When Alex Rodriguez went down with a quad injury that will keep him on the shelf for a few weeks this year, he hadn’t been off to the same start he enjoyed last year. Admittedly, that’s not a fair comparison. How often does any player hit 14 home runs in a month while single-handedly carrying a team?

But despite a slower start, he still had a vital role in the lineup. As the cleanup hitter, he was hitting .272./330/.506 with 4 HR and 10 RBI in 81 at-bats. Those are poor numbers by A-Rod’s standards, but to suggest that the team doesn’t miss him is wishful thinking at best.

In his absence, the Yankees’ replacement third basemen have been downright awful. The three replacements — Wilson Betemit, Alberto Gonzalez and Morgan Ensberg — have now enjoyed 70 plate appearances as third basemen this year. Collectively, they are hitting .239 with a .271 OBP and a .269 slugging percentage. That is utterly woeful.

Things don’t look much better behind the dish either. As a catcher, Jorge Posada hit .321/.345/.429 this year in 29 plate appearances. The other three catchers have put together 114 plate appearances and are hitting .224/.263/.348.

While it’s easy to say that the Yankees were a .500 team without A-Rod and, hey, wouldn’t they still be a .500 team now, that ignores the reality offered by those who have tried to replace Jorge. The Yankees are missing a ton of offense right now, and it’s showing in the product on the field. The middle of their lineup is weak; Shelley Duncan had to hit cleanup against lefties, and even Derek Jeter found himself penciled into the four hole for one game. The bottom of their lineup — drawing well below league-average production from the C and 3B spots — has become a terrible liability. It’s a cascade issue.

The Yankees probably could have withstood an injury to either A-Rod or Jorge. They probably would be two games behind Boston had just one of them gone down. But with both out, this team’s offensive production slides off the table. Get well soon, guys.

Popularity: 4% [?]

According to PeteAbe, A-Rod could be a week away from rejoining the Yankees. Right now, the Yanks hope to ship A-Rod and his strained quad down to Tampa tomorrow. He’ll workout at the Yankees’ complex over the weekend and test his leg in games on Monday and Tuesday before hopefully rejoining the Yankees in Tampa on Wednesday. Sounds good to me.

Popularity: 1% [?]

You’ve probably heard it by now, but Alex Rodriguez has been placed on the 15-day disabled list. No word on the corresponding move. We’ll update you tomorrow.

Update: Just checked. Betemit went on the DL April 14. So he can come off the DL.

Popularity: 2% [?]

June 22, 1995
July 26, 2006
August 25, 2006
April 8, 2008

Three times as a Yankee, A-Rod has struck out four times. One time ever in his career before arriving in the Bronx, he achieved that dubious feat. It’ll happen.

Popularity: 1% [?]

With Jeter injured, the great Yankees short stop debate kicks back up again. We all know Derek Jeter isn’t the best fielding short stop around, but how should the Yanks replace him? Jeff Passan at Yahoo! Sports thinks that using A-Rod at short is so crazy it just might work. John Harper thinks that A-Rod, who has played just a few innings at short since 2003, should stay at third. I think using Morgan Ensberg at third and A-Rod at short isn’t the worst idea the Yanks have put forth recently.

Popularity: 3% [?]

In an exclusive by RAB favorite George King, former Yankee bullpen catcher and A-Rod confidante vouches for Alex’s good name. “In four years I was with him 24 hours a day, and not one time did I ever hear, see or get wind of anything having to do with performance enhancing drugs, steroids, HGH, anything,” Borzello said. And this, folks, is what we’ve come to. Because a bitter and jealous Jose Canseco writes it in a book that had to struggle to find a publisher, friends now feel the need to clear A-Rod’s name. Canseco won’t offer up any proof of what he writes; whatever happened to innocent before proven guilty?

Popularity: 3% [?]

