A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez (11 page)

Alex tried to downplay expectations, even trotted out a bit of toe-scuffi ng humility for the beat writers. “I never want to crowd him,”

Alex said of Griffey. “I want to be a guy who helps him win. I want to be the guy in the background. Whether fans like me and my personality, that’s up to them.”

This, of course, was far from the truth. The need for adoration fueled Alex’s ambitions, and he thought he was destined to be baseball’s best player. But he understood that the fans liked humble players, so he became a student of how to play the media. He worked on perfecting his answers, as if each interview were an audition. On occasion, when his answers were ill received or sounded awkward or he appeared to have been rambling he would say, “I didn’t mean it that way. My English isn’t very good.”

After four years of schooling in the Dominican’s ABC school and the rest of his education in the U.S. system, Alex’s English was just fi ne. But unlike players who shrugged off malapropisms and peppered their speech with profanities, he was self-conscious and overly deliberate when he spoke in public. (Jose Canseco once wrote that Alex spoke as if his answers had to be fi ltered through a “focus group.”)

The media trainer Andrea Kirby was Alex’s public speaking coach. At his rookie orientation, she began to work with him at the request of a Major League Baseball offi cial. The league recognized that Alex could be a huge draw for them— a handsome, bilingual
prodigy with big-play fl air and studio-quality charisma at a time when fans were sick of surly sluggers like Albert Belle, who spewed out expletives in live interviews and upended clubhouse buffet tables out of anger.

Alex was angelic by comparison, baseball’s boy-band idol. He was the youthful antidote for a sport still hobbled by the labor strife of 1994, when the entire postseason was canceled. Fans were dis-gusted by greedy players and owners, and attendance plunged.

The fans who did go to the ballparks often booed the players whose behavior, they felt, had tarnished the sport. Barry Bonds and Bobby Bonilla habitually preened after hitting home runs, while Darryl Strawberry and Steve Howe were cited for repeated drug offenses.

Alex could be the savior. He was neither too urban nor too country; he was smooth and stylish, unlike the players who sported gold chains as thick as lassos (“I don’t like to wear gold,” Alex said) or chewed on wads of tobacco that made their cheeks puff out like Dizzy Gillespie’s.

There was a genuine, lovable core in Alex, the part of him that was acutely sensitive to what others wanted him to be, the part that made him so popular with children. Kids of all ages wrote to Alex, requesting him as their show-and- tell project in school. He was fas-tidious. He was meticulously inoffensive. He had his hair trimmed once a week and brushed his teeth obsessively to polish his smile.

He claimed to fl oss four times a day. “He knew that people were looking for him to be, well, I want to use a phrase that I’ve never used before: a clean hero,” Kirby recalls. “He knew there was an expectation for him to be one of the good guys, and he wanted to live up to that.” He wanted to be good at being good.

Alex would watch taped interviews he’d done and scan the morning papers, looking for his name. “He liked to read the papers and all that stuff,” Cora says. “So he knew everyone was talking about him.” He rehearsed out loud answers to easily anticipated
press questions while driving in his black Jeep Cherokee— his only splurge buy from his signing bonus. His salary was $109,000— the league minimum— but it was plenty of money to buy video games and his high-end suits and to pay for all those long-distance phone calls to his family. He had budgeted $1,000 a month for inciden-tals and saved most of it.

Alex was hardly a shut-in stuffi ng his money under his mat-tress. He explored the city, walking through Seattle’s art galleries and its music district, trying to get to know his new surroundings.

“He was mature for his age, mature and confi dent,” Mariners former scouting director Roger Jongewaard says. “He wasn’t afraid to try things or do things. He went to places and did things that young kids just don’t go to, just don’t do.”

When Alex was asked back then how he stayed away from trouble, he said, “What I try to do is stay busy. Believe it or not, I went to Stanford University the other day and just walked around campus. I tried to picture myself being a junior in college and what it would be like. Stanford is one of the places I had a chance of going to school.” When asked what he did on the road, he said, “When we go to Anaheim, I like to go to Newport Beach in the morning, relax, hang out and read a book.”

In the years to come, he would tell the Seattle reporters how impressed he was with Leonardo da Vinci’s genius. “He wrote his notes backward so that people wouldn’t take his ideas,” Alex said.

“People like me would have to put them up to a mirror to read them. He says you can learn seven facts every second for the rest of your life. That means we are using only two percent of our brain.

