Peter Gammons and Tim Marchman do not agree

October 29th, 2007 | Posted by PostmanE

Above is Peter Gammons’ response to the Alex Rodriguez announcement last night. (HT: AA.) Gammons conveys what just about everyone, or at least everyone with the ability to flout the situation, was saying: Alex Rodriguez is a total dick for preempting the World Series.

It’s hard to disagree — after all, come on dude, wait a day; you’ll get your attention then — but Tim Marchman makes a pretty sufficient case to the contrary. Seriously:

Commissioner Bud Selig would like right now for everyone to think of nothing else than the dynastic Red Sox — of how David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez and Theo Epstein and Josh Beckett and so many others have not only redeemed the wretchedness and suffering of generations of New England fans, but made victory even more joyous than anyone had dreamed it could be, and how their sheer, unimpeachable brilliance reflects so well on the sport everyone plays as a child. Or of Aaron Cook, the Rockies pitcher who overcame life-threatening disease and an injury that had kept him off the mound since late August to pitch six gritty innings that just weren’t enough, and the noble sporting triumph of someone who wins even in defeat.

Here, though, comes Alex Rodriguez to remind everyone that professional sports are about money and utter crass power. The pure cynicism of Rodriguez’s ploy does so much to expose the sham pieties of the men who promote baseball that it should be applauded for that alone. Being so forcibly reminded that baseball is about money and power doesn’t, after all, diminish our ability to appreciate it as a sport one bit. To go along with the pretense that it does, to pretend that Rodriguez’s contract isn’t at least as important as Cook’s noble defeat, would be absurd. Credit to Rodriguez for being shameless and showing baseball for what it really is.

In leaving as he has, Rodriguez has also made himself larger than Joe Torre’s retirement, the ascension of a new generation of Steinbrenners (both of whom, bizarrely, go by diminutives of the same name), and the replacement of Torre. Everyone always felt that no matter how many MVP awards he won and no matter how many times he carried a team that’s gone months without reliable pitching, he had still never done anything to be as outsize as Reggie Jackson or Mark Messier or whoever. He has now. Derek Jeter may have four rings, but he never responded to press reports that he was about to be offered a $150 million contract by essentially severing ties with a team. If money is how you show respect in sports — and it is — A-Rod has more respect than any jewelry can ever earn.

We’ll never really know if Rodriguez felt all the grievance toward a team that never protected him, a press that lived down to its worst caricatures in covering him, and fans that shamed themselves with their lack of support for him that any rational person would have. If he did, he has now taken a grand and admirable revenge, and seized control of a story that’s just now beginning.

Contrarian? Slightly, but it’s also a really good point: If this was intended, Alex Rodriguez just proved he can pull the strings of the entire sport of baseball even on its most important night. That’s power and influence the likes of which David Eckstein and a host of other mediocre World Series players will never know.

It’s also, in a way, funny. Rodriguez is offered what can be perceived as an insult of a contract — the same as Joe Torre’s was — and he tells the team, the organization, the media and the fanbase that did literally nothing to help him throughout his stay there (besides sign his checks, of course) to shove it. That’s a big fat middle finger to every New York media member and fan that ever called him a choker or failed to contextualize his performance’s peaks and valleys. In a way, it’s redemptive. Not only does it allow A-Rod a huge measure of revenge, it proves that money isn’t enough. It proves that having everything you want in the biggest city in the world doesn’t mean squat if you hate going to work every day, that the endless cascade of idiocy in New York is too much to take no matter how many Manhattan condos you own. Somewhere in here, buried underneath the piles of cash and gallons of ink, there’s a lesson: Money swears, but not as loudly as we all think.