Rodriguez lined out, popped out and struck out before his tapper in front of the plate in the eighth rolled maybe 10 feet – far enough for Brett Gardner to score from third and put NY up 4-2. I don’t have any time or energy to focus on anything else.
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Girardi actually started the latest controversy by first saying he would try to get A-Rod into as many games as possible before his agreed retirement. Since June 25, Rodriguez has seven hits in his last 55 at-bats and when his occasional start resulted in unproductive at-bats it gradually led to rookie Gary Sanchez becoming part of the designated hitter mix. He said his job was not to worry about farewell tours, as if that is what the.200-hitting A-Rod is getting since it was announced the Yankees would release him and then pay him the balance of his 27-million-dollar contract to be a special advisor.
Rodriguez was asked if a phone call from another team would be hard to resist, especially since he sits just four home runs shy of 700, a plateau reached by just four other players in big league history. The kid would get the bat if Rodriguez homered, got two hits or the Yankees won. It’s been a great run and an incredible journey. “I tried to put my glove up where I thought it was going to be”.
Rodriguez missed a year of his career because of both his own bad decisions and Major League Baseball’s desire to make an example of him. Oscar Hernandez, just called up to the D-Backs from the team’s Double A club, hit the first home run of his career in the top of the twelfth, delivering a win for Arizona. Alex is our last superstar.
And the consensus within the Yankees’ upper management is that Rodriguez’s struggles are not just an extended slump. “This is not just this year”. Considering that Chase Headley, the primary third baseman, has not covered himself in glory, why not give Rodriguez one last shot at his former position? As an athlete, those are things that you have to deal with.
After sitting on the bench unused for much of the past month, Rodriguez was in the lineup as the designated hitter and batting third for his 2,784th and perhaps final regular-season game as a major league player in a career that started with Seattle in 1994, moved on to Texas in 2001 and then NY three years later.
“Anything that I do”, he said, “I would clear with Hal first”. “That’s something I’ll be able to share with my daughters for a long time”.
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If Girardi had a sense of the moment, he would have let Rodriguez play shortstop – not third. When he evades questions about his feelings about how he has been treated and says he has plenty of time to get into that after he is done playing, Im interested to know because we all know Joe Girardi is handling this as bad as anyone possibly could and he’s looking bad. “I said it’s been awkward and hard”. But we are a family and we’ve had a wonderful relationship for the last 10 years.
