Alex Rodriguez recently indicated he would retire after the 2017 season when his lengthy contract with the New York Yankees finally expires. He then walked back the comments a bit because, as always, nothing is simple with him.
We know the story with Rodriguez by now: three MVP Awards, a World Series championship, a yearlong suspension for steroids, and an unlikely 2015 comeback following the suspension and two surgically repaired hips. That’s to say nothing of his gargantuan paychecks and the headline-making to which sportswriters have devoted gallons of ink for the better part of two decades now.
We will never know how many of his statistics were achieved with the help of PED’s, but the fact remains that his career numbers are staggering:
- 4th on the all-time home run list with 687. He’s 27 shy of Babe Ruth and figures to pass him sometime in the 2017 season
- 3,070 hits, a figure that normally can be exchanged for a one-way ticket to Cooperstown
- 4th on the all-time RBI list, just 20 behind Cap Anson. He’s 159 away from tying Babe Ruth here also
- the best-hitting shortstop of all time until his conversion to third base for the Yankees in 2004.
If Alex Rodriguez decides he and his body have had enough and he calls it a day at the end of his contract, he’ll have had one of the finest careers ever based strictly on the numbers. He hit 33 home runs last season at 40 years old after coming back from his suspension, though he tailed off badly in the season’s second half. It’s hard to believe that he’s got another 30 home runs left in him for each of the next two seasons (assuming he can even stay healthy), but doing so would put him at 747 career home runs. Even with all his money and recent injuries and advanced-for-baseball age, who’s to say he doesn’t come back for one more year to get the handful of home runs he would need to become the next Home Run King? I probably would and you probably would, so it’s a safe bet that he likely would also. His contract calls for him to get an additional $6 million for contract milestones that include hitting home runs No. 714, 755, and breaking the all-time record which is currently Barry Bonds’ 763. That’s a cool $18 million more if he breaks the record but more to the point, it would be another feather in A-Rod’s enormously well-tailored cap.
This would all depend on how healthy and productive Rodriguez is for the next two seasons. If he misses significant time with injuries and/or his offense is league-average or worse, he might find Bonds’ record on a hill that’s just too high to climb. So Alex Rodriguez might retire in two years, and he might not. The countdown clock begins, but it might have to be reset.
