Mike Celizic

You look at Alex Rodriguez after another failure to produce sitting in the dugout like an exhibit in Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum, and you don’t see the best player in baseball. You see Ed Whitson.

It’s time to unload him, because once a player gets the Ed Whitson Look, he’s never going to recover.

If that sounds drastic, it’s not. A-Rod isn’t just in a slump. He’s shot. The boos and the headlines and the endless abuse on the talk shows have gotten into his head and set up permanent housekeeping. Naturally a man who wants to please everyone in the worst way, he’s pressing so hard to make it all better he can barely swing the bat.

He’s shot. Toast. Finished as a Yankee, and there’s no sense pretending he can come back and be the man he was advertised to be. He could be that somewhere else, but not in Yankee Stadium, not half a base path across the infield from Derek Jeter, who reminds A-Rod every day simply by taking in oxygen everything he is not, not two bags away from Jason Giambi, who staggered, stumbled, fell, but never stopped being loved because he never lost the knack for getting big hits.

For those of you too young to remember the Bronx Zoo years of the 1980s, Ed Whitson was a highly touted pitcher signed to a big free-agent contract by the Yankees. A country boy, Whitson couldn’t deal with the pressure and the crowds of New York. A great talent when he came in, he was little more than a human batting tee by the time he left, a failure in pinstripes who the fans chose to blame for every Yankee failure.

It drove him to such desperation, he ended up beating up Billy Martin, the manager, which in New York was like beating up Santa Claus, and ultimately was blown out of town by a hurricane of Bronx cheers.

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Country music fans know what the Ed Whitson Look is. It’s the face of a man whose dog got run over by the Prius-driving liberal who stole his wife, she being the same woman who broke his fishing poles, knocked a hole in the bottom of his bass boat, and took a baseball bat to his truck. It’s the face of that same man sitting at a bar that has just run out of Budweiser and Jack and has nothing left to drink but wine spritzers. And the juke box won’t play anything but hip hop.

He’s lost. He’s hopeless. Life is never going to get any better, and he knows it.

That’s A-Rod in the Yankee dugout.

A week ago, when The Wall Street Journal first suggested that the Yankees might be shopping the $252-million man, I said that he still put up good numbers over the course of the year and was a gold-glove infielder. But it’s gotten worse since then, much worse.

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The Yankee crowd, which never really accepted him from the day he came to town before the 2004 season, has turned on him like only it can. After starting July on a little hot streak, his bat has gone colder than a slumlord’s heart. But the depth of his despair is more evidenced by his work in the field. Gold glove winner Alex Rodriguez can’t even throw the ball to first base anymore. Or to home plate. Or anywhere that it needs to be.

It’s gotten so bad, the devilishly clever headline writers at The Daily News have branded him with a nickname that’s never going to go away: “E-Rod.”

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