After hitting his first home run of the 2016 MLB season, New York Yankees designated hitter Alex Rodriguez got the day off as his team wasn’t scheduled to play on Monday. Some might snark that he needed a day off following his first heavy lifting of the season. Others might say the off-day comes at a good time for A-Rod, giving him a good feeling to dwell on, rather than think about his struggles during his past nine games.
Let’s preface this by saying it’s early. We can probably use that one for at least another two weeks, until the calendar turns to May. The MLB season is only two weeks old, so it seems rather silly to criticize a player for poor performance. But this is Alex Rodriguez we’re talking about. Everything he does is always under heavy scrutiny. Those who enjoy poking fun at him haven’t had much opportunity to do so for the past six months, especially coming off a surprisingly productive 2015 campaign in which he hit 33 home runs.
However, it doesn’t take very close examination to observe that A-Rod has had a rough start to his 2016 season. Sunday’s home run was the highlight of a 1-for-4 day at the plate, which pushed Rodriguez’s batting average up to .118 (4-for-34) thus far. Yes, it’s early. Yes, that’s a small sample size. A good week could easily turn his early-season numbers around and essentially negate what’s being written here. For any other player, this would just be a bad start and would hardly receive any attention.
But A-Rod is 40 years old now. He’s going to turn 41 in July. Those aren’t typically numbers that we associate with active players, even in this era of improved health, training and, well, other means that often come up whenever the topic of discussion is Alex Rodriguez.
A-Rod’s slow start also prompts raising an eyebrow because — as impressive as his overall power numbers were — he didn’t hit very well in the second half of last season. He compiled a triple-slash average of .216/.324/.448, to be exact, though still slugged 15 home runs in 272 plate appearances. Though some might say Rodriguez should have been plenty rested after sitting out the 2014 season due to a suspension for his involvement in the Biogenesis PED investigation, he was playing his first full season in two years and likely, understandably was worn down by fatigue after six months of playing Major League Baseball. Oh, and he turned 40 years old last July.
While speaking to reporters last week following the Yankees’ series in Toronto, Rodriguez insisted that he was victimized by some bad luck. He was hitting the ball hard, but making outs. Under different circumstances, he may have had three or four hits against the Blue Jays. The Wall Street Journal‘s Jared Diamond supports that with information from FanGraphs, citing Rodriguez hitting line drives on 29 percent of his batted balls.
Yankees manager Joe Girardi may have agreed with that, but the actual results still prompted him to move his DH down in the lineup. Rodriguez was batting third in the lineup — where he hit for most of last season — but on Sunday against the Seattle Mariners, he was in the sixth spot. Whether it was because he felt A-Rod was pressing a bit in the upper-third of the batting order or just wanted to shake things up, the results seem to have justified the move. At least for one day.
Girardi wasn’t just passively moving around names on the lineup card and leaving Rodriguez to figure things out on his own, however. The manager saw some things A-Rod could work on and made a couple of suggestions.
“Joe gave me some good advice,” Rodriguez told the New York Post‘s Fred Kerber. “He told me to stop feeling for the baseball and just drive it. That was good advice. I didn’t try to do too much and just put a good swing on it.”
Whether or not that advice yields some long-term benefits remains to be seen. Rodriguez went hitless in his next three at-bats on Sunday.
Up next for the Yankees is a three-game home series versus the Oakland Athletics. At 6-7, the A’s have been an early surprise in an initially mediocre AL West. But the Yankees will face the bottom of the Oakland rotation, which might provide some more opportunity for A-Rod to get himself right. Rodriguez has never faced Tuesday’s starter, Eric Surkamp, but the left-hander has allowed four runs and nine hits in nine innings thus far. Kendall Graveman gets the nod on Wednesday, but has only pitched against Rodriguez three times, giving up one hit. Against Thursday’s starter, Rich Hill, A-Rod has one hit in five plate appearances. So that’s not much to go on, if looking for evidence that the Yankees’ DH has the potential to get hot soon.
But again, it’s really early in the season. Too early to make any sort of snap judgments. You know it, I know it and Girardi certainly knew it when sniping at reporters constantly asking him about Rodriguez’s season-opening slump. Do you think he’s already tired of hearing about this?
“You know what?” Girardi said to several reporters. “I went and saw a shrink and had him analyze what I should analyze and went from there. That’s what I did.”
Yet what if this is cause for concern? Have we mentioned that A-Rod is 40 years old? And even though he hit those 33 homers last season, he batted .250 with a .486 slugging percentage. He’s also under contract for one more season after this one, set to be paid another $20 million. If he slogs through this year and looks done as a player, will the Yankees really want to keep him around next year? At this point and for all the trouble the team has gone through with him, it seems far more likely that the Yankees would just give him a $20 million handshake and usher him out the door. With Carlos Beltran and Mark Teixeira becoming free agents, next year is an opportunity to start fresh — and with some much-needed payroll flexibility.
These are questions the Yankees don’t want to answer yet. And Rodriguez can quiet such whispers with a few good swings, especially if he hits a few into the seats. But this is Alex Rodriguez we’re talking about. Which means we’re always talking about him.
