Elizabeth, it looks like Dave has left us. He is on vacation this week, but didn’t leave before asking me if I expected him to read and blog about A-Rod while he was gone. I told him I did not. I don’t want to read this on vacation either.
In the meantime, I’ve gotten through about half the book, to chapter 8, “The Trophy Date.” A-Rod has been traded to the Yankees after his unprecedented $252 million/10 year deal with the Texas Rangers.
Leaving aside for a moment the shadily sourced accusations of cheating as a Rangers shortstop and Jose Canseco’s conjectures (even though A-Rod’s already admitted to using steroids now, and we don’t need Canseco telling us something he doesn’t know) I have a big question for you: why is the subtitle “The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez?” So far there’s only one life. That life has just changed over time. Maybe he’s a conflicted person, but he doesn’t seem to have multiple personalities. And I only have about 100 pages left, so I think, at most, Roberts has room to make the case for dual personalities. And even duality would be tough in 100 pages.
There were also a few spots where I felt as though I was stepping out of time and space to read Roberts actually criticizing her own book. She brings up Stuart Smalley, the Al Franken “Saturday Night Live,” I had compared her vision of A-Rod to in a previous post. She says the following at the beginning of chapter 5, “The Perfectionist:”
Alex Rodriguez was suffering from a writer’s block of sorts in forming his own baseball identity, wanting badly for his career to be a living folktale but comparatively frozen on how to start the narrative.
Oh no, Selena. Did you mean to put that in, or was that a note to someone about you writing this book?
She also points out a Sports Illustrated cover from 1996 with A-Rod in front of lava and under the “achingly trite headine, ‘Hot Player’ . . .” Achingly trite. Maybe that’s the only kind of writing A-Rod inspires as a subject.
I’m like Dave, though, the more I read about other characters and subjects, the more I wish that the book were about them. Like Scott Boras, his agent, who went to pharamacology school AND law school. Like Ken Griffey Jr., with whom A-Rod had a rivalry when they both played for the Mariners. And Junior played on the Mariners team with his dad, and they were the only father-son team to do so in the Major Leagues. I also want to read Juiced, Canseco’s memoir.
In defense of Roberts, it gets better than the first few chapters promised. She stops psychoanalyzing A-Rod so much and just gets back to the business of telling stories — the games, the controversy over his salary and diva ways, the era of rampant steroid use. This is not to say that she still doesn’t make unsourced allegations about A-Rod just being a cheater in general. And the book’s best chunk are eight pages of fantastic sports pictures of the man — with his pin-up good looks — in action. Maybe that’s all there really is to say about him. He looks and sounds like a better story than he actually is.