It fascinates me.”

And he fascinated everyone who followed baseball. They all agreed: Alex was just what the sport needed.

He liked shopping for Frank Sinatra tunes. He was old school.

Sometimes, as Sinatra’s music fl owed through the speakers of his Jeep, his mind would become preoccupied with his image. He
would get lost in replaying his fl ip throws on a double play. He would go over again and again what he had said in the postgame interviews. Had he remembered to make eye contact? Had he engaged the reporter in personal conversation? Had he answered with authenticity?

“Some of the training methods are technical things,” Kirby says. “But they come across to people at home as ‘I’m seeing a genuine person,’ and he really wanted that. I think he really wanted people to see the best of who he is.”

The irony is that all this self-consciousness only added to the pressure he placed on his performance on the fi eld. During spring training, each at bat, each catch, each throw felt pinched by pressure because he knew he was the starter and that everyone was watching him. “It’s not easy making that transition from high school,” his manager, Lou Piniella, said. “But Alex was a special talent. We knew that in a short period of time, this guy was going to be an All-Star player.”

Alex was overwhelmed for the fi rst time in his baseball life by the very thing he craved: attention. He had come down with a case of the uglies. The yips. He struggled to fi eld normal hops. He struggled to put the bat on the ball. He struggled to fi nd himself in February and March. “He was lost,” Cora recalls. “He had no idea what he was doing, especially when hitting. I don’t want to say he was scared, but he was
concerned
. He was concerned that he wasn’t going to live up to the hype.”

Alex picked apart his ungainly plate appearances— was his pitch selection that off?— and he obsessed over his misplays. Alex confi ded his fears to Cora, and Cora introduced him to Fannin.

Cora told him that Fannin had taught him that self-criticism wasn’t a noble pursuit; instead, it was a destructive diversion. “I have the phone number of a guy who can help you,” Cora told Alex in late March. “Give him fi ve minutes. I know it’s going to work.”

Fannin met Alex in mid-April and immediately confronted
him with questions: “What do you want, and why am I here?”

There was no hesitation in Alex’s voice when he stared Fannin in the eye and said, “Hall of Fame.” Over the next few minutes, Fannin asked Alex if he realized how much a life lived by S.C.O.R.E.

would cost him. Alex thought he meant money, since Fannin’s rates ran from $10,000 to $50,000 a year per client. But Fannin was referring to the discipline needed to succeed. His S.C.O.R.E.

program required Alex to be selfi sh. He would have to isolate himself from his family. “You’ll miss birthdays,” Fannin told him. He would have to cut himself off from undisciplined teammates.

The ideology seduced Alex. He craved guidance. He wanted to know: What is the secret to greatness?

Bill Haselman, a backup catcher in the majors for 13 seasons, was a teammate of Alex twice: in the minors, playing in the frozen reaches of Canada and then, years later, in Texas. He was a friend who thought of Alex as a good guy but could see his neediness.

“When he came into the league, he wanted to learn as much as he could, almost too fast,” Haselman says, “instead of just letting the game take its course and learning it as you go. It’s like he wanted to drink from a fi re hose. And that’s good, because he wanted to learn a lot, but it’s also hard to do when you’re coming up and wanting to be successful at the same time. He was always trying to fi nd out what was going to make him better. That’s what he’s driven by.”

Fannin provided easy-to- remember, easy-to- use answers. “I have a lot of tools, a lot of routines on how to attract the zone,” he told Alex. “I have preperformance tools; I have adjustment, quick tools you can do in fi fteen, thirty seconds.”

What others might consider fortune-cookie philosophy, Alex devoured as wisdom. Fannin soon persuaded Alex to begin reciting a catchphrase in his mind before every at bat: “I hit solid with an accelerated bat head.” For the next 12 years, Alex would say these exact words to himself as he stepped out of the on-deck circle. For
a dozen years, Alex would either talk with, text or e-mail Fannin before every game.

The results would, in Alex’s own words, change his baseball life. “Jim is my sounding board, guide, advisor, mentor, therapist, baseball strategist, life coach and Zone coach. And my friend,” he once wrote.

This sounded so
Oprah
, but Alex grew up during the boom times of the self-involved, self-help culture. He watched the day-time talk goddess on occasion and saw Al Franken’s Stuart Smalley character mock the popularity of therapy on
Saturday Night Live
with his “doggone it, people like me” routine. Alex grew increasingly into himself.

