Written By Jay Jaffe at SI.com
The finish line is in sight for Alex Rodriguez. According to a story by ESPN’sAndrew Marchand, the Yankees’ 40-year-old slugger says that he’ll retire at the end of the 2017 season, when his 10-year, $275 million contract expires. Given his multiple hip surgeries and the rancor with which he fought the league and his team in 2013 during the Biogenesis scandal while unsuccessfully attempting to evade punishment for his use of performance-enhancing drugs, the fact that he can even walk away on his own terms is almost miraculous.
Rodriguez was the first player to be suspended for a full season for his use of PEDs, a punishment that had been reduced by arbitrator Frederic Horowitz in January 2014 from an even bigger 214-game suspension handed down by then-commissioner Bud Selig in August 2013. At the time that the Biogenesis story first broke in early 2013, the New York Daily News and USA Today were among the outlets reporting that Rodriguez would never play for the Yankees again despite being owed $61 million for the final three years of his contract. That assertion turned out to be false and even laughable, given its progenitors’ attempts to wave away contract law, the Collective Bargaining Agreement and common sense. Nonetheless, Rodriguez’s performance in the 44 games he played for the Yankees in ’13 after returning from injury (a .771 OPS, his worst since a 48-game season as a 19-year-old in 1995) suggested that both his body and his baseball skills were in an irreversible decline.
After a full season away from the game, expectations for what a 39-year-old Rodriguez might provide the Yankees in 2015 were quite low. In fact, New York had re-signed mid-2014 acquisition Chase Headley to a four-year deal to remain its third baseman with that in mind. Rodriguez himself said during spring training, “I’m just trying to make the team.”
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