Alex Rodriguez is more likable than he's ever been, and the reason is almost funny: he stopped trying to look like a complete person.
For most of his career he came across as the most managed man in the sport. Then came the PED era, the therapy, the stretch where, in his own words, nobody wanted to deal with him. He was once called "the best paid pariah in the history of sports." That's a long way from where he sits now, on Fox's World Series set, between David Ortiz and Derek Jeter, baseball still looking like the entire contents of his life.
He's been confessing it for a decade. Taking the Fox job back in 2015, he said it plainly: "I love the game. I love to watch. I live for baseball." At 50, he put a number on it, saying he's probably watched every World Series game for the last 45 years and got lucky enough to play in six of them. Nobody focus-groups that. It's a man admitting his life runs on one channel.
That's exactly why people have warmed to him. A guy who seemed to use baseball to build a brand now looks like a guy who genuinely can't stop watching it. You can see this obsession, and seeing it makes it sympathetic in a way his old calculated ambition never was. When he needled Ortiz for getting stuck in an elevator before Game 4, or when he's breaking down a 12-inning thriller like the Rays' 4-3 survival act at Tropicana Field, the tell is the same every time: he'd be doing this in his living room for free.
Call enthusiasm this loud from a man with his history chemically assisted if you want, or treat a life with nothing outside the game as something to mock. The joke lasts about a second before it falls apart, because the obsession is the single most honest thing about him. A-Rod has sold a lot over the years that's fair to doubt. This obsession isn't one of them.
Credit for the turnaround starts with A-Rod. He went through therapy, said out loud that nobody wanted to deal with him and that he was just trying to get his life together, and let people see him needing the game instead of spinning them. "When Fox took a shot with me, I was very fortunate, very grateful," he said. The old A-Rod never admitted he needed anything.
Fox earned its share too, and the smart move was personnel. Putting him next to Ortiz and Jeter was the whole trick. Ortiz gives his intensity a laugh track. Jeter gives it history, and the history is wild: the two were close enough early in their careers to stay at each other's homes, per Ian O'Connor's book "The Captain," and the relationship curdled so badly that a Yankee official once said raising A-Rod with Jeter "would've been the last conversation I ever had with Derek." Now they sit shoulder to shoulder and rib each other on national TV. That reconciliation does more for A-Rod's image than any apology tour could.
The World Series was still going when this ran, Milwaukee up 3-1 after Game 4, Game 5 set for Tampa Bay. A-Rod will watch every pitch of it whether the camera's on him or not. The man who once guarded every word now looks like he has nothing in his life but this, and that's the most charming thing about him.
