Michael Kay thinks Alex Rodriguez still belongs in Cooperstown, and he’s got a strange little workaround in mind.
On Tuesday, Kay laid out his case on ESPN radio, suggesting Rodriguez could extend his Hall of Fame window by getting back on the field just long enough to reset the clock.
“My advice to Alex, come back, activate yourself for one game, get an at-bat and then restart the clock to get yourself another 15 years on the ballot,” Kay said Tuesday on his ESPN radio show.
Kay even floated the idea that the Seattle Mariners might be willing to make it happen. Rodriguez was back in Seattle over the weekend and drew a standing ovation from Mariners fans during a pregame ceremony honoring the franchise’s top 50 players as part of the team’s 50th-anniversary celebration.
The bigger issue, of course, is the Hall vote itself. Rodriguez has acknowledged using performance-enhancing drugs, and that has kept him stuck well short of election. He has never received more than 37% of the vote, and Cooperstown requires 75% for induction.
The former Yankees star still has five years left on the ballot. He completed his fifth year in January, and as long as he keeps clearing the 5% threshold, he can remain eligible for as many as 10 total years.
Kay’s argument is built on time and changing attitudes. In his view, the electorate will look different down the road, with older voters who are dug in against PED users gradually replaced by younger ones who may be less rigid on the issue.
“Five years you have to wait before you get on the ballot,” Kay said. “Then the voting bloc of older voters that hold firm about not putting in PED users, they die off.
Younger people that don’t feel the same way, they enter the voting block, and maybe you get to 75%. But I don’t think you get to 75% now.”
He also made the larger point that Rodriguez’s talent would put him near the very top of any all-time list if not for the PED stain. Kay said that if Rodriguez had never used performance-enhancing drugs, people would talk about him as one of the greatest players ever.
“If Alex never did performance-enhancing drugs, we would be talking about him as one of the greatest players who ever lived,” Kay said.
Kay noted that Rodriguez, a natural shortstop who shifted to third base after being traded to the Yankees, finished with 696 career home runs. That total ranks fifth all-time, behind only Barry Bonds, Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth and Albert Pujols.
He also said Rodriguez, Bonds and Roger Clemens would all be automatic picks if voters were simply making a list of the 20 greatest players in baseball history. But in Hall of Fame terms, the PED connection has kept all three out of the individual plaque room.
“And for those that think, once they get to the Veterans Committee, they’re going to get in, no they’re not,” Kay said. “These are the people that hold even more enmity toward people that used PEDs, so Rocket’s not getting in, Bonds is not getting in, and even in a Veterans Committee 10 years from now, I don’t think Alex is getting in.
“One at-bat, restart your clock, give yourself a better chance,” Kay said.
Rodriguez, for his part, has said he’d feel empty if he were actually voted into Cooperstown. In an interview with The Athletic, he said the Hall would not give him the same sense of fulfillment that his life now does.
“I have a life today that I didn’t have for the first 40 years,” Rodriguez said, referring to his personal life journey with therapy. “If I went to the Hall of Fame, in a weird way, I would be hollow inside.
I would still be in a lot of pain... I would rather have what I have today, because it really helped me unlock a lot of the work that I needed to do.”
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