Alex Rodriguez and the Price of Greatness

Five Quick Hits

* The Cardinals aren't blowing anyone away this season, but Chris Carpenter should be a heavy favorite to win his second straight NL Cy Young Award.

* The NFL regular season starts in one week. It's about time.

* This year, for the first time, I have NFL Network and ESPNews at my house. During football season, that could be perilous.

* No matter what happens over the next two weeks, sports fans across the world wish Andre Agassi the best.

* Agassi finishes his career as one of the greatest male tennis players of the Open Era. The only guys in his league are Bjorn Borg, Jimmy Connors, Roger Federer, Rod Laver, Ivan Lendl, John McEnroe, and Pete Sampras.

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Today, Alex Rodriguez is one of the most reviled players in Major League Baseball. Yankees fans hate him for his inconsistent performance and failure to live up to expectations. Old-school fans are turned off by the huge contracts he's signed. And almost everyone was upset by his decision to sign with the Yankees, baseball's "Evil Empire," as Red Sox president Larry Lucchino famously labeled them.

While the Yankees roll — they recently completed a five-game sweep of Boston and now lead the AL East by an insurmountable eight games — Rodriguez is currently mired in what is probably the worst slump of his career. He's batting a career-low .275 and, as of this writing, has only one hit in his last 20 at-bats. For most players, there's nothing wrong with hitting .275. But for the reigning AL MVP, making over $20 million this year and coming off a season in which he hit 50 points higher than that, it's not up to par. Even more troubling than A-Rod's numbers — which are low across the board, not just in batting average — has been his inconsistency.

The Yankees are a good enough team that they don't need Rodriguez to have an MVP-caliber season. The year he's having — .870 OPS coming up on triple-digit runs and RBI — would be fine if A-Rod were steadier. But he's been up and down all year, and his play in the field has been an outright liability: he's on pace for a career high in errors and a career low in fielding percentage. A-Rod's lack of consistency looks especially bad when he is compared with teammate Derek Jeter.

It's a natural comparison for several reasons. Jeter is the team's captain and, more than any other player, the public face of the franchise. Rodriguez is the team's highest-paid player and, at the beginning of the season, was widely regarded as the best in the game. Both are natural shortstops, though Rodriguez switched to third base when he came to New York. They're about the same age (Jeter is 32; A-Rod, 31) and started their careers around the same time.

This season, Jeter — a great player, but one with far less natural talent than Rodriguez — is having a much better season. He leads A-Rod in hits, doubles, triples, total bases, runs, steals, on-base percentage, average, and OPS, though Rodriguez still has the edge in power numbers like home runs and RBI. The numbers favor Jeter even before you factor in his steadiness and clutch performances, and Jeter is the king of intangibles.

Rodriguez, since joining the Yankees, has seemed mentally fragile, psyched out by the pressure of playing in the nation's biggest media market, the pressure of playing in games that matter, the pressure of adjusting to a new position, or all three. While Rodriguez was excellent last season, in 2004 (his first year in New York), A-Rod's offensive production was markedly down, and this year, he's having perhaps the worst season of his career.

Rodriguez has always been an exceptional player. He was dominant in high school and the Mariners chose him with the first overall pick in the 1993 draft. Rodriguez was briefly called up to the majors in '94 and '95, but his first full season was 1996. That year, A-Rod got 215 hits, including 91 for extra bases. He led the American League in runs and the majors in batting average, finishing second in the AL MVP voting.

After a sophomore slump, Rodriguez reeled off three more incredible years for the Mariners, winning the AL Silver Slugger for shortstops each season. His OPS was over .900 each season, he hit more than 40 homers each year, averaging 122 runs and RBI, and he had double-digit steals each season.

After the 2000 season, A-Rod's contract with Seattle expired, and a bidding war ensued. On December 11, 2000, Rodriguez became the highest-paid player in the history of professional sports, signing a $252 million contract with the Texas Rangers. The Rangers didn't get any better with A-Rod in town, but he continued to perform at an incredible level. From 2001-2003, Rodriguez had over 180 hits, 80 extra-base hits, and 120 runs every season. He averaged — averaged — 52 home runs, 132 RBI, 382 total bases, 83 walks, and 15 steals, all while playing Gold Glove-caliber shortstop. His overall OPS in Texas was over 1.000.

Despite A-Rod's excellence, the Rangers were terrible, finishing last in the AL West all three years. After the '03 season, Texas traded Rodriguez to the Yankees. In 2004, most people attributed A-Rod's struggles — his power numbers plummeted and his offensive production was the lowest since his '97 campaign — to his adjustment to playing third base. When Rodriguez bounced back in 2005, that seemed to be the case: 2004 was an aberration, a one-year blip. Today, though, it's '05 that looks like the blip. Rodriguez is on pace for career lows in batting average and slugging percentage, with a career high in strikeouts. Recently, he assumed a new position in the batting order, but that doesn't seem to have helped.

No matter what A-Rod's results this season, his legacy is secure. He could retire tomorrow and be a first-ballot Hall of Famer. What's at stake for Rodriguez now is whether he's an all-time great or a true immortal. If A-Rod does retire tomorrow, or hits .275 and slugs .475 for the rest of his career, he'll still make it to Cooperstown, but no one will mention him in "best ever" debates. But if Rodriguez plays another five or 10 years like he did in Seattle and Texas, he'll be in the same sentence as people like Honus Wagner and Cal Ripken, Jr.

If Rodriguez never recovers the form he had before joining the Yankees, that will be the price he pays. And only A-Rod will know whether it was worth trading immortality for money.