Charles Finch

I've been a Yankees fan since I was about 5 or 6, and I'm really pleased that Alex Rodriguez will be coming back next season, after it certainly appeared as if he would go to a team like the the Angels or Dodgers. I've often wondered whether there was a frisson of racism in the way people view A-Rod, undeniably the greatest player of my lifetime, very probably the greatest of all time. It goes largely unremarked that he is one of the most visible and richest Latino-Americans alive, but would the reaction to him be entirely the same if he were white? I don't know. But it's slightly ugly that commentators (not to mention Yankees' officials) accuse him of avarice and soullessness simply because he has an excellent, tenacious agent and honors the terms of his contract. And it's unjust, for this year at any rate, to criticize his playoff performance when the team would never have reached the playoffs without his regular season dominance.

Sometime in 2012 or 2013 Rodriguez will probably break this year's new home run record, and everyone will agree that it's nice to have the record untainted again; but that won't efface entirely the almost tragic, and certainly traumatic, saga of Barry Bonds. When I was young and truly in love with baseball, Bonds was a skinny, ultra-talented player on those exciting Pittsburgh Pirates teams of the 1980's. Since that time he's made bad choices, but then I wonder again what role race had to play in those choices; perhaps ambition, when combined with a certain defiance at the circumspection that greeted him as a black player, added up to produce the veiled and uncertain figure who will now be part of baseball history forever, for better or worse.