NOTE: This musing also appears today on our sister site, Leblanguage. Please visit it regularly for coverage of sports of media, politics, sports and life.
I’ve always had a complicated relationship with the New York Yankees. My heart–at least the ventricle holding my baseball fandom– will always and often inexplicably belong to the Mets. Both geography and personal history dictate that’s my lifescript, and with any luck perhaps I’ll be rewarded with at least one more world’s championship in my lifetime. At the rate they’re going, that lifetime’s gonna need to extend into Methuselehian levels to have that wish fulfilled.
Being both realist and opportunist, I glommed on the Yankee bandwagon at various other points when the Mets were rarely competitive and even when they were would inevitably disappoint without even a playoff appearance, just like their 2025 season wound up. And that was most evident in the late oughts and and early teens of this century when the Yankees were the fortunate winners in obtaining the services of an exceptionally talented and prolific hitter named Alex Rodriguez. I confess I wasn’t as much of a fan of his as I was the main components who steered the team’s run of five World Series appearances in eight years, including a defining and definitive five-game conquest of the Mets in the 2000 Subway Series. The Core Four? (Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, Mariano Rivera and Andy Pettite)–all home-grown Yankees who defied the previous decade’s meddling and free agent-obsession of mercurial owner George Steinbrenner? Heck yes. And my personal favorite, the multitalented and gregarious Bernie Williams? I named my first cat after him.
Their stories, especially Jeter’s, have been told many times before, often in reverent tones based on their success and the lack of skeletons in their closet. Rodriguez, of course, has a much more complicated tale. A tale not told, at least with his permission, until last week’s debut of yet another compelling HBO SPORTS documentary. The network and platform are devoting three consecutive Thursday nights in November to ALEX VS. AROD, and since it’s from the prolific team of RELIGION OF SPORTS that my old Pyramid colleague Michael Strahan is a partner in it caught my attention despite my lack of reverence to the subject himself. The first hour that dropped last week was not exactly hard-hitting, a point USA TODAY’s Ralphie Aversa brought to light in his review:
If you’re looking for a “kiss-and-tell” documentary, “Alex vs. ARod” isn’t it. The docuseries covers Rodriguez’s upbringing and his professional career, from 1993 when he was the first overall draft pick to his last game in 2016. In between, there’s his rise with the Seattle Mariners, a record-breaking deal with the Texas Rangers and then the headline-making trade that sent him to the New York Yankees. But there’s no talk or mention of Jennifer Lopez, who dated the baseball star from 2017 until they called off their engagement in 2021.
The first hour covered his timeline just up to the point where the championship-less Rodriguez opportunistically found his way to the storied franchise that was a short subway ride away from his Washington Heights roots, where as everyone who has any ties to that area knows too well (me included) you travel in the opposite direction to change at 145th Street and then double-back to get to the Stadium. That’s pretty much the way he found himself the face of the underachieving Yankees of the next dozen-ish years, a team whose fortunes more closely paralleled those of the Mets of that era–good enough to compete at times, but only winning one world’s title in what turned out to be the last full year of Steinbrenner’s life–after Bernie had retired and A-Rod had effectively replaced him as “The Fifth Beatle”.
I came away from Part One feeling much like I did while watching those Yankee teams play–intrigued at times but mostly underwhelmed. I was captivated by one of the few lesser-known stories that were told–through not only A-Rod’s filter, but the perspective of those close to him–that was shared by Aversa:
One of the bigger personal revelations in “Alex vs. ARod” is the strained relationship between Rodriguez and his father Victor, who he inherited his love for baseball from. Victor left their family when Alex was 10 years old. They wouldn’t see each other again until 2000, when at the urging of his then-wife, Rodriguez and his father met in Minneapolis. The Mariners were in town for a four-game series against the Twins. Over the four games, Rodriguez batted .412 with 6 RBI. After the final game, the two never saw each other again.
I’m committed enough to see this through to conclusion, as I net out somewhere along the lines of the MINNEAPOLIS STAR-TRIBUNE’s Neal Justin, who is now dealing with Arod on a daily basis as part-owner of his cities’ basketball franchises. Not exactly favorable, but not willing to walk away completely:
The first installment, now streaming on HBO Max (new episodes premiere at 8 p.m. Thursdays on HBO), barely mentions his divisive ego and seasonlong ban because of his use of performance-enhancing drugs…(O)ther aspects of his personal life are skimmed over. His rivalry with fellow Yankee Derek Jeter is treated like a scuffle over who gets to ride shotgun. There are shots of his most famous girlfriends, including Cameron Diaz and Kate Hudson, but no real commentary on his quest to be a big cheese off the field.
But we will apparently get some version of confession and attempted redemption in tonight’s second installment and next week’s conclusion, as Aversa teased:
(S)ports talk radio icon Mike Francesa calls former Major League Baseball star Alex Rodriguez “a Shakespearian figure” and a flawed man. The person Francesa was talking about couldn’t agree more, saying that the media personality’s observation is, “the line of the documentary.”
“I think that flawed man and the suspension, led to a man that needed help,” Rodriguez, 50, tells USA TODAY over Zoom. “I went into therapy with Dr. David and he saved my life in many ways.” The suspension Rodriguez refers to came in 2013, when MLB banned A-Rod for an entire season over the use of performance-enhancing drugs. As for “Dr. David,” that’s Dr. David Schnarch who Rodriguez reveals was his therapist from 2009 until the psychologist’s death in 2020. In the final installment of the series, A-Rod returns to Schnarch’s Colorado home and reflects on his journey to “rewire my brain.” “He helped me really understand some of the issues that I survived from being a younger kid,” Rodriguez says. “And he taught me some incredible lessons.”
And these days, nothing is more relatable to me than a talented, good-looking and phenomenal athlete who has ties to both South Florida and the Bronx who’s capable of learning lessons later in life and becoming a somewhat less despicable person in the process.