The wait is over, and we can all breathe easy. No, the BP hasn’t gotten the oil leak completely plugged just yet. 
The second-longest wait in America is over – Alex Rodriguez finally hit his 600th home run today, blasting a 2-run shot off Toronto’s Shaun Marcum into straightaway center field. Luckily for the Yankees, the ball landed in a net that hangs above Monument Park, thus enabling the team to retrieve it and auction it off online. Commemorative infield dirt, anyone? (the actual ball is pictured here).
A-Rod becomes only the seventh player in MLB history to do so. In addition, at age 35, he is now the youngest player to hit number 600 (Yankee legend Babe Ruth was the previous record-holder, hitting his at age 36). While this is an impressive accomplishment, what’s even more astounding is the lack of interest in A-Rod’s home run.
Let’s face it – “A-Fraud” is probably only second behind “BALCO” Barry Bonds in terms of the fans’ least-favorite modern slugger. Rodriguez is always going to have the stigma of prior performance enhancing drug use (or as he called it in his infamous 2009 press conference, “Boli”), so this should come as no surprise. There has been very little buzz about #600 outside of the New York tri-state area. And even there, some of the local media, such as ESPN’s Ian O’Connor, aren’t afraid to state this fact.
In fact, a lot of baseball fans were openly rooting for him to have a prolonged home run drought, similar to the anti-Bonds backlash as he prepared to break Hank Aaron’s all-time home run record. The opposite was true in 1998 during the McGwire/Sosa home run “chase.”
The bottom line is that no one cares. America in 2010 is a lot different than it was in previous decades. The majority of sports fans don’t much care for athletes that cheat (Tiger Woods), think they’re above the law (Ben Roethlisberger) or are even the least bit narcissistic (LeBron James).
At least now we can move on to more important things, like the story that stole A-Rod’s thunder − Brett Favre’s latest retire/un-retire debacle. Now there’s an athlete who has his finger on the fans’ pulse.
Used with permission of the author.
Chris Lardieri covers the Los Angeles Dodgers for Examiner.com and has written about Major League Baseball for Inside Edge, a scouting company that provides content to ESPN Insider and Yahoo Sports. He previously wrote for 1766, the Rutgers Alumni Magazine, and popular blog, ‘The Outer Loop’. Be sure to follow Chris on Twitter for more MLB and sports observations.
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