With Alex Rodriguez’s career in the majors coming to a close (or at the very least, his Yankee career), I thought I’d relate my favorite memory from the best and most controversial player I’ve ever watched play for my favorite team.

When Alex Rodriguez was traded to the New York Yankees before the 2004 season, Yankee fans could have been forgiven for thinking the way LeBron James did after he joined the Miami Heat in 2011 and predicted an endless string of championships; after-all, from 1996-2003 the Yankees had won 4 World Championships and 6 American League Pennants in 8-years (all 4 of the championships being won in the 5-years from 1996-2000, including 3-straight from 1998-2000). But for many reasons, and in spite of his own personal brilliance, in Arod’s first 5-seasons with the Yanks, from 2004-2008, the team never returned to the World Series. That run included Arod winning both the 2005 and 2007 AL MVP Awards, and Alex’s 2007 season in particular is the greatest I have ever seen by a player other than Barry Bonds. In ’07, Arod led all of Major League baseball in home runs (54), RBI (156), slugging percentage (.645), OPS (1.067), OPS+ (176), and Wins Above Replacement (9.4); he also batted .314 and stole 24 bases for good measure. And if you want to complain about performance enhancing drugs here, let me stop you by saying that many players in 2007 have been linked to PED usage either before, during, or after that year, and yet none of those players ever remotely approached Arod’s 2007, or his career as a whole. In fact, I could write an entire column about why we tar the names of certain athletes when they are connected to having taken PEDs while others never face any backlash at all, but that is not the topic here.

The Yankees started 2009 as a very different team from the one that Arod had joined in 2004. Joe Torre had left as the manager after the 2007 season, and in 2009 the Yanks would be opening a new Stadium, and were coming off missing the playoffs in 2008 for the first time since the 1993 season. The Yanks wanted to make sure 2008 was an aberration, and added prized free agents C.C. Sabathia, Mark Teixeira, and A.J. Burnett to a core that still featured Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettitte, Jorge Posada, and Alex himself. All the moves paid off as the Yankees had the best team in the majors, winning 103 games while the next closest team, the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, won 97. But as the team succeeded as planned, Arod personally struggled with injury issues for really the first time in his career, but he ended the regular season on a positive note as he managed to hit 2 home runs and drive in 7 RBI in the finale and finish with at least 30 HRs and 100 RBI for the 12th consecutive year (he would make it 13 in 2010, and met those totals 14-times total in his career). The Yanks met the Minnesota Twins in the first round of the playoffs, the American League Division Series, and in spite of being heavily favored, having home field advantage, and winning game 1, they entered the bottom of the 9th of game 2 down 2 runs, and Arod hit a 2-run HR to tie the game, which the Yanks won in extra innings to take a 2-0 lead in the series. Arod hit another big home run in game 3 as the Yanks finished the sweep. For the 3-game series, Arod batted .455, finished with an OPS of 1.500, 2 home runs and 6 RBI.

In the American League Championship Series, the Yanks met the Angels, a team that had knocked Arod and the Yanks out of the playoffs in 2005 (and they had also knocked out the Yanks in the 2002 ALDS before Arod arrived. The Yanks had never beaten them in the playoffs before 2009) and had finished with the 2nd best record in baseball. 2009 was a different story, as the Yanks beat the Angels in 6-games to win the team’s 40th American League Pennant, and the first for Rodriguez in his career. Arod continued to rack up clutch hits in the series, and while C.C. Sabathia was awarded the ALCS MVP for his brilliance in winning games 1 and 4, and finishing with a 1.13 ERA in 16 innings, but the award could easily have gone to Alex, who tied game 2 with a solo home run in the bottom of the 11th inning, and finished the 6-game series batting .429, with a 1.519 OPS, 3 HR, and 6 RBI.

