A-Rod Is Letting Us Down

Let's get this on the table first: Alex Rodriguez wants to be a Yankee, and the Yankees want Alex Rodriguez. Usually, it's good when you get a match like that in sports. So what makes this one different? When Rodriguez decided to opt out and become a free agent, it gave us non-Yankee fans a reason to be excited. We actually cared about where A-Rod went, we cared that it wasn't in New York, and (most importantly) we cared about off all this in November. But now it seems like nothing new is on the horizon, which means that baseball will have to go into hibernation.

Rodriguez is one of the greatest baseball players ever, and unlike Barry Bonds, he has nothing hanging over him (except for a postseason curse, which most teams don't care about). What was going to keep baseball relevant throughout the winter was the A-Rod tracker, which would have had a graphic on ESPN much like the Santa tracker on your local news. With the craziness of college football and basketball, the juggernaut that is the NFL, and the drama that is the NBA, can we really be expected to care about what's going on with Mike Lowell and Pedro Feliz?

What Rodriguez did when he opted out, was give us hope that in the very near future a mega-deal would have been done and a new A-Rod era would begin. Everyone was making their predictions, weighing the odds. Rodriguez got our hopes up, and now he is slamming that door of possibilities right back in our faces.

So, just like every other year, nothing exciting is going to happen this offseason. The pieces will fall in their mundane places, and fans across the country won't even notice. Baseball needed A-Rod to go somewhere else. Fans wanted him to go somewhere else. So now, I guess we'll pay attention to something else.