Alex Rodriguez: The Hero Who Never Was

Following the attacks on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt knew he was addressing Americans who were both worried and fearful. The exact plan for America was uncertain, but Roosevelt made one thing clear, "I honestly feel that it would be best for the country to keep baseball going."

While an unabashed baseball fan, Roosevelt supported baseball for other reasons. He knew the country needed a constant, something to give them hope, and a sense of normalcy.              

But just as baseball has so often been a brace for America, the sport itself has lost its prominence at many times. No other American sport has shared the peaks and valleys that baseball has and, consequently, no other sport has had the larger-than-life heroes who, to this day, still dominate the debate about the greatest baseball players ever.   

The first scandal that rocked baseball was back in 1919, the “Black Sox Scandal.”

When the awful truth came out that the championship games were fixed, it was difficult and painful for fans to fathom that the World Series had been corrupted. Neither the media nor the fans knew if professional baseball could survive such a terrible scandal. 

But when the game needed it the most, a player emerged that not only had the skills, but the personality to bring the game back. 

Babe Ruth, the Sultan of Swat, whose home run hitting prowess and larger than life personality not only brought baseball out of the dead ball era, but also gave faith to the millions who had lost faith and questioned if the game could endure after the Black Sox Scandal.        

From Ruth’s era until the present, there have been a number of players to join the ranks of heroes of the game and helped to continue to keep baseball as America’s game.

Players like Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier on that Spring day in 1947.

Lou Gehrig, ravaged by the disease that bears his namesake, considering himself the luckiest man in the world simply having had the opportunity to play baseball.

Joe Dimaggio, Ted Williams, some of the greatest hitters of all time, needing a pitcher or two—Sandy Koufax and Bob Gibson.

And ultimately, Hank Aaron breaking the Babe’s all time home run record.

The players and their accomplishments transcend the game itself.          

I write this today not to honor the game nor the heroes of the past, but rather to debate where the game stands today and if there will be heroes of the future.

The issue of steroids itself is quite possibly the most beat to death issue in all of sports. While a terrible problem and a plague upon the game, the fact is that it happened, and dedicating eight segments to it on Sportscenter is not going to re-write the past.          
For me, Alex Rodriguez was never “chosen one” to lift baseball out of the shadow of steroids, as some dubbed him. My reasoning is simple, but sure to draw masses of criticism. To me, Alex Rodriguez never played with a pure passion for the game.

I always felt that the reasoning for making him the savior of baseball wasn’t so much the fact that he was a hero to all, but rather, because his home run mark would far eclipse that of Bonds, thereby eliminating the moral dilemma of accepting Bond’s record or not.

So there I said it, although Alex Rodriguez was and still is an absolutely incredible player, he was never the one to lift baseball out of one of its darkest times.

So if not A-Rod, who? Who is capable of restoring integrity to America’s past-time? While keeping it from becoming just that, a past time.

To find the answer to this we don’t need to look very far. If one begins to look around the league, we find that there are players everywhere capable of restoring our faith in baseball.       

Albert Pujols. To Cardinals fans, he is already their hero, to the rest of us, he is an incredible fantasy player and we heard he is pretty good in real life. The reason that Albert Pujols’ name doesn’t stick out as often as it should, is because he keeps a pretty low profile.

A man who cited his reasoning behind not taking steroids as, "I can't fool God. ... I'm a big believer that anything you do in the dark is going to come out in the light, and I fear (God) too much to do anything to disappoint him."

A man who is a lifetime .334 hitter, halfway to 3,000 hits, and has 319 home runs through only eight seasons.

But above all, he is a man that people around him such as his former hitting coach Mike Easler say “ has a passion for the game, a love for the game. You can see it. You can sense it.” All of these credentials, and the man feels blessed just to be playing a game he loved as a kid.          

The Tampa Bay Rays. Yes, I realize they are not a single player, but if ever there was something to restore my faith in baseball, it is that you can win without buying a team.

A perennially awful franchise was able to go from 66-95 to 97-65, falling just shy of clinching a World Series Title. Maybe it gave me flashbacks to my baseball playing days, playing summer baseball on a terrible team with so much potential. Hoping one day we would all come together to make a run of our own.

Whatever it is, I saw a very special camaraderie on that Rays team, and find them to be a great candidate to restore hope in baseball.       

Josh Hamilton. This pick is almost too obvious but I had to include it anyway. Not only did he pull himself out of a drug induced death spiral, but he also maintains an incredibly optimistic approach to the game and life itself.

A physical freak and a constant fan favorite almost everywhere he goes, Hamilton never turns down an autograph and always has a souvenir for fans. He even urges us all to fight a little harder through his miraculous life story.

"It's my privilege to tell my story," he says. "I never get tired of telling it. I know just how fortunate I am."         

These are just some of the men that will lift baseball out of the shadows, men whose rare combination of passion, skill, and perspective allow them to lift a beaten sport back to center stage. A-Rod did not hurt baseball, he merely opened a door for far better candidates to become legends on the diamond.