ANAHEIM, Calif. – The tony resorts and late 19th-century cabins on Lake Rosseau in Canada boarded their usual clientele a year ago this week, couples and families frantically choosing between stargazing and kayaking and garden tours and wolf howls.
It was a way to kill a few days, to pry themselves from the world’s rigors, to take a breath and maybe sort the real from the real destructive.
On what happened to be the day of the 80th MLB All-Star Game, Alex Rodriguez chose the golf, the nature hike and a lazy swim in the lake.
Michael Young started at third base for the American League in St. Louis. He was one of four third basemen on manager Joe Maddon’s squad. Three New York Yankees played – Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera and Mark Teixeira.
Alex Rodriguez had been there with them all for nine consecutive seasons, and 12 of the previous 13. And now the world’s best-paid, and maybe most-skilled player, a man with more than 500 home runs and one unreliable hip, showered off the lake water and turned on the television.
He longed to be there, on his feet, healthy and sure of himself. Instead, he was batting .256. He’d hit .207 in June. He’d sat down in spring training, bit back tears and revealed he’d dabbled in steroids as a “young and dumb” kid.
Alex Rodriguez had had better halves of baseball. He’d had better years in his life.
So while the rest of baseball went to St. Louis, he went to Lake Rosseau, some 70 miles north of Toronto, where the hockey players go (“Their Hamptons,” Rodriguez said), and separated the real from the rest.
“I needed it,” he said. “The competitor in me was like, ‘Man, I wish I was there.’ But I needed the four days off.”
The rest of the story, you might remember. Rodriguez healed from his hip surgery, batted .315 in August and .344 in September, then hit six home runs and drove in 18 runs in the postseason, which ended with a parade along the Canyon of Heroes, his first.
He sat Monday afternoon in a ballroom in Anaheim, his only hope for wolf howling coming from the next table over, where Nick Swisher was being … Nick Swisher.
Dressed in a blue blazer with five golden buttons on the cuffs and a white handkerchief peeking from the breast pocket, wearing a heavy gold watch on his left wrist and a tie striped in blue and gray, Rodriguez sipped from a cup of Starbucks, marveled at the young stars in the room and seemed entirely grown up and close enough to satisfied.
He’s not a starter. Evan Longoria, whose game he adores, is. That’s OK. He’s surrounded by Yankees, from the manager to the coaching staff, to his shortstop, second baseman, right fielder and three pitchers.
“I see pinstripes everywhere,” he said. “That’s what’s going to be great.”
He’ll play when Joe Girardi decides to play him, maybe get a big hit late, and have a good time of it. The championship changed everything, but first he had changed everything, and he’s pretty sure that’s why he’s here – and not at the lake – this year.
Need proof as to how far Rodriguez has come? He’s barely a story at the 81st All-Star Game. He’s a guy in the room, one of the 34 or so, albeit the one with 597 home runs. His table was more fly-by than destination.
“Hey,” he said, not ungratefully, “the game is changing.”
Six hundred home runs, where only six other players have gone, could come on the Yankees’ next homestand. Rodriguez views the milestone not in home runs, but in distance. Personal distance and personal growth. In August 2007, eight days after his 32nd birthday, he became the youngest player to hit his 500th home run. Not three years later, he spoke mostly of what he has become since.
“Being here, it brings me perspective,” he said. “How different I am as a teammate, as a person. There’s nothing about being here this year that I take for granted.”
He paused and smiled.
“It’s funny,” he said, “how much things have changed in just 100 home runs.”
He’d revealed what he needed to reveal, to ease his conscience, to simplify his life, maybe in part because he’d been backed into a corner, maybe not entirely sorry he had been. Regardless, it’s better this way.
“I’ve never enjoyed the game more,” he said.
Nor it, him.
“With Al, it was great,” Andy Pettitte said, “me and him had a great relationship from the get-go. We talked a lot. And I feel like he’s gotten more comfortable in there, in the clubhouse. Maybe there was an uneasiness, or he was uncomfortable. But there’s been a little bit of a transition. Maybe a little growing up.”
That’s it, of course. Rodriguez was so busy hitting the first 500 home runs, he’d lost sight of the game being played around them, along with the man hitting them. It wouldn’t happen over the next 100, or the 100 after that.
He said himself that of those 597, the most important home runs he’d ever hit didn’t count toward that total. They were the ones he hit last October in the playoffs and the World Series.
“How far I’ve come,” he said again.
When the interviews were done, he excused himself. It was time for some stargazing. And maybe a wolf howl or two.