In Opting Out, A-Rod Gets Last Laugh

Anyone who ever doubted that Alex Rodriguez has nerve can now fall silent. No matter how extraordinary he was at Yankee Stadium, the greatest player of his generation was never extraordinary enough to satisfy his leeriest critics, who had him drawn as a hollow fraud who lacked the audacity to really excel and the ruthlessness to be great. Rodriguez was never able to convince some that he was bigger than Derek Jeter. Now he's made himself bigger than baseball.

The brazen magnificence of Rodriguez's exit from New York is incomparable. Just as the Boston Red Sox were playing out the last innings of the seventh of a string of wins over the Colorado Rockies and Cleveland Indians in which they utterly outclassed two excellent teams to establish themselves as both unquestionably the best team in baseball and a potential dynasty, news broke that Rodriguez's agent, Scott Boras, had emailed the Associated Press to announce that Rodriguez would be opting out of his contract, making him a free agent. On every count, this is astonishing.

During the World Series, no one, according to both formal and informal baseball law, is supposed to make any real news. The commissioner's office in the past has exhorted teams to keep quiet about managerial hirings and firings and contract negotiations during the Series, so as to focus the attention of the world on the seven games that are supposed to represent the sport at its best. To announce such a thing during the last innings of a decisive World Series game, thus upstaging the crucial moment toward which the entire season builds, is a calculated affront to all the game's proprieties and ideas of order.

Commissioner Bud Selig would like right now for everyone to think of nothing else than the dynastic Red Sox — of how David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez and Theo Epstein and Josh Beckett and so many others have not only redeemed the wretchedness and suffering of generations of New England fans, but made victory even more joyous than anyone had dreamed it could be, and how their sheer, unimpeachable brilliance reflects so well on the sport everyone plays as a child. Or of Aaron Cook, the Rockies pitcher who overcame life-threatening disease and an injury that had kept him off the mound since late August to pitch six gritty innings that just weren't enough, and the noble sporting triumph of someone who wins even in defeat.

Here, though, comes Alex Rodriguez to remind everyone that professional sports are about money and utter crass power. The pure cynicism of Rodriguez's ploy does so much to expose the sham pieties of the men who promote baseball that it should be applauded for that alone. Being so forcibly reminded that baseball is about money and power doesn't, after all, diminish our ability to appreciate it as a sport one bit. To go along with the pretense that it does, to pretend that Rodriguez's contract isn't at least as important as Cook's noble defeat, would be absurd. Credit to Rodriguez for being shameless and showing baseball for what it really is.

In leaving as he has, Rodriguez has also made himself larger than Joe Torre's retirement, the ascension of a new generation of Steinbrenners (both of whom, bizarrely, go by diminutives of the same name), and the replacement of Torre. Everyone always felt that no matter how many MVP awards he won and no matter how many times he carried a team that's gone months without reliable pitching, he had still never done anything to be as outsize as Reggie Jackson or Mark Messier or whoever. He has now. Derek Jeter may have four rings, but he never responded to press reports that he was about to be offered a $150 million contract by essentially severing ties with a team. If money is how you show respect in sports — and it is — A-Rod has more respect than any jewelry can ever earn.

We'll never really know if Rodriguez felt all the grievance toward a team that never protected him, a press that lived down to its worst caricatures in covering him, and fans that shamed themselves with their lack of support for him that any rational person would have. If he did, he has now taken a grand and admirable revenge, and seized control of a story that's just now beginning.

Two points should, for now, though, be appreciated. The first is that this was Alex Rodriguez's decision. His agent works for him, and whether or not Rodriguez explicitly instructed Boras to upstage the end of the World Series, such a decision is ultimately his responsibility, for good or ill. The second, related point is that the $150 million offer the Yankees were reportedly about to make, was, given the present market, as insulting as offering to slash Joe Torre's salary was. There are no real villains and certainly no heroes in stories like this one, but the question for now is whether Rodriguez jumped, or whether he was pushed.

tmarchman@nysun.com