Yankees’ Rodriguez to have surgery

Sunday, December 9, 2012

— If it were a concession to age and injury, only Alex Rodriguez knows for sure.

The question was this:

What kind of player do you think you can be when you come back from surgery?

“I think the latest sample and most legitimate is how I played the first four months,” Rodriguez said Saturday, making his first public comments since the announcement last week that he will be out four to six additional months after surgery on his left hip in January. “I thought my pace was at a pace that was solid and definitely a winning player.”

But before his season went “south” - to use Rodriguez’ word - the 37-year-old’s statistics were a far cry from the eye-popping numbers he put up most of his career.

When Rodriguez suffered a fracture of the fifth metacarpal on his left hand after being hit by a pitch from Seattle right-hander Felix Hernandez on July 24, he was hitting .276 with 15 home runs and 44 RBI.

The injury cost him 36 games, and after he returned Sept. 3, he suffered a labrum tear in his left hip - it still isn’t clear exactly when it occurred - that doctors believe caused a miserable stretch run to the season.

In the remainder of the regular season, he hit .261 with 3 home runs and 13 RBI in 28 games.

Then he went 3 for 25 in an embarrassing postseason in which he was pinch hit for and benched.

“That was quite miserable, to be honest with you,” Rodriguez said after passing out toys to children at the Boys and Girls Clubs of Miami-Dade’s Hank Kline Club, where he participated in its baseball program while growing up. “But like I said,we have a tangible issue. A lot of things make a lot of sense. Now I get to fix it and go back and play baseball.”

The tangible issue, as General Manager Brian Cashman disclosed at the winter meetings, was the tear in the left hip that wasn’t discovered until an end-of-season evaluation in Vail, Colo., by Dr. Marc Philippon, who performed surgery on Rodriguez’s right hip before the 2009 season.

Rodriguez f irst complained of pain - strangely, in his right hip and not his left - after Game 3 of the AL division series against the Baltimore Orioles, a game in which Raul Ibanez pinch hit for him in the ninth inning and hit a tying home run before adding a game-winning home run in the 12th.

A magnetic resonance imaging that night came back clean.

Before Manager Joe Girardi pinch hit for Rodriguez in that game, the third baseman said he had been in a dialogue with trainer Steve Donohue and hitting coach Kevin Long all night.

“[I told them] I’m just not firing,” Rodriguez recalled. “There’s something wrong, I just can’t put my finger on it.”

Neither could doctors, at least not until after the season. But Rodriguez said hedoesn’t second-guess anyone for not checking his left hip. After all, he had complained of pain in his right hip, an oddity he can’t explain.

“I think everyone was trying to do the best they can,” he said. “It was definitely an unfortunate situation, and if we knew, we could have avoided the bloodbath of the last two weeks.”

He said the news he received in Vail was “a crushing blow,” but he’s not concerned about his career - or the entire 2013 season, for that matter - being in jeopardy.

“I think I’m definitely going to play,” Rodriguez said. “We’ve been down this road before. We have a good plan, we have a good team in place and I’m looking forward to the challenge.”

During the last month of the regular season and into the playoffs, Rodriguez repeatedly was asked about his health andmaintained he was OK.

“When I struggle, it’s on me,” he said Saturday. “It’s a team sport. I have to do my part. There’s no excuses here.”

Pressed, he conceded the obvious: The injury had at least some impact. “I knew there was something wrong,” he said. “It was very frustrating. Obviously, I wasn’t moving and exploding the way I’m used to.”

Sports, Pages 32 on 12/09/2012