As the Red Sox and A’s duke it out in the late innings - good work, Huston Street - the Daily News checks in with everyone’s favorite third baseman, Alex Rodriguez. In an interview with John Harper, A-Rod talked about his past regrets and contract decisions.

The piece takes a different tone from others. Instead of rehashing that familiar territory of the opt-out saga, A-Rod talked about his 2000 decision to go with the money in Texas instead of his heart with the Mets. It’s a twist, but in light of this off-season’s events, it doesn’t ring totally true. Harper writes:

The conversation initially centered on A-Rod’s pursuit of a ring, but veered off into areas he has rarely discussed: The regret he suffered when he shunned the Mets in favor of the Rangers in 2000, and the .personal conflict that surrounded his decision to break away from agent Scott Boras this past offseason.

“I went for the contract when my true desire was to go play for the Mets,” Rodriguez said of his decision to ink his $252 million deal with Texas eight years ago.

As A-Rod looked back on the events of the past offseason, he seemed haunted by the idea that in breaking free of the Yankees he could have made another decision based strictly on money and wound up as unhappy as he was in Texas for three years.

The three-time MVP says that at some point after his opt-out decision in October, he realized he could have been heading for a similar scenario, with Boras dictating his next destination…”So to make the right decision just feels really good,” Rodriguez said, “versus being taken down a road where I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, where am I? Oh, $400 million to play in some place I hate? Great, I’ll blow my — head off.’ I wanted to remain a Yankee and for once I put my money where my mouth was.”

Of course, absent in this seemingly honest confession by A-Rod is any mention of the fact that he still managed to cash in to the tune of at least $275 million. He still managed to land the biggest contract in the history of baseball, and for all we know, the Yankees pulled a Tom Hicks and outbid themselves. Since A-Rod reconciled with the Yanks before fielding any other serious offers, we’ll never know if the Cubs or Angels were willing to hit that $300 million plateau.

As Opening Day approaches, the cynic in me wonders if A-Rod should just leave this past behind him. What’s done was done for whatever reasons. It’s hard to envision an altruistic A-Rod eschewing millions of potential dollars to play for the Yanks for just $275 million plus endorsement opportunities and those historic bonus clauses. Maybe for A-Rod, he viewed this as a decision to stay in New York, but he has hundreds of millions of reasons to forget his regret.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Nice boat. (Photo by Patrick Demarchelier/Men’s Vogue)

Stop the presses! It’s another tell-all A-Rod magazine piece. This time, it’s written by self-professeed Red Sox fan and blogger Seth Mnoookin, and it appears in next month’s issue of Men’s Vogue.

Setting aside issues of objectivity — it’s only a little fishy that a Red Sox blogger gets tabbed to write a cover story on Yankee poster boy Alex Rodriguez — Mnookin’s piece is mind-numbingly the same for anyone who’s followed the A-Rod Saga at all over the last few years. It starts out in October and rehashes the whole opt-out/falling-out triangle between A-Rod, Scott Boras and the Yanks. It backtracks to the early 1990s and follows A-Rod to Seattle, to Texas, to the Yanks, to the post-season where he struggled in 2007 and still managed to out-hit the rest of his teammates.

As the pieces drags on, it’s obviously heading to the same place: A-Rod is a great baseball player, but he doesn’t allow the public to see the Real Alex Rodriguez. Heaven forbid the man wants a little bit of privacy. A-Rod poses for photos; he answers questions by e-mail. But no one else wants to comment. While Mnookin tries to hint that this is some shortcoming of A-Rod’s, I’d like to think it’s a bunch of people attempting to respect the guy. The need to tear him down is overwhelmingly ridiculous.

Where Men’s Vogue gets it right is in a sidebar piece about A-Rod’s workout. I’m sore just pondering his routine.

But in the end, it’s all the same. Maybe one day, we’ll hear something new about A-Rod. We know Boras was a father figure; we know they don’t talk; we know A-Rod and Derek Jeter had to bury the hatchet on some seven-year-old comments. Until someone finds something new on A-Rod, do we really need to keep reading this?

