New York, N.Y., February 16 — Well, it’s official. Even the Yankees Web site says so now. The Yankees have a new third baseman, and it’s megamillionaire Alex Rodriguez, the shortstop of the Texas Rangers until a couple of days ago. Boston fans are generally angry, and fans of small-market teams that dot the landscape are aghast that the Yankees have gotten the best player in baseball, again.

A major American spectator sport that was on the brink of ruin just a few days ago due to the growing BALCO scandal (the what?) is on the ropes again. But this time the villain is a more familiar one: George Steinbrenner, the owner of the New York Yankees. As the wildest of baseball offseasons comes to a close, fans across the country are now directing their derision at a familiar target.

Confounding many of their fans, the Yankees allowed three veteran members of their vaunted starting rotation to leave this winter, and installed the flawed 2003 ALCS hero, Aaron Boone, at third base. They signed a big bat in Gary Sheffield, yes, a leadoff (“bad”) guy in Kenny Lofton, and several vets for a leaky pen that has confounded them for years. But many of the faithful threw their hands up in dismay when 2001 World Series star Curt Schilling was installed in Boston, and he was later joined by closer Keith Foulke, repairing two of the shortcomings in a team that came within five outs of unseating the Yanks as the American League representative in the World Series last year. The trade of young talent and lots of bucks to plug the hometown Bronx rotation barely lowered the howls to groans.

But even worse for the spoiled (who wouldn’t be?) hometown faithful, the Yanks sat on their hands as the courtship dance between John Henry in Boston and Tom Hicks in Texas was initiated, and the potential A-Rod/Manny Ramirez trade dominated the headlines. The laughs at how Boston would handle fielding two of the best shortstops in the American League turned to murmurs of concern as the White Sox offered Nomar Garciaparra a place to display his skills, while proffering young outfield dynamo Magglio Ordonez to fill the about-to-be-created gap in Boston’s left field in return. The news that Alex was willing to restructure his contract (read: make less money) to escape last place in Texas was not greeted with joy, and there were a few bad moments where the deal appeared ready to go through, after major league baseball had made a point of giving all the parties as many extensions as they would require to get it done.

But Yankee fans breathed a sigh of relief as the Union nixed the deal because Rodriguez was giving up more of his contract’s value than was allowed in the most recent collective bargaining agreement between the sport and its players. The dance continued through several more strings of rumors but it gradually became clear that Red Sox ownership and management had drawn a monetary line in the sand at a point beyond which they would not go. Texas owner Hicks stood steadfastly on the far side of that line.

Meanwhile, the Yanks’ crosstown rivals, the New York Mets, who have been suffering from a mediocre talent level in their outfield personnel both in the field and at the plate for years, failed to make a good-faith offer to the guy generally considered to be the best outfield talent in the game, using his 2003 injury to cover the fact that their 11th-hour offer was the lowest in guaranteed money that Vladimir Guerrero would hear from anybody. Why do I bring this up? What, aside from the fact that the Mets and Yankees (in name, anyway) compete for the richest city in the world’s spectator dollar, do the Mets have to do with this deal the Red Sox whiffed on, and the Yanks finally pulled off?

What isn’t trumpeted much in New York papers these days is that when Nelson Doubleday and Fred Wilpon headed a group of investors that purchased the Mets in August 1980, 80 percent of the funding was provided by Doubleday and his publishing company. Little was heard of the ups and downs experienced by these co-owners in the mid-eighties as the Mets built a playoff team that paid off for them big-time in the form of the 1986 World Championship. They struggled with player contracts and personnel decisions in the years that followed, but managed to stay competitive for a few years, including the shocking loss to the eventual World Champion Dodgers in the 1988 National League Championship Series.

Then the club fell on hard times. But after a series of atrocious player moves resulted in some ugly last place finishes in the mid-nineties, the team made another play for glory. Taking full advantage of soon-to-be former Florida owner Wayne Huizenga’s dismantling of the 1997 World Champion Marlins, they acquired some solid pitching, and found themselves at a crossroads during the 1998 season. Big hulking banger Mike Piazza, the power-hitting catcher for the Dodgers, was moved (temporarily, the whole baseball world knew) to the Marlins in a contract squabble. The Wilpon-controlled front office expressed no interest in the burly former lower-round selection, but Doubleday pleaded in the papers and behind the scenes that the Mets take the chance and spend the money to make this upgrade. Nelson prevailed, the Mets traded for Piazza, and two years later they played in the World Series against the Yankees.

But apparently Doubleday had spent all his capital and his bluster on that former move, because when the player who might have been the final piece in the puzzle in Flushing made a public appeal to play for the Mets during that Subway Series in Shea Stadium, the Flushing front office replied out with guns a-blazing. Rather than pursue the best offensive ballplayer available, the Mets shut down negotiations almost immediately. Rejected, Rodriguez found Texas and their money, but only after he was forced to look elsewhere. Wilpon and Doubleday finally parted ways in 2002, and the denouement of their rivalry was not a good one for the team’s fans. The voices of caution, of “spend less,” of middle-of-the-road salary for a team playing in the Big Apple, won out. Nelson took his spending ways and retreated, and Wilpon took a tight and solid grip on the financial reins.

