we’re going to be good.’ Then Al got me hyped hitting the homer, so I just wanted to finish.”
Cervelli had been in Double A less than a week earlier, but with both Posada and Jose Molina on the disabled list, the 23-year-old catcher was asked to get the league’s highest-paid pitcher on track. It was Cervelli’s first start of the season and only the second of his career. “I remember everybody talking, ‘Oh, it’s CC,’ and I was scared,” Cervelli said. “He was the No. 1 guy in the rotation.”
Cesar Izturis and Brian Roberts opened the ninth with singles, and with the tying run on deck, Girardi could have brought in Mariano Rivera for what had rapidly become a save opportunity. But neither Girardi nor pitching coach Dave Eiland budged from the third-base dugout. Sabathia, who had thrown only 98 pitches to that point, would have a chance to finish the job. He responded by striking out Adam Jones, Nick Markakis, and Melvin Mora— Baltimore’s 2–3–4 hitters—to complete his masterpiece. “He needed to come out and make sure everybody knew why they signed him,” Burnett said. “‘Don’t forget who I am and what I do.’”
Sabathia’s final line: nine innings, four hits, one walk, eight strikeouts. The Yankees had their cleanup hitter back and they finally saw the Sabathia they had been waiting for. As they returned to their hotel in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, the buzz was back. “It seemed like from that moment on, you were expecting seven, eight, nine [innings] every night,” Thomson said. “He was just dominant. That was an incredible night all the way around.”
For the record, Rodriguez struck out in his next two plate appearances after the homer and grounded out in the seventh inning—not that anyone would remember. It would be referred to as The A-Rod Game and while he recognized the significance of his return he also knew that his contribution paled in comparison to what Sabathia delivered. “One swing,” Rodriguez said, “and the rest was CC.”
10. Pie in the Sky
The Yankees had been largely amused by the four-faced Buddha that A.J. Burnett refused to travel without, and occasionally someone would ask about his many tattoos, particularly the ones of Bruce Lee or the bloody Spartan warrior from the movie 300. That was fine, but he had more to add to the universe than frequent scowls and excessive ink.
While with the Florida Marlins and Toronto Blue Jays, Burnett established a reputation as the “pie guy,” anointing himself with the task of sneaking behind the heroes of exciting victories and smashing them in the face with a towel full of goop, preferably during a television interview. To Burnett’s recollection the practice began with shaving cream in Miami, but teammates complained when they were blinded by the frothy foam.
Burnett made a wise shift to whipped cream, instructing clubhouse attendants to keep a canister of Reddiwip handy near the dugout runway. It was some good-natured, not-so-clean fun, the type that the buttoned-up Yankees had never experienced. “I’ve got a great picture where Jeff Conine has got it dripping off his face, whipped cream all over,” Burnett said. “In Toronto I did it to a bunch of guys. I honestly didn’t know if I should do it when I got to New York. I didn’t want to disrespect this organization by going out there and throwing whipped cream on somebody, but I was like, ‘I’ve got to do it.’”
All Burnett had to do was wait for the right opportunity, and it seemed to be coming. Alex Rodriguez’s return spurred the team back to the .500 mark following its early May slide. With Derek Jeter and Hideki Matsui hampered by injuries and Jorge Posada on the disabled list during a series in Toronto, the offense received contributions from unlikely sources.
Brett Gardner hit his first major league homer on May 13, while rookies Ramiro Pena and Francisco Cervelli delivered big hits against the first-place Blue Jays. Jeter and Matsui returned to collect key knocks as the Yanks finished off a series win, ending the trip on a high note. CC Sabathia followed his gem in Baltimore with eight innings of two-run ball, winning back-to-back starts for the first time as a Yankee.
