OAKLAND The back of the shirt laid out the numbers of utmost importance to Alex Rodriguez in the calendar year 2006:
“Two-hundred fifty-seven days.”
“Thirty-seven weeks.”
“Nine months.”
The front of the shirt did the same thing, only less cryptically: “Mission Twenty-Seven.”
The T-shirts were distributed to all the Yankees, and several were wearing them under their gray road uniforms during Monday night’s bravura of an opening – a 15-2 pasting of the Oakland Athletics that couldn’t have been more one-sided if you’d had the young Tyson in one dugout and Mitch “Blood” Green in the other.
But as with everything else about this team, the words and their meanings apply more directly to Rodriguez, affect him more completely, engage him more assiduously. There are fewer and fewer people in the Yankees clubhouse who had anything to do with the first 26 mission that ended properly, after all; none of those dossier omissions are more prominent than No. 13’s.
“We’re one focused team right now,” Rodriguez said. “You could see that we were really chomping at the bit, eager to come out and see if we could put everything together. When we play the way we played tonight, it’s really exciting to think what we could do.”
Someone said, “Though you probably won’t score 15 runs every night.”
To which Rodriguez smiled, and without missing even half a beat, replied: “Why not?”
Last night, they proved why not, spending large chunks of the game looking terribly average and ordinary, squandering scoring chances, spoiling a fine pitching performance from Mike Mussina. The final was 4-3, A’s, the winning run scoring seconds ahead of a monsoon.
So the Yankees will not go 162-0. And Rodriguez will not maintain the pace he’d set for himself after one game, which would have yielded the modest seasonal totals of a .600 batting average, 162 home runs, 810 RBIs and 486 hits. None of that changes what we’ve seen so far from Rodriguez, who never looked more comfortable in a Yankee uniform than he did on the field Monday night, never looked more comfortable in his own skin than he did afterward.
He’s the one who threw out the gauntlet that hangs over him now, remember. On the day he accepted the MVP trophy for 2005, he was the one who broached the subject of his empty playoff resume. Yankee acolytes may have bashed the unwashed inquisitors who filled his glorious day with interrogations, but it was A-Rod who set that agenda.
And A-Rod who must live up to it now.
“We have some pretty high ambitions on this team,” he said late Monday night at McAfee Coliseum. “Myself, sure. But everyone. We know what we need to do here.”
It is also A-Rod who, even after but two games, will undoubtedly have to answer for all the runners he stranded last night – two in the first, one in the seventh, two more in the ninth – because A-Rod is always a lightning rod, because even in early April people question his credentials, mostly because he’s never been shy about providing plenty of ammunition to do so.
Still, with all of that, everything is set up for Rodriguez to have one of the monster years in baseball history. The lineup around him is one of the great batting orders ever put together, and it’s hard now to calculate how many opportunities he’s going to have to keep the scoreboard whirring like a pinball machine, as he did in Monday’s second inning when he chased Barry Zito with a thunderous grand slam. If everyone stays healthy, if everyone stays well, there is no reason to believe he shouldn’t shatter his personal season bests for runs scored (141), RBI (142) and OPS (1.045).
Best of all, he’s hitting in the No. 4 hole, and judging from Monday’s performance, there’s little reason to believe that burden is going to affect him at all. He is now where he always should have been, anchoring this lineup, put into the sweetest of all hitting positions.
“It ought to be fun every day,” Rodriguez said. “That’s for sure.”
More days like Monday will help that along. So will fewer days like Tuesday.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com
