cameroncrazy822

"Alex Rodriguez and his agent, Scott Boras, have become the kind of phonies that aspiring phonies now study in sports, somewhat the way scientists study lab rats.

Here was Boras the other night, getting his client A-Rod into the World Series the only way he can, having him opt out of his Yankees contract on the night the Boston Red Sox were about to sweep the Colorado Rockies.

In so doing, Boras unwittingly gave us a fitting epitaph to A-Rod's Yankee career:

He upstaged more World Series games than he actually played in.

It was the late George Young, general manager of the football Giants, who once said to me, "When they say it's not about the money, it's always about the money."

It is always about the money with A-Rod. He just won't ever say that, even if you threaten him with one of his own baseball bats.

So he tries to make it about his teammates, some of whose names he actually knows. So here was Boras, who never seems to run out of saliva - or angles - talking about Mo Rivera and Jorge Posada and Andy Pettitte instead of the $300 million he thinks he can get for A-Rod someplace else.

"Alex's decision was one based on not knowing what his closer, his catcher and one of his statured starting pitchers was going to do," Boras said in one interview he gave Sunday night while Game 4 of the Series was still going on.

If Boras thinks that he can convince anybody who has followed a single at-bat of Alex Rodriguez's career that he has ever cared for a baseball player other than Alex Rodriguez, then Scott Boras really is the world's greatest sports agent.

Boras has made no secret that he is looking for another 10-year contract for A-Rod. That is out of one side of his mouth. Out of the other, he wants us to believe that a huge reason A-Rod walks away from the Yankees is because of this sudden concern about the futures of the 37-year-old Rivera, the 36-year-old Posada, the 35-year-old Pettitte.

I have even heard some broadcasters suggest that Joe Torre leaving the Yankees might also have been a reason why A-Rod wanted to leave. Every time I did, I had the same reaction: That anybody thinking Rodriguez had loyalty to any manager - especially one who batted him eighth in a playoff game against the Detroit Tigers last year - must be drunk.

It is as interesting to note that this all happens as the Red Sox win again. And that there is all this fuss about A-Rod's contract one night after a Red Sox pitcher, Daisuke Matsuzaka, knocks in more runs - two - with his first postseason hit than A-Rod did against the Indians in the Yankees' division series.

Once, nearly four years ago, Rodriguez nearly went to Boston. The Red Sox were even willing to part with Manny Ramirez and his own big contract ($20 million a year) to bring Rodriguez to Fenway Park to play shortstop for them. If they had managed to do that, they would probably still be looking for their first World Series championship since 1918.

Boras loves to show you a lot of research about how a lot of great baseball players have come up short in the postseason. Even A-Rod short, which means short enough to ride a horse in the Breeders' Cup. In Boston, where Ramirez was MVP of the 2004 World Series, where he and David Ortiz are run-producing machines in the postseason, they must think Boras is the one acting drunk.

You can go up and down the Red Sox batting order, pick any name, and find somebody who did more for his team than A-Rod did for the Yankees in the last three Octobers he played for them.

He was a gold-plated phony coming in the door and he is the same leaving.

Here was Rodriguez standing in the Stadium Club at Yankee Stadium in February 2004, on the day it was officially announced that he was coming to New York to play third base for the Yankees:

"I've come to the point in my career [where] winning is the most important thing. Aside from the personal accolades - and I think I've done a lot there - winning is the most important thing. And being a New York Yankee and the history and the present and the future, I think it provides an opportunity when you drive to the ballpark every day that you actually have an opportunity to win and win big. Hopefully in October. So I think it was just team over personal."

Nothing is ever personal with him, ever. He wants to act like a team guy and sound like a team guy but has no real idea how to do that, because everything is supposed to be about him.

It's why you wanted to laugh the other night when Boras invoked the names of Rivera and Posada and Pettitte. You know who they really are to Alex Rodriguez? Three more guys in the clubhouse trying to breathe his air.

Big Octobers, that's what A-Rod promised Yankee fans. And that is exactly how it worked out during his four seasons here. Only the big Octobers, two of the biggest in baseball history because of the way the Red Sox came back in the league championship series and then swept through the World Series, were in Boston.

A real good Yankee fan I know put it this way yesterday, even talking about a player who hit him 54 home runs this season, one without whom the Yankees wouldn't have even made the first round of the playoffs:

"The Red Sox won, but we lost A-Rod. Call it a split.""

From his mouth (typewriter) to God's ears!