Mike Celizic

To those who say he never delivers a big hit late in a game against the Red Sox, Alex Rodriguez had an emphatic answer Monday night. With two out and one on, the most maligned great player whose initials aren’t B.B. stroked a Keith Foulke pitch over the Green Monster in Fenway Park. Take that, A-Rod bashers.

They took it, and gleefully, using it as just another bit of evidence that A-Rod saves his best performances for times when they have the least impact. The home run, they pointed out, didn’t win a game that the Yankees were already trailing in, 9-1, when the ninth inning began. When it was over, the score was 9-5, and, despite going 2-for-4, A-Rod went home with his reputation intact as a hitter who doesn’t produce in the clutch and doesn’t win games.

We’re hearing more about that reputation in New York these days as the depleted Yankees struggle to score runs. Newspaper columnists remind him of every late-game failure. Callers to radio talk shows demand that he be traded. His defenders grow more shrill in their arguments as the critics keep pounding on the game’s highest-paid player.

After a while, you start to wonder what people thought he was when the Yankees traded for him before the 2004 season. He had that huge salary, true, but you can’t judge a player by his paycheck — at least you shouldn’t. You go by what he does on the field.

A-Rod was sold as the premier player in the game, and he’s been that, winning a second MVP trophy last season. He hits for power and for average. Once the game’s best shortstop, he moved to third to accommodate Yankees captain and hero for life Derek Jeter and became one of the game’s best third basemen.

The Yankees got what they paid for and what everyone should have expected. What they didn’t get was what A-Rod never was — a great clutch hitter. You heard it when he was with the Mariners and then the Rangers. Both teams failed to win when he was there and got better when he left. Therefore, he’s not a good player.

That’s nonsense, too. You don’t average 40 home runs, 120 RBIs and 120 runs a season without helping to win games. And three-run home runs that get your team off to what becomes a 12-4 victory aren’t meaningless. If the Mariners and Rangers got better when he left, it was because they got better pitching and more balanced lineups. Anyway, Seattle is bad again, and whose fault is that? Probably still A-Rod’s.

He is, as a recent Star-Ledger piece by Dan Graziano was headlined, “A Lightning Rod.” The $25 million salary draws the attention. And his numbers in clutch situations galvanizes opinion.

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There is evidence to back up the claims that he’s not the greatest clutch player in the game. A-Rod has relatively modest numbers batting with runners in scoring position late in close games, numbers that look humble next to those of the Red Sox’ David Ortiz. People remember his failure to produce last year in the playoffs against the Angels and in the final four games of the seven-game loss to the Red Sox the year before in the ALCS. When he hit into an inning-ending double play late in a recent game against the Mets, it was mentioned high in every game story.

"It'll never stop until I win five or six world championships, and hit a Joe Carter home run to win one of them," Rodriguez said, the New York Daily News reported.

"I don't take anything personally. I think it's comical. Anyone who drives in 130 runs has to hit in the clutch. I've done a lot of special things in this game. For none of that to be considered clutch is an injustice."

When he was in Seattle, Edgar Martinez and Ken Griffey Jr. were the guys who carried the team. A-Rod was the complimentary weapon who made Martinez and Griffey that much more fearsome.

But he never has been a guy to put a team on his back and drag it out of a slump or through the late months of a season. He wasn’t with Seattle, wasn’t with Texas. There was never any reason to expect he would be in New York.

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