Alex Rodriguez: Alien →

Jeb Lund, writing for Rolling Stone:

So, tonight, he will not take the field in his final game, apparently too much of a liability for a team trying to convince itself that it's not going nowhere—a team that spent 2014 driving a .256/.304/.313-hitting Derek Jeter around the country in a ceremonial glass float like the Baseball Pope while local burghers at every MLB outpost heaved offertories at him.

A-Rod won't get anything so lavish. After 696 career home runs, he'll get a pregame ceremony, take his at bats, give a curtain call at the dugout and retire – that pre-funeral decades in advance of the real one.

I shield my eyes whenever I hear that small but vocal minority of Yankees fans who never warmed to A-Rod start yapping about “Real Yankees.”