Popularity: 2% [?]

Here’s something interesting about A-Rod: If Alex plays 154 games or more this season for the Yanks, a feat he has achieved each year in pinstripes, he will have logged more games as a Yankee than as a Mariner. Hard to believe, no? I still think of him as a Mariner first, but after this year, his longest tenure will in all likelihood be with the Yanks.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Jon Heyman at Sports Illustrated relays the story of how A-Rod almost wasn’t a Yankee anymore. It’s a nice look back on a story that was pretty much lost in the rest of the off-season hoopla. Once the Santana derby took front page, we all kind of swept A-Rod under the rug. Which is nice, since he was taking the brunt of it from the fans for the few weeks in which this situation was up in the air.

According to Heyman, the Angels, Dodgers, Mets, Red Sox, Tigers, and Giants were in on A-Rod, whether explicitly or implicitly. Further, A-Rod planned to meet with all of them, if for no other reason than to increase his leverage. However, it appears his desire to remain in the Bronx remained at the forefront of his mind.

So why did he opt out?

Rodriguez and Boras had believed that the Yankees needed to see, 1) that A-Rod was willing to leave, a serious concern since Boras thought A-Rod tipped his hand too much throughout his glorious 2007 season, and, 2) that others were willing to pay much more. Boras always believed the Yankees would get back in and pay the market rate, which he felt was 10 years for at least $300 million, for the three-time MVP with as much marquee power as home-run power — but only after he opted out and gave them a reason to.

And so we had the opt-out situation, in which many of us waved goodbye to A-Rod, even though it wasn’t our ~$21 million he had blown. The Yankees had made it pretty clear that he wouldn’t be welcome back if he opted out.

Boras felt the Yankees needed to be shocked. And while the opt-out did that, it apparently also shocked A-Rod. Rodriguez understood he’d be opting out, but he didn’t plan on the quick negative reaction by fans, media, and especially by the Yankees, including new boss Hank Steinbrenner, who publicly said the Yankees were done with A-Rod. “Good-bye,” Steinbrenner announced on opt-out night.

We did plenty here at RAB after the opt-out. Namely:

• Bid him adieu, noting that the opt-out signaled that he never intended to re-sign.
• Moved his category from “Current Yankees” to “Selfish Jerks.”
• Created a new one: “A-Rod’s Shimmy Makes the Women in New York Puke.”
• Explored the myriad options open for the Yankees to fill the third base vacancy.

A few weeks later, though, we learned that A-Rod was talking to the Steinbrenners about a contract. We were baffled a bit — and I talked to more than one person who thought it was a facade to extract more value from the other teams on the market. But after a day or so, it became apparent that these talks were serious, and that A-Rod would be a Yankee for the rest of his career.

Rodriguez triumphantly called Boras from the meeting with the Steinbrenners. He mentioned some hope for incentives but didn’t seem to care too much about them. Boras nonetheless pressed for $30 million in very attainable home-run milestones and finalized the contract language. So with the $10 million Texas was obligated to pay after the opt out, that could bring the total haul to $315 million — which is not too bad for a guy who was portrayed as crawling back. Yet, it probably still fell short of what he could have gotten elsewhere (or maybe even from the Yankees, had he waited it out).

Given the treatment of A-Rod by the fans and media in the past, I was pleasantly surprised by the reaction to his re-signing. While a number of fans thought that we were making a mistake by giving him 10 years and $275 million, he was for the most part welcomed back with open arms.

And A-Rod is glad to be back, too.

“New York brings out the best in you. And the worst,” Rodriguez said the other day. “You have to be able to look in the mirror and be honest with yourself I didn’t want to go to a place and hide and have my weaknesses be swept away. New York has made me a better man. And it’s made me a better baseball player.”

It might be spin, it might be PR speak. But it’s damn nice to hear those words from the best player in baseball.

Popularity: 2% [?]