I promise you that I will stop talking about A-Rod just as soon as something else happens in Yankee-land. Maybe the GM meetings will bring us some relief this year. I hear the Yanks want this guy from the Twins — Johan Somebody or other.
Anyway, the latest news comes to us, unsources, from The Boston Globe, part owners of the Boston Red Sox. Hooray conflict of interests. The news is in Nick Cafardo’s rather extensive Notes column. Cafardo writes, in the Etc. section, about A-Rod:
If Alex Rodriguez could handpick the team he plays for, Boston might well be No. 1 on his list. According to a source who has talked to Rodriguez recently, he’d love to play for the Sox because he thinks they can win multiple championships… Whither the Yankees? “That’s something I will keep between Brian Cashman and myself,” Boras said. “I’m not making any more comments about the Yankees.”
There’s just so much to say about this little tidbit. Let’s start with A-Rod’s thinking that the Red Sox can win multiple championships. Clearly, A-Rod’s been doing his homework on the Red Sox, and he has decided that the Red Sox’s framework and organization best suits his own desires of finally nabbing that elusive ring. Never mind the fact that A-Rod’s old team owns the most championships in baseball history and is a perennial playoff contender. He wants to go to the World Series champion now, and he’s going to run crying to his mommy if it doesn’t happen.
See, A-Rod just knows what everyone else knows: The Sox have built up quite the team. Rich Lederer on The Baseball Analysts wrote a two-parter on the bright Red Sox future (Part I, Part II), and Baseball Prospectus has quite the love for Boston (Kevin Goldstein, New York’s own Jay Jaffe, John Perotto). It’s so disingenuous of A-Rod to want to go to Boston. In other words, it’s just like him.
Now, I also think there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that A-Rod winds up in Fenway. First, the Red Sox management is just too smart to give A-Rod a ten-year deal worth $30-35 million a year. They don’t want to pay 38-year-old A-Rod that much, let alone 41-year-old A-Rod. Theo Epstein, John Henry and, for all his idiotic talk about the Yankees-Red Sox rivarly, Larry Lucchino just don’t do that anymore.
Meanwhile, if A-Rod thought he had it rough with the New York fans, just wait until he experiences the full wrath of the Red Sox fans. They would expect this greedy turncoat to go 4 for 4 with 4 HRs every day.
Finally, in this three-sentence tidbit from Cafardo, we get another glimpse into the A-Rod/Boras relationship, and it’s starting to sound a little bit like Boras thinks he blew it with the Yankees. The closer to Cafardo’s entry is a veiled comment about Brian Cashman that one could interpret to mean that Boras and Cashman are indeed talking secretively about A-Rod’s potential return to the Yankees.
Yeah, right. The Yankees have made it perfectly clear that A-Rod is dead to them. They aren’t turning back from that stance any time soon.
Boras, you see, is using the media to intimate that the Yankees are in play because that serves to drive up A-Rod’s price. As long as that glimmer of a possibility exists, Boras can use it as leverage. But the Yankees have seemingly out-smarted A-Rod and Boras by maintaining a hard-line stance. The Yanks are not negotiating. Good luck to you, Scott, they said. And I have to think that Boras is maybe beginning to believe that the best deal he’ll see this winter for A-Rod is the one the Yankees originally offered before A-Rod opted out. Wouldn’t that be sweet, sweet revenge?
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