Mike Celizic

The big magazine article is out, the denials are in place and Alex Rodriguez, near the end of one of what may be his greatest season as a  hitter, is once again the center of controversy, seemingly without even trying.

There’s an article in the new edition of New York Magazine, written by Will Leitch of Deadspin.com renown, that says A-Rod’s agent, Scott Boras, has already had discussions with the prospective purchasers of the Chicago Cubs about going there after the season’s over. It will all depend, the article  suggests, on how much love the Yankees, their fans and the New York media show the game’s best regular-season player.

It’s so typical. No matter how hard he tries to behave and fit in, ultimately A-Rod is bigger than the team. He denies it, and probably actually believes he’s thinking only of the team. But there’s too much history to see it any other way. It’s about ego and money, and the team be damned.

I have to insert here that Boras denies pretty much everything in the article, as well he should. Such discussions would violate Major league Baseball rules, seeing that A-Rod’s still under contract to the Yankees. He also denies Leitch’s contention that the Cubs’ offer will include an  opportunity to become a part-owner of the Cubs after he’s done playing.

Boras says that’s not true, either.

“Great players with great demand create great rumors,” Boras told the Associated Press, and even that denial reeked of spin and ego, as if this sort of thing is to be expected. A-Rod called the story nonsense, but my hunch is that it’s nonsense of Boras’ invention. If Leitch wrote it, it came from someone with a claim to credibility.

Writers don’t make these things up. They may get misled, but the stories come from people who have a claim to knowledge. The odds are great that Boras had a hand in this, probably behind the scenes. He says he never talked to John Canning, the likely new owner of the Cubs.

But that doesn’t mean that Boras didn’t plant the story with someone else who relayed it to Leitch. It’s what coaches do when they say they haven’t talked to the team they end up signing with a week later. They have somebody else do the talking so they can preserve “plausible deniability.”

What’s got to be annoying to the Yankees is the timing of this – a week before the playoffs. When the story should be about the Yankees’ remarkable comeback from 14.5 games back to the brink of the AL East title, it’s about A-Rod. It always seems to be that way.

He’s an incredible baseball player, but stuff like this sure does make him annoying, sometimes to distraction. He’s like the guy who cuts the cheese in a crowded elevator and doesn’t get why everybody’s trying to get away as far away from him as possible and making faces – after all, the odor doesn’t bother him.

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What’s also instructive is that these stories never come out in the normal outlets – the local papers. They’re always in a major magazine, and they’re usually at times when attention is most focused on the game – just before the season starts or just before it ends. And they always advance his agenda, whether it’s how badly he’s treated by the Yankees or how he and Derek Jeter don’t hang out anymore or how he’s thinking of taking advantage of his option to leave town after this season.

When disruptive news appears in big magazines, neither the timing nor the identity of the publication is accidental. Boras and A-Rod had time to plan what they were going to say or not say, and they knew when the magazine would come out. Neither one is quoted directly in the article, but neither sounded surprised to hear about it.

The timing is perfect for their purposes – at the height of A-Rod’s popularity in the last week of the season, with the Yankees all but guaranteed of a spot in the playoffs. So this automatically becomes the biggest story in New York for the 10 days before the playoffs begin.

Whoever fed Leitch has even managed to make this not about A-Rod but about the Yankees and their fans. The conclusion Leitch reaches in the article is that the money won’t be an issue, because if the Yankees want to keep him, they can afford the price. Instead, he writes, it will be about how much  love Yankee fans and media show him, particularly in the playoffs, where he’s been, shall we say, less than scintillating.

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If Boras is indeed behind the story, it’s another brilliant piece of work by the reigning master at setting the agenda and driving the debate. It turns a great Yankee story into an A-Rod story. It turns the discussion from winning to money. It makes the critical issue not A-Rod’s performance, but the attitude of the fans and media.

You can see where this is going. If A-Rod decides to go to Chicago, it’s going to be because Yankee fans cared more about a couple of little slumps in the playoffs – you know, 1-for-14 in a four-game loss to the Tigers last year; 2-for-15 against the Angels in 2005 – than about his terrific regular-season totals.

The story has all the hallmarks of a Boras operation. It sets up a rival bidder for A-Rod’s services, it sets a price at $30 million a year, sets a 10-year term on the contract, and establishes A-Rod’s importance by suggesting he’s worthy of being given a chunk of the team when he retires.

The prospective Cubs owner may or may not be interested in A-Rod. But if the interest is invented, it’s invented by Boras. That’s what smart agents do: they plant rumors about teams biding for their players to drive up the price.

And they don’t give a damn about how much is disrupts the team on the eve of the most important games of the year.

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