Meanwhile, a “show me the money” fan in Boston in the months thatfollowed would have had an even more confusing time untangling the behind-the-scenes details of that club’s sale. It all involved a convoluted deal where Mr. Henry sold his Marlins to Jeffrey Loria of the Expos with MLB first loaning Loria the money and then purchasing the Expos themselves, and a guy who wasn’t willing to spend the money to grow a contender in Florida took over in Boston. And now, after an admitted slew of payroll additions and adjustments, that same group continued to refuse to budge the further $1-2 million per year that it would take to make Alex Rodriguez one of the most revered players in Red Sox nation. With the figures between a deal and no deal so close, it’s hard to not look back on the Boston purchase in 2002. John Henry succeeded in acquiring the Red Sox, even though the offers by both Miles Prentice and Charles Dolan exceeded the $660 million from Henry’s group offered by roughly $100,000 apiece. What if, huh?

And then a seemingly minor news item in January changed everything. Having eschewed a slew of other choices to fill their infield and outfield, many of them more costly, the Yankees had re-signed Aaron Boone, daring him to do better in a second stint in the South Bronx. They liked his defensive range to his left, his power, and his speed on the bases. They would expect to see better coverage of the line, an enhanced batting average, a few less strike outs following a few less 0-2 counts. But Boone tore up his knee playing basketball, with all the viable 2004 third-base options gone from the market.

For weeks, the Yanks plastered low-cost band-aids on their damaged prospective 2004 infield, while other teams stood and watched the Rangers act as if all was fine, claiming that Rodriguez would gladly play out his years in last place in Arlington, even serving as team captain. The two other teams who had come closest to getting Rodriguez out of the backwater in Texas stood idly by, and the Yanks scrambled to come up with a third base solution. The Mets, who refused to step to the plate in 2000, announced that they wouldn’t sign a shortstop when that was the position of choice of their top prospect. (Then they went out and signed a shortstop.) The Red Sox stood pat. When it became clear that A-Rod’s need to be out of Texas was greater than his need to play his favorite position, Rodriguez came face-to-face with the one thing he hadn’t confronted yet: a team willing to put its cards on the table.

Little concerns remain. Alfonso Soriano, sent to Texas to acquire Alex, has a huge potential upside, an atrocious 2003 postseason notwithstanding. But as their myriad critics will hasten to tell you, the Yankees rarely hesitate to exchange a prince of potential for a star who has proven that he can play now. I’ve been here all along, and it’s sometimes a painful lesson, I’ll admit. A nation of baseball fans, led by those in Flushing and Boston, will now hold their collective breaths for the next six weeks, hoping that some accursed result befalls the Yankees after they made their move. On February 16, 81 years ago, archaeologist Howard Carter and his team unearthed the tomb of King Tutanhhamen, and the world thrilled to the (largely exaggerated) reports that one by one, each searcher came to an unfortunate end. In a fit of wishful thinking, negative vibes have been traveling all around George Steinbrenner, Alex Rodriguez, Derek Jeter, Brian Cashman, and Joe Torre for the last several days.

These fans and non-fans argue that the Yankees always get the best players, regardless of cost, forgetting that the Yanks were ready to go into the season with Aaron Boone at third. The Yanks dealt with this situation in good faith, reacting to need, a logical step one assumes all teams operating a going concern would follow. Certainly not all could afford Rodriguez, but Anaheim afforded Guerrero and Colon, and Baltimore ponied up for Lopez and Tejada. Meanwhile the Mets fiddled while Flushing burned in 2000, and the Red Sox let as little as $2 million per year stop them in their tracks two months ago.

And then again (and this from Yankee haters and fans alike), they argue that Soriano could be a star. Alphonso Soriano is one of four Yankees who share January 7 as their birthday. One of the others is the Hall of Famer Johnny Mize, who was acquired by the Yanks much later in his career than Alex Rodriguez. In the more than 10 years preceding his arrival in the Bronx, Johnny recorded the following firsts in league offensive stats: OPS, three times; batting average, once; slugging percentage, four times; runs, once; times on base, three times; doubles, once; triples, once; home runs, four times; rbi, three times; and extra-base hits, four times. It compares well with A-Rod’s stats: OPS, none; batting average, once; slugging percentage, once; runs, three times; times on base, none; doubles, once; triples, none; home runs, three times; rbi, once; and extra-base hits, one time.

So let’s assume the extremely improbable scenario that Alex’s dominance ends once he hits the big time in New York. Those who predict that nothing good will come from this new pairing can take heart, for instance, in the fact that Mize never cracked a number-one offensive stat again once he became a Yankee. But there is a pretty overwhelming positive number associated with Johnny Mize and his stay with the Yankees too. He played in Pinstripes five years, and they won five World Championships during that time.

February 16, 2004, Alex Rodriguez is a Yankee. Is this a good day for Yankee fans? As one who was not eager for a Rodrguez signing one week ago, I’ll tell you this. Encouraging a cultural habit that would permeate much of Western civilization for millenia into the future, the Roman Catholic Pope Gregory the Great decreed on February 16, 600, that henceforth, “God Bless You” would be the correct response to a sneeze. In a seemingly totally unrelated event, George Steinbrenner, the 73-year-old owner of the Yankees, passed out at a memorial service weeks ago. And also, the anniversary of the death of another flamboyant baseball owner, Charley Finley, falls on Saturday, as he left us in 1996 at the age of 77.

Is that a sneeze I hear coming out of Tampa? Small matter actually. Even if it’s only for being the procative owner of the baseball club I have loved for almost 40 years,

God Bless You, George Steinbrenner!

YANKEE BASEBALL!!!