Will A-Rod take Yankees down with him?
Alex Rodriguez’s reputation is in the tank. Will he take the Yankees season down with it?
Now that A-Rod has admitted to using banned substances when he was with the Rangers, how he reacts to the pressure will be a huge factor whether the Yankees will return to the playoffs after missing out last season.
The good news: A-Rod has pretty much been embroiled in controversy since he arrived in The Bronx — Canadian strippers, Madonna, his relationship with Derek Jeter, screaming ‘Ha!’ at an opposing player and most recently A-Fraud. You name it — he has been there and faced that. Well, except for this. Rodriguez always had his numbers and his reputation as a clean player to fall back on; now both of those are tarnished. How similar will the pressure he feels in October be to the pressure he will feel to prove that his astounding power is not due to injections? And we all know A-Rod and October don’t mesh.
That pressure comes from the thinking that he has to win the game with every at-bat. Now he will have to worry about proving he is the real deal without steroids every time he comes to the plate. Even with the additions of CC Sabathia, A.J. Burnett and Mark Teixeira, the Bombers still need their biggest bat in the middle to help them get to the postseason.
Success under this intense scrutiny will be his best way out of this. Winning makes people forget. If the Yankees win the World Series this year and Rodriguez is a big part of that, the steroids issue will hit the backburner. The best statement Rodriguez can make now is with his bat not his mouth. If not, questions about why the Yankees need Rodriguez will persist.
Your opinion?
Schilling has an opinion on this. What? No Way!
Former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling weighed in on the A-Rod issue on his 38 pitches blog. I know what you’re thinking: that guy never has an opinion. But it’s true, he finally spoke out on something.
Schilling questioned why Rodriguez’s name was the only one out of the 104 names on the list to come out, which is actually a very valid point.
