Winning with class
In a tour de force of self-absorption, Alex Rodriguez, in the person of his unctuous agent, Scott Boras, managed to crash the finale of baseball's greatest show the other night.
Rodriguez told Boras, who told FOX, which told millions of people watching the last innings of the World Series that Rodriguez was opting out of his contract with the New York Yankees. Displaying all the subtlety of a hooker in the shadows of the Port Authority station on 8th Avenue, A-Rod announced his services were available to the highest bidder.
Why this couldn't have waited a day or two is a good question. And it poses another that everyone in New England should be asking: Do we want this guy playing here and living among us?
With the parade and warm feelings out of the way, it's worth noting that winning the World Series was nice, but wasn't as special as 2004. How could it be? The 2004 win ended 86 years of frustration. It was a unique, culturally cathartic moment. There were people in these parts who literally died in peace after that.
But we are now facing another cultural crossroads. If the Red Sox let Mike Lowell go and sign Alex Rodriguez, then we can drop all this talk about Red Sox Nation being a unique phenomenon, unlike any other relationship between a team and its fans.
Statistically, A-Rod is the best baseball player in the world. Can't argue with the numbers. But statistics don't win big games. Character does. And Mike Lowell has more character, if less money, than A-Rod ever will.
In sports, hatred is the sincerest form of flattery. We say we hate the Yankees, but in ways that few of us would admit, we secretly admire the confidence, if not the arrogance, of New Yorkers.
Until only recently, we hoped to win and wrapped ourselves in the comforting cloak of passionate losers. New Yorkers expected to win, and were furious when they did not. Now we expect the Red Sox to win and are in danger of becoming not our parents, but something far worse: Yankees fans.
We in Red Sox Nation have smugly derided the Yankees as the best team money can buy, conveniently overlooking the fact that only the Yankees spend more on baseball players than the Red Sox.
The Red Sox payroll is three times that of those loveable, listless Colorado Rockies they just dispatched. Tickets to Fenway Park are both the hardest to get and the most expensive in the game, meaning that "America's Most Beloved Ballpark" is increasingly the purview of the rich and the well connected.
Traveling hordes of Red Sox fans have invaded out-of-town ballparks, and some have behaved boorishly. It is only recently that you hear the words "arrogant" and "Red Sox fan" in the same sentence.
Winning with class is more important than winning at all costs.
Signing a guy like A-Rod would mean we have drunk the Kool-Aid, that we are Yankees fans, that winning is all that matters. There is considerable evidence that most of Red Sox Nation gets it.
The Red Sox fans who stood behind the dugout in Coors Field in the flush moments after Sunday night's clincher intuitively grasped the significance of maintaining certain standards, even as a losing tradition morphs into one of expected success: They chanted, demanding that Lowell be re-signed and that A-Rod be ignored. Tens of thousands did the same at the parade.
A-Rod didn't bother to fly out to Denver Sunday to pick up his award as the best hitter in the American League. He snubbed Hank Aaron, one of the greats, for whom the award is named.
Milwaukee's Prince Fielder, the National League winner, managed to show up. Perhaps A-Rod was too busy counting his money, or dreaming of ways to spend his next, record-breaking contract.
But you can't buy class. If somebody from Boston has to pay him, let it be our old pal and Dodgers owner Frank McCourt. LA and A-Rod were made for each other.
Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com.
