Comments on: Alex Rodriguez: Tragic Hero? (Part II)

By: Revisiting Alex Rodriguez, Tragic Hero | pitchers & poets

Revisiting Alex Rodriguez, Tragic Hero | pitchers & poets — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 21:33:20 +0000

[...] one year ago today, I posted the first entry in a three-part series on Alex Rodriguez. My goal was to examine A-Rod as a Shakespearian tragic hero. In the [...]

By: Eric

Eric — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 17:13:07 +0000

I understand what you’re saying; A-Rod never had that Ripken folksiness or Jeter smooth. But I still can’t help thinking of him as a hero. Maybe it’s because I grew up as a fan as he exploded as a player and he came of age as the phenom on those easy-to-love- Mariner teams of the 90s, but I still see him that way. Maybe heroism is subjective. One man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter right?

As to your second point…I see the sort of lack of humanity in A-Rod, but it’s hard to walk past a New York news stand not to find him a compelling figure in the unfolding human drama. Regardless, it’s definitely worth exploring whether I’m totally off base, and he’s hardly the hero to tohers that I make him out to be.

By: Ted

Ted — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 12:55:37 +0000

“Where he’s gained status as an all-time great hitter, he seems to have lost it as a champion of the sport.”

This is what puts the premise in question to me, in that I don’t think A-Rod ever “lost it,” but instead he never in fact was a baseball hero, in the Jeterian and Ripkenian sense of the term.

To me, he’s always been this great hitter who can’t get anyone to think that he’s a hero at all. We watch him as a kind of a walking stat-maker, an enthralling anomaly, rather than a compelling figure in the unfolding human drama.