Mike Celizic

Alex Rodriguez thinks it’s important that he and Derek Jeter don’t get along. As he said in his first interview in Yankee camp, relations are so strained that the two superstars, who were once fast friends, don’t even do sleepovers any more.

Sleepovers? The word conjures up visions of little A-Rod’s mom calling little Derek’s mom to arrange a play date. It does not conjure up visions of two adult buds crashing on each other’s sofas at the end of a long night of painting the town.

It must be a big deal to him, because A-Rod admitted he’d been lying when he kept saying during his first three years in pinstripes that there was nothing wrong with his relationship with Jeter. He wanted to come clean, set the record straight, get his big hurt out on the table where everyone could poke at it until they got tired of the sport and wandered off to find something more interesting to do.

You have to feel sorry for this enormously talented man who was abandoned by his father when still a boy and still wears the scars of that betrayal. He wants everybody to like him, from the Yankee captain down to the guys who sell the peanuts and programs in the stadium. He tries and tries and tries to be perfect, so that there is nothing not to like. He even bares his fragile soul, just to set the record straight.

And you know what? Nobody cares because it isn’t a surprise.

It’s been obvious that Jeter felt betrayed when A-Rod was still in Texas and said that Jeter wasn’t the leader of the Yankees and implied that he, A-Rod, had a tougher job of carrying a team, that Jeter was just one of a great collection of players.

A-Rod may think it’s significant that the two highest-paid players on the highest-paid team in American sports don’t have play dates, but Yankee fans sure don’t. All they care about is whether both players get a lot of hits and make big plays in the field and win another World Series, which would be Jeter’s fifth and A-Rod’s first.

Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth, the two greatest players on the first Yankee dynasty, didn’t speak to each other, and the Yankees just kept on winning titles. In the 1960s, most of the Dodgers had no use for Don Drysdale, but none of them called press conferences to whimper about it.

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More recently, Thurman Munson, the Yankee captain in 1977, couldn’t stand the newly arrived free agent, Reggie Jackson, whom Munson thought was an arrogant jerk. The feeling was pretty much unanimous in the Yankee clubhouse, but that team won the team’s first World Series in more than a decade, and, when Jackson hit three home runs in three at-bats in the deciding game against L.A., his teammates decided that he did have some good points after all.

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These are some of the more famous examples of great players not getting along with teammates, but they’re not the only ones. Every athlete who’s ever played a game realizes that there are going to be teammates who aren’t going to like each other. Everyone would love for every team to be one, big happy family, but it’s not as important as winning.

Players ultimately judge each other on performance. Mariano Rivera’s popularity in the Yankee clubhouse isn’t unrelated to his extraordinary talents as a closer. Jeter’s stature depends to a degree on an easy-going personality and a fierce vein of competitiveness, but he’s the captain not because of his oratory skills — he doesn’t really have any — but because of the way he plays the game.

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A-Rod’s stature is born of the same reality. If his teammates tend to be annoyed with him, it’s not because of how much he makes — they all make plenty — but because he doesn’t come through nearly often enough in the clutch.

You could imagine them rolling their eyes at this latest confession by their third baseman and wishing he’d just forget about his image and go out and pound the baseball. That’s all anyone’s ever wanted from A-Rod — performance. He may think it’s important to be slick, but none of his teammates do.

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