“He’d put one of those self-help books on the chair in front of his locker,” says one former Mariner. “He wanted us to see it: ‘Look, I’m improving my inner self.’ It was different, I’ll say that.”

Alex also kept a scrapbook of newspaper and magazine articles about himself in his duffel bag. He would read them from time to time as if to absorb a hit of self-affi rmation. As if Fannin weren’t enough of a self-esteem prop. Funny thing, though, it worked.

“He changed,” Cora recalls. “It was almost right from the get-go.” By the time Fannin sat down with Alex in Milwaukee, his stats were slowly inching up. In April, Alex had been hitting ninth as he groped for singles. His spot at the bottom of the order was part of Piniella’s plan to ease him into the big time. “Sweet Lou was great for Alex,” says Fernando Arguelles. “I told Alex when we signed him that Lou spoke better Spanish than we did. Sure enough, Alex said, ‘Oh, man, you were right.’ Lou was a great father fi gure.”

Piniella was not known for patience and sensitivity toward youth. The good humor and lovable side of Piniella could, at any moment dissolve into a dirt-kicking rant at an umpire that would inevitably end with Sweet Lou’s spittle dotting the uniforms of everyone within the blast zone. Yet he truly liked Alex. “Like his own son,” Arguelles says. Some wondered if Piniella had the deft touch to deal with young players, but he was careful with Alex.

He tucked Alex away from scrutiny, sticking him at the bottom of the lineup. Within a month, with Fannin in his head, Alex began performing. By May 8, Piniella had seen enough maturity in his young shortstop that he moved Alex into the number two spot, right in front of Griffey. In the 49 games after the switch, Alex hit .360 with 13 homers and 46 RBIs.

Rodriguez gives a lot of credit for this hot streak to Fannin, but baseball observers know that Ken Griffey, Jr., played a large role. He hit right behind Alex in the third spot, which meant that pitchers went after Alex, throwing him strikes, needing the out because they didn’t want to face Griffey with a man on base. That meant Alex saw a lot of fastballs that, with his uncanny bat speed, he was able to feast upon. “The most obvious thing Junior does for me,” he said at the time, “is get me better pitches.”

There were other factors. Mariners hitting coach Lee Elia taught the young shortstop to square his body at the plate to create a solid foundation. He also moved Alex’s pinkie off the knob of the bat for a better grip. Small adjustments, but they had a major impact for a hitter this talented. Elia knew he was working with a special player. “I had Mike Schmidt in Philly, Don Mattingly in New York, Ryne Sandberg in Chicago,” he said, “but I haven’t seen too many guys who can get their bat through the hitting zone any faster than Alex. With his ability, there’s no telling what he can accomplish.”

The league’s best players were scheduled to play the 1996 All-Star Game in what most people felt was the worst stadium in Major League Baseball. Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia— the Vet— was old, decrepit and ugly. The turf was the phony green of an arti-fi cial Christmas tree. The smell of garbage, an unsavory mix of half-eaten hot dogs, beer-soaked popcorn and discarded cole slaw, permeated the corridors, and the workout room was literally full of gym rats— scurrying, not lifting. The place was a dump, and Alex Rodriguez was thrilled to be there.

A few days earlier,
Sports Illustrated
had hit newsstands with Alex on its cover. With a backdrop the color of hot lava and an achingly trite headline, “Hot Player,” the cover featured a shot of Alex in a gray Mariners uniform with a blue sweatband on his left forearm bearing his jersey number: 3, in honor of Braves outfi elder and perennial All-Star Dale Murphy, another spotless hero Alex had worshiped. In the photo, Alex was smiling, with streaks of eye black high on his cheekbones and his fl ip-style sunshades under the brim of his Mariners cap. He was 20 years old and appeared to be happy and completely relaxed. And why wouldn’t he be? He was coming to the All-Star Game with a .336 batting average and on the cover of the nation’s biggest, most respected sports magazine.

The story inside was a paean to Rodriguez so effusive that it might have been written by Alex’s mother— or his agent. In the opening paragraph, Gerry Callahan wrote, “By 10 p.m., he is nestled in bed with his Nintendo control pad. He makes Roy Hobbs look like John Kruk, and he makes you wonder if you’re missing something: A guy this sweet has to be hiding some cavities.”