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Time for Alex Rodriguez to grab some bench?
- Updated: April 23, 2016
7:04 PM ET
NEW YORK — The Yankees are on a modest two-game winning streak. The vaunted back end of their bullpen, particularly Dellin Betances, is no doubt making opposing hitters consider opting out of their at-bats. The lineup still isn’t hitting much, but it is making the most of the hits it does manage to get. And Masahiro Tanaka, their nominal No. 1 starter, is pitching like an ace again.
But there is an elephant in the room, or more accurately, an anchor in the middle of the Yankees’ batting order, and it threatens to drag the ship down with it.
That anchor is Alex Rodriguez.
A-Rod took another 0-for-4 in Saturday’s 3-2 victory over the Tampa Bay Rays at Yankee Stadium, a game won in dramatic fashion on Brett Gardner’s walk-off home run with two out in the ninth inning. To be fair, Rodriguez hit the ball hard his first time up, barely missing a home run when Desmond Jennings made a leaping catch at the left-field wall. And he went down looking at a borderline strike in the fourth.
But he looked pathetic striking out in the sixth, and not much better flying out to shallow right in the eighth. Since hitting a home run off Mike Pelfrey in his first at-bat on April 9, A-Rod has four hits in 42 at-bats. His batting average is down to .132, his slugging percentage .245, his OBP .233, his OPS .478. He has walked just six times this season and struck out 18 times.
To say he is having a slow start is an insult to slow starts. In fact, he is having by far the worst start of his career, and I truly did not realize how bad until I went back through all of his 22 big league seasons. His previous low average after the first 15 games of a season was .204 in May 2009, when he was recovering from his first hip surgery. But even that year he had hit seven home runs, including one in his first at-bat.
What makes this start even more alarming is that, traditionally, Alex Rodriguez has always gotten out of the gate quickly. In 19 previous Aprils — remember, he began one …
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