A-rod hit his 600th home run. It was a monster shot. Even people that hate the Yankees and A-rod had that to say about it.
The interesting thing is the muted response from much of baseball. I’m going to leave all of the race accusations to someone else. Not because I don’t care but mostly because I don’t believe they are true.
I think the muted response has more to do with the fact that in reality our expectations rarely meet up to our reality.
Someone once told me to always pick dead people for heroes because a dead person wouldn’t be able to let me down.
Donald Downer aside for that type of advice, you have to look at that perspective to properly understand the A-rod response.
At its finest baseball is about mythical heroes welding wooden clubs and hurling fire coated baseballs. Doing battle on a field of honor where what happens between the lines is difficult but governed by simplicity. You score more runs than your opponent and you win. It’s about grown men playing a boy’s game with the reckless abandon that only young boys have. Somehow this qualifies them for “hero” status.
And yet, with many of the superstars of today’s game, there is very little mythical hero in them.
What they do possess is humanity, in all of its brokenness and shattered complications. The gray areas overwhelm the black and white ones when it comes to humanity. Most monsters are not as monstrous as we want to believe and most heroes are not as heroic as we want to believe.
Two different responses to number 600 highlighted this for me. The first was from a colleague and a fellow Yankee lover. She said to me, “44 at bats? That just proves that he can’t hit when it matters.”
Of course, that has to ignore last year’s playoffs, which I pointed out. She agreed. See, that’s the push and the pull. I once won 100 bucks off of a friend of mine when the Yanks were playing the Red Sox. A-rod was up to bat, the game was very close. My friend (A Reds fan) said to me, “Oh, he’ll get a hit.”
I replied, “I’ll bet you 50 bucks he doesn’t. In fact, I’ll bet you 100 that he either strikes out or gets a weak ground ball.”
But A-Rod has hit when it mattered, right?
Then there’s the second response. A friend of a mutual friend said to me, “Yeah, but how many when he was juiced?” To which I immediately reply, “Well, how many were from pitchers that were juiced?”
Once again, nothing is a easily delineated as the media wants us to think it is. Does 600 mean what it did when Hank Aaron hit it? Probably not, given the steroid era and the sheer number of people who have done in the last few years have changed all of that for us.
The truth is though that A-rod reminds all of us that we probably are not as honorable as we would like to think ourselves to be, nor are we as villainous as we may sometimes think ourselves to be. More often than not we are stuck in the ugly, amorphous place known as the middle ground.
We all have flaws. We all have strengths, you, me and A-rod.
Of course, you and I will probably never be in a position to hit any Major League home runs, but I wonder if A-rod doesn’t provide us with an opportunity to step back and consider what we are doing with the talent we have.
Love him or hate him, A-rod is working it. Are we?
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