No doubt, some conspiracy theories will emerge in the aftermath of Alex Rodriguez's announcement Sunday that he will retire as an active player after appearing in Friday's game between the New York Yankees and Tampa Bay Rays at Yankee Stadium.
The guy has twice turned up in the middle of baseball's long-running steroid scandal and he did come back in 2015 from a one-year suspension to hit 33 homers during the season he turned 40, so there are going to be whispers. But this probably is what it appears to be.
Rodriguez is four home runs short of 700 and he is signed through the end of the 2017 season, but his performance took a dramatic nosedive this season and his playing time for the now-rebuilding Yankees had declined precipitously along with it.
So, there is some logic to his decision to bow out gracefully soon after teammmate Mark Teixeira announced that he will retire at the end of the 2016 season. It's just going to be hard for some fans to accept that A-Rod would be satisfied to walk away without becoming the fourth player in major league history to hit his 700th home run.
It's not unprecedented, however. Hall of Famer Frank Robinson decided to retire during the 1976 season just 14 homers away from becoming only the fourth player to reach 600 home runs. He also was just 57 hits from 3,000, but stepped off the Cleveland Indians roster to devote his full attention to managing the team.
He had served as player-manager for two seasons after becoming the first African-American to be named manager of a major league team.
Robinson has maintained since that it wasn't that tough a decision because the emphasis on round-number milestones was not nearly as pronounced as it would become over the next couple of decades. He could have put himself in the Indians lineup much more than he did during those two seasons as player-manager and easily reached 3,000 hits.
Rodriguez probably could have played out the season on the Yankees bench if the club did not decide unilaterally to release him sooner. The club is rebuilding, so manager Joe Girardi could have continued to play him in September to allow him to try and reach the home run milestone.
The fact that the Yankees weren't interested in doing that is probably a testament to the ambivalence baseball fans feel toward A-Rod's artificially inflated career numbers...and, frankly, they have every right to feel that way.