SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – The $252-Million Man was heading for the batter's box at Estadio Hiram Bithorn Stadium in the seventh inning Sunday when a funny thing happened. Just as Alex Rodriguez arrived, the voice on the P.A. system announced:
"Now batting ... number three ... Al-exxxxxxxx ... Fernandez."
Huh? Alex Who?
Hoo-boy. For the $252-Million Man, it was that kind of day.
We don't know how Rodriguez would have scripted his first game as a Texas Ranger if we'd given him a laptop. But we'd bet the "out" clause he wouldn't have scripted this:
A Knoblauch-esque throwing error on the first ball hit to him all season.
A Cosmo Kramer slip and tumble, on the very next play, as he was trying to turn his first double play of the year.
Another ground ball, later in the game, in which he tripped over his own shoelaces and wound up on the ground again.
A P.A. announcer who got him mixed up with an injured pitcher for the Marlins.
And an 8-1 loss by his new team to the Toronto Blue Jays, in a nationally televised Opening-Day extravaganza from a distant island, beamed to numerous other countries through the miracle of satellite.
"Well," said A-Rod afterward, "you have to start somewhere. Some good things happened, too. A couple hits. Just a little of everything: Error. Slip. Hit. First game. Now I just want to move on."
Hey, at least there was good news on that move-on front. Move on he will. By 9:30 Sunday night, the charter was winging its way toward Texas, where the real Alex Rodriguez will be bound to surface one of these days.
He might not slip again for the next nine years and 161 games of that contract. But the baseball gods sure it had it in for him in Game One.
At least he wasn't the only one.
Third baseman Ken Caminiti took a calamitous pratfall himself while fielding a ground ball.
Starting pitcher Rick Helling got Tony Batista to hit what he thought was a pop-up in the fourth inning, only to see it turn into a game-breaking home run – thanks to the largesse of Estadio Hiram Bithorn where the "gap" in left-center is a cozy 339 feet away.
Reliever Mark Petkovsek faced four hitters in his own Texas debut – and got none of them out.
Two other new Rangers – second baseman Randy Velarde and centerfielder Bo Porter – struck out three times apiece.
And a team built around one of the scariest lineups in baseball went 0-for-Puerto Rico (0-for-10) with runners in scoring position.
"All I can say," said Helling afterward, "is that it was just kind of a funky day overall. I don't know how to explain it. A lot of things that could have happened either way, for either team, all happened bad for us."
Oh, somewhere in there, by the way, it was a great day for international baseball goodwill and all that.
The warm ovations for Pudge Rodriguez and Carlos Delgado were unforgettable.
The mix of music – from salsa beats to U2 (or is that U-Dos?), from the pounding of the conga drums to the theme from "I Love Lucy" – was a kick.
The major-league debut of the local mascot, Populaso, during the seventh-inning stretch was darned near electrifying.
And the six and a half minutes it took to get through the national-anthem triathlon – Canada, U.S., Puerto Rico – represented a slice of baseball life you won't ever witness in, say, the Metrodome.
"To come to the stadium," said Delgado, "and see the stadium sold out, and to get introduced, I got goose bumps. And to see Pudge and Ricky Ledee come out waving their Puerto Rican flags and the people went nuts, that was totally priceless."
Even Rangers manager Johnny Oates, after an international-incident kind of afternoon, was able to say – and mean it – that "if I could have picked any place other than one of the big-league parks to open up the season, I would have picked right here."
He just wouldn't have picked everything that happened once the game started, that's all.
Asked if this wasn't quite the perfect introduction for A-Rod to the good folks of Texas, Oates observed, astutely: "I don't think he needs any introduction. I think they know who he is and they know what he can do."
In other words, they know this team didn't pay 252 million clams for THIS.
Rodriguez's day actually started just fine. In the first inning, he became the first player in baseball to get a hit this season. Then, thanks to a slicing double by Rafael Palmeiro, A-Rod also became the first player in baseball to score a run this season.
Perfect. Want to renegotiate?
OK, never mind. This plot began turning the other way in short order.
Second inning. Delgado at the dish. The Rangers lined up in their Carlos Shift, which positioned A-Rod to the right side of second base. Whereupon Delgado bounced a ball right where he was standing.
That was the good news.
But mysteriously, Rodriguez seemed to lose his footing, then hesitated, and then bounced the throw to Palmeiro, making him the first player in baseball to commit an error this season.
Not so perfect.
"I'm not sure he'd ever played on that side of second base before," Oates alibied. But A-Rod was having none of that.
"I just short-armed the ball," he said. "I was positioned perfectly. I just couldn't get it done. Routine play."
Only seconds later, he had a chance to turn a routine double play. And that, too, turned out anything but routine.
After taking Velarde's flip and crossing the bag, he inexplicably toppled over and barely got a throw off at all. That play couldn't be scored as an error. But we'll take the liberty of scoring it as downright embarrassing, at the very least.
Since Caminiti also careened to the rock-hard AstroTurf in similar fashion, Rodriguez was asked if the field had given them problems.
"Oh, it wasn't the field," he said. "Cammy and I were both wearing plastic spikes, and they just made for a slippery surface."
They later both changed into metal spikes. But even that didn't prevent A-Rod from going down again in the seventh inning, when he tripped over his laces as he planted to field a ground ball by Shannon Stewart. Fortunately for him, the three-knockdown rule wasn't in effect, according to international rules.
"I've never had that happen once," a confused Rodriguez said later. "Then I had it happen twice in three innings."
Well, whatever it was that happened to the Rangers, it's safe to say they didn't spend six weeks in Florida honing themselves to perfection, just so they could have an afternoon like this one.
"It was pretty bizarre, no question," Helling said. "Alex's first play with us was Delgado's ball. He slips a little getting to it. Then he double-clutches. Then he slips when he throws it. It was like an out-of-body experience. I was, like: `What's going on here?'"
For questions like that, there are no answers, naturally. But it's just as well. You sign the best free agent in history, give him enough money to buy his own zip code, spend three months marveling at how smoothly he handles all the attention ? and then he can't stand up for nine innings in his first game.
Right.
And just when you think he's the biggest name in the whole sport, they even get his name wrong.
Welcome to another baseball season. Why should this one make any more sense than the 124 that came before it?
Jayson Stark is a Senior Writer at ESPN.com.
| |
|