What turned out to be Alex Rodriguez’s only trip to the World Series was a matchup between the game’s best team in 2009, the Yanks, vs. the defending champion Philadelphia Phillies, who had won the World Series in 2008 for the first time 28-years. The Phillies took the first game at Yankee Stadium (the first and only time the Yanks would lose in Yankee Stadium that postseason) behind a tremendous performance from their ace pitcher Cliff Lee, but the Yanks had battled back to win game 2 in NY and take game 3 in Philadelphia, which included a home run hit by Arod that was the first play in World Series history to be reviewed. It was Game 4, which became the pivotal game in the series, that included my all-time favorite Arod moment, and probably the biggest in his career. With the Yanks up 2 games to 1 and in possession of home field advantage, the game was just about a ‘must win,’ for the Phillies, and Yankee starter C.C. Sabathia did not make it easy for them. The Yanks built a lead and, while the Phils had chipped away, the Yanks still led 4-3 with two-outs in the bottom of the 9th and their bullpen rolling along. But the Phillies stole the momentum when Pedro Feliz belted a two-out, two-strike pitch from Joba Chamberlain into the bleachers for a home run, tying the game at 4. The Phillies’ closer, Brad Lidge, who had been perfect in the Phillies 2008 postseason run, easily struck out the first two Yankees he faced, including Derek Jeter, and as Johnny Damon came to the plate, the TV camera showed Phil Coke warming up in the Yankee bullpen, and my heart dropped into my stomach. Coke was terrible, and it seemed to me that I would be forced to relive the painful mistake that I believed Joe Torre had made in the 2003 World Series – the last in his great career with the Yanks. The Yankees had a 2 games to 1 lead in 2003, just as they did in ’09, and like in ’09 game 4 was on the road. The Yanks had come back to tie the game in the top of the 9th, but in extra innings Torre never brought in Rivera, the greatest closer and postseason pitcher in MLB history (and who in 2003 was coming off winning the ALCS MVP in that brutal series with the Red Sox) because normal baseball tactics say that a road team should never bring in its closer without a lead, so the Yanks went with inferior pitching, the Marlins stole the game, and the Yanks would lose the series 4 games to 2.

I felt like I was watching a horror movie, forced to watch Yankee manager Joe Girardi make the exact same mistake Torre did 6-years earlier, as he was about to go with Phil Coke instead of Mo, who was having another spotless postseason run in 2009. The script changed thanks to Johnny Damon, and Alex Rodriguez. Damon battled the previously un-hittable Lidge for a 12-pitch at bat that ended with a single, and then executed a steal of 2nd and 3rd base on the same play that is the most memorable play from that series, and led to myself and countless Yankees fans screaming at the screen as Damon popped up from his theft of second and ran to third, since we did not realize that no one was covering 3rd and it seemed like Damon was just making a huge mistake in the biggest moment of the entire series. But the Yanks still had 2-outs, so the odds were that Damon would just be left stranded at 3rd base, but his presence had slightly un-nerved Lidge, who seemed to become more cautious because his best pitch, a diving slider, was often difficult for his catcher to handle, and Lidge hit the batter, Mark Teixeira, with a pitch to bring up Arod with runners at 1st and 3rd, and still two-outs. Arod then had the biggest hit of his career, slicing a double to left, scoring Damon. The Yanks took a 5-4 lead and Mo began warming up in the bullpen to pitch the bottom of the 9th, and when Posada knocked in both Teixeira and Arod to give the Yanks a 3-run lead, it was a done deal. Mo set the Phillies down in the 9th and the Yanks took a 3-games to 1-lead. The Phillies would win game 5 in Philadelphia, but the Yanks would close out the series in game 6 back in New York, winning their 27th World Championship, and the first and only Championship of Arod’s long, brilliant, maddening, and controversial career. Hideki Matsui would win the World Series MVP for his clutch hitting, but if MLB had an MVP award for the whole postseason and not just individual series (why is the NHL, with its terrific ‘Conn Smythe Award,’ the only sport to have an overall playoff MVP award? MLB, the NFL, and the NBA should come up with their own versions of the Conn Smythe Award immediately), it would absolutely have gone to Alex Rodriguez. Without his clutch contributions throughout that postseason run, including the double that I believe decided the World Series, the Yanks would still be looking for their first championship since they won their third consecutive title and 4th in 5-years in 2000.

I have seen on TV and in person many other amazing moments from Alex Rodriguez, and have cheered him and been left frustrated by him more times than I can put into one column. On TV I watched him hit the longest home run in old Yankee Stadium that I have ever seen, a shot to left field that went beyond the ambulance that was parked in that part of the park. I attended a game in Baltimore against the Orioles in 2010 where Arod, who had already hit a solo home run earlier in the game, came up with a runner on base and two-outs in the top of the 9th, and hit a 2-run HR for a lead that Mo promptly saved as a victory. I have seen him hit big home runs and strike out in bad spots. I have seen him live up to his potential in 2007 only to let us down failing PED tests and missing the entire 2014 season (Derek Jeter’s final season), seen him cheered by Yankees fans and booed by fans of all teams, including the Yanks. And whatever you may think about Alex Rodriguez, and whether or not he belongs in the Hall of Fame – and I firmly believe he should be inducted into the Hall of Fame, alongside Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Manny Ramirez, among some other PED-linked players whom I believe would have been Hall of Famers regardless of whatever drugs they may have taken – it is hard to deny how compelling Alex Rodriguez has been as a player all these years. Whether you loved to cheer him or to boo him, it has been impossible to ignore him. I will remember him with bittersweetness, grateful for his leading role in winning the 2009 Championship, and sad for what might have been, had he not spent so much time getting in his own way.