1. In his five seasons with the Yankees – five seasons that he pledged were free of performance enhancing drugs – Alex Rodriguez has averaged 42 homers.
If he plays to his average this year Rodriguez will move to the brink of 600 homers. He begins this season at 553 homers, 47 shy of the 600 milestone.
Which makes you wonder just how the Yankees will handle such a milestone chase? A key reason the Yanks caved in and re-signed Rodriguez was to profit – especially via the YES Network – as Rodriguez stalked all the important home run milestone achievements.
But can the Yanks (and Rodriguez) really celebrate and play up the chase now? How silly would it look to have one of those countdown clocks or banners toward 600 when Rodriguez essentially told the world that the 156 homers he hit in three years as a Ranger were abetted by his use of banned substances.
This is part of the A-Rod difficulty for the Yankees moving forward: How do they handle the achievements that made him so seductive to them? Ignore them and you are confirming how soiled you feel your own best player is. Commemorate them and you risk the scorn of participating in a farce and/or a fraud.
2. Carlos Delgado has compiled a borderline Hall of Fame career: The good being consistently excellent power/run production that will give him strong overall totals at the end of his career, the bad being just two All-Star selections, which highlights the sense of Delgado as a very good, but not great player. Boy would his candidacy be helped by, say, an MVP award. Well, he did finish second in 2003 to, well, to Alex Rodriguez in what A-Rod says was his final year juicing. Would Delgado have won the MVP had A-Rod been a clean player? Put that in the ever deepening list of things we do not know about this era. But it sure would look nice on Delgado’s record, no doubt about that.
3. There are many reasons that the Mets were unable to trade Luis Castillo this offseason, including that he was an older, fading player with a horrible contract, a dubious work ethic and a crumbling body. But here is another reason: If you needed a second baseman, they have been in abundance and – unfortunately for the Mets – still are. The best free agent second baseman, Orlando Hudson, is still available as camps are set to open, and so are Ray Durham and Mark Grudzielanek. And earlier this week the Cardinals released their version of Castillo in Adam Kennedy, who was due to make $4 million this year.
