Alex Rodriguez played for the Trenton Thunder in a rehab game on Saturday.
The singular event in the life of Alex Rodriguez is not his imminent suspension, or the career home run record that now will never happen.
The event that makes him so remote, so rudderless, took place when he was 9, when his father disappeared. This is not pop psychology to explain a man who blundered into the airplane propeller of adult reality. This is his own theory.
Back when he was a young major leaguer, Rodriguez would occasionally explain himself in terms of his missing father. His mother was strong and smart, and remains so to this day, but he expressed bewilderment that a father could just take off.
People who knew him in Seattle accepted that as the flaw in that apparently perfect equipment — the willowy shortstop with power, who worked so hard and innately understood the game but not life. He went from earnest to clueless, with no warning light — “always on the outside of whatever side there was,” as Dylan wrote about the gangster Joey Gallo.
Barely into his 20s, Rodriguez once told a reporter a poignant tale that in his spare time on the road he visited college campuses, like Harvard, asking students how they chose the college, and what they studied. He had once feinted toward taking a few courses at the University of Miami, probably as a negotiating tactic with the Seattle Mariners, before taking their huge bonus. Now he claimed he was sampling that alternative life — but common sense, self-protection, could not be grafted on by visiting a campus or accumulating elegant business suits.
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