Ian O’Connor, the honor today is yours.

The Yankees have no interest in devaluing an asset like Rodriguez, not when they have nine years to go on a contract worth more than $300 million. So they’re not about to declare themselves a better, happier team with A-Rod on the bench.

But facts are facts: The Yankees haven’t reached the World Series in Rodriguez’s five seasons, and they reached six in the eight seasons before he arrived.

Coincidence, or guilty as charged?

Here are the Yankees rotations in four selected years, pitchers are in order of how many games they started for the team:

Hmmm, what’s the difference?

The trendy thing to do among skeptics, cynics and statistical analysts is to diminish who Derek Jeter is, what Jeter is, what he brings to the ballpark every day. His range has shrunk. He is neither slugger nor perennial batting champion. Since signing his $189 million contract, he hasn’t even been a part of a World Series winner.

“Intangibles, my eye!” the skeptics and the cynics scoff, laughing.

But here’s the thing: Yesterday afternoon at Steinbrenner Field, there were two baseball teams competing against each other – one representing America, the other America’s Team. But there was only one captain on the field, one designated leader for both Team USA and the Yankees.

TWENTY MILLION DOLLARS WORTH OF LEADERSHIP.

Minutes before the Dominican Republic team was about to take the field for practice, A-Rod’s former wife, Cynthia, pulled up in a gray Mercedes SUV with their two daughters and a female friend of Cynthia’s. When Rodriguez emerged from the clubhouse alone, in full uniform, he stirred a media frenzy by heading over to the car and picking up his 4-year-old daughter, Natasha.

Why is going to see his family who have dropped by something that causes a MEDIA FRENZY? The workout facilities for the Dominican WBC are far closer to his family–who he does not see all that often these days–than the Yankees one in Tampa.

It’s okay, though, because if he didn’t want to spend any time with them they’d just report that A-Rod is a terrible father. The media has made it their personal crusade to exploit everything the man does for news since he stepped foot in this town, and now it’s gone way past ridiculous.

A-Rod hasn’t left his career in bars or strip clubs. He hasn’t thrown his career away over a drug like cocaine the way Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry did, helping ruin any chance the Mets of the 1980s had to be some kind of dynasty. But the two of them were addicts. With Gooden particularly, we have found out in his post-baseball years, as he lost everything and ended up in jail, just how much of an addict he really was.

Great athletes like these, because of the talent with which they’ve been blessed and the work they’ve honestly done in their lives, can make their sports look ridiculously easy. But at the same time, they make being a sports fan seem impossibly hard sometimes.

Then, when caught the way A-Rod has been caught on steroids, they often offer these pathetic imitations of true accountability and think they can turn the page because they want to.

I don’t even know what to say it’s just…Mike Lupica. It’s a discombulated mess of outrage which is what he’s been doing for the last 25 or so years. It’s his schtick and he’ll unfortunately never lose his job but it sucks and so does he.

This all could have been avoided if the Yankees had listened to Cashman, who knew that despite Rodriguez’s 54 homers and 156 RBIs in 2007, the Yankees would be better off letting him walk.

Like every other team that has employed A-Rod, the Yankees have yet to win a thing with him, and it is hard to believe they ever will. For everything he adds to a team, he takes away that much more, and despite Rodriguez’s brilliance in 2007, Cashman seemed to know it.

Cashman was going to let him walk because he wanted to stick with his word not because he would have gotten a magical Scott Brosius clone who would loft the team to the World Series with a medicore pitching staff.

Let’s look at the people who the Yankees were looking at to take A-Rod’s spot:

• Joe Crede — Would have been spectacular with that career OBP of about 300 and back that keeps him from playing ever.
• Miguel Tejada — Yes this would have been an excellent way to avoid the TOXIC CLUBHOUSE EFFECTS.
• Wilson Betemit — Welp.

These were the names that were brought up. They weren’t in a position to trade for, say, Miguel Cabrera like the Tigers did without parting with pieces that were untouchable such as Joba Chamberlain or Phil Hughes.

God if only the Yankees had some scrap or heart or grit they would totally have won everything with amazing pitching staffs of the recent past. Think of what Aaron Boone would have done to make

Here’s an extra quote from the same column:

Understand, this is not a media-created frenzy. It is solely an A-Rod Production, starting with his decision in 2001 to puncture his legacy with a syringe right up to his disingenuous and dishonest news conference Tuesday at which he promised to lay this all to rest.

No I am pretty sure it’s a media-created frenzy since apparently it’s all guys like Wallace Matthews are writing about these days. You know what, just read the whole column (or don’t if you know what’s good for you), it’s one giant awful quote.

My quest to find the worst out of it all every day is probably going to give me an anuerysm.

It’s lovely that many Yankees showed up at his press conference to support Rodriguez, but frankly, many of them looked bored. Either bored or exasperated.

There were four, which I guess is many. And, how many of four is many? We get it, they’re not all best friends but it’s not news and frankly I don’t understand why it’s an issue or why they should be.

There is some hope in the Yankee family that a chastened Rodriguez will do better at taming his humongous ego and insecurities. Perhaps he could then fit more seamlessly into the Yankee culture.

I have decided the only thing worse than TRUE YANKEE is YANKEE CULTURE in regards to amorphous terms that exist only to deride those we don’t like.

It wasn’t as bad as R. Budd Dwyer’s last press conference 22 years ago, when the Pennsylvania treasurer shot himself to death on national television. But yesterday’s performance by Alex Rodriguez was full of holes.

Hmm yes, not quite as bad I agree.