Alex Rodriguez was dead meat when he made the turn at first base. He was racing to second, trying to leg out a sixth-inning double, and about halfway between first and second the Yankee Stadium boobirds were starting to clear their throats.
“We were all laughing because we were all saying, ‘No! No! No!’ on his way to second base,” Derek Jeter said.
The throw came in from left field and Rodriguez slid for the bag, the closer he got to second the more apparent it seemed he would be tagged out. And there was Rodriguez, sliding headfirst in the dirt with his arms outstretched like Superman, the embattled Yankees third baseman impossibly swimming around the tag.
“You’re just trying to survive,” Rodriguez said after the 7-2 win against Toronto. “You know you’re in trouble. It’s like when you come in without your homework and the teacher calls your name. . . . I just got lucky. That was kind of a goofy slide anyway.”
Somehow, Rodriguez pulled his left arm back to his body and reached out with his right hand, as if he was doing the crawl stroke right there in the dirt. Second baseman Aaron Hill went to tag Rodriguez’s left arm, but in a classic fake, Rodriguez avoided the tag and touched the bag with his opposite hand. Safe!
“You can only be out by 30 feet to make that type of slide,” Rodriguez said. “I don’t know how I made it.”
The leadoff double helped jumpstart a six-run sixth inning. Two pitches later, Jorge Posada smashed Ted Lilly’s offering over the left-field fence. Rodriguez helped pile it on with a two-run, bases-loaded single in his second trip to the plate that inning.
“He started the whole thing, and he finished the whole thing.” Joe Torre said. “Alex has had some good at-bats, made some good plays in the field. Everything feels pretty good right now.”
For a player who not long ago was mired in a slump of strikeouts and fielding errors against the Blue Jays in particular, Rodriguez seems to have rebounded and shaken those demons out of his game. Last night Rodriguez went 3-for-5, and he’s now 8-for-19 since returning home this week.
And the closest he’s come to being booed was when he was about 10 feet shy of second base.