Mike Celizic

Alex Rodriguez has come crawling back to the Yankees. It's a huge defeat for self-professed superagent Scott Boras as well as yet another failure of nerve in crunch time for the most controversial player in Major League Baseball.

A-Rod has contacted his once-and-perhaps-future team about negotiating a new deal. One report said the Yankees are willing to talk to him with a couple of “ifs” the size of the Matterhorn attached: He’s got to take less money than he was making on his celebrated $25.2-million-a-year deal, and he can’t bring the Boracious agent into the negotiating room with him.

“Alex is going to be back with the Yankees,” one of the sources reportedly told the New York Daily News.

If that’s true, it’s good news for the Yankees in the sense that they don’t have to worry about who’s going to be playing third base and hitting clean-up.

The news as reported isn’t so good for A-Rod. It suggests that he hasn’t had suitors clogging Boras’ voice mail with offers of enormous contracts, and also shows that the self-absorbed star can’t stand the thought of losing the New York spotlight.

Consider how we arrived at this turn of events. A-Rod spurned a contract extension to take effect when his old deal was to expire in three years that would have paid him $30 million a year. The Yankees told him they would never take him back if he were crawling naked on his belly over broken glass.

So now A-Rod is back and presumably reaching for the Bacitracin and Band-Aids. And the Yankees are smugly telling him to lose his agent and also to start thinking about eating the $21 million on his old contract that his former team, the Rangers, were going to pick up.

Depending on how you look at it, it’s either pathetic or delicious. It’s pathetic that A-Rod could be made to kiss the hem of the Steinbrenners’ royal garments and give up a pile of money just so he can be subjected to more insulting headlines in the local tabloids. And it’s delicious that Boras, whose only interest is in how much money he can make, could suffer a brutal defeat; not only failing to get that $30-million-a-year contract, but being thrown off his own flagship.

Keep in mind this isn’t confirmed in any way as the truth of what both sides want. You can believe that The Daily News has talked to people who claim to know what’s going on behind the scenes. But you can’t know whether the sources daubed an accurate picture of what’s going on or were simply using the newspaper to float some trial balloons. One of the bylines on the story is that of Bill Madden, one of the deans of New York baseball writers and an exceptionally well-connected reporter. But he’s also a man who sometimes gets big scoops that turn out to be as wrong as brown shoes with a tuxedo.

Regardless of the motivation in planting the story, we can assume that it represents scenarios being considered by each side. This one is mostly from the Yankees’ point of view, and it wouldn’t be surprising if the unnamed Yankee source is Hank Steinbrenner, who’s taken over the baseball side of things from his father, George Steinbrenner, himself.

“We will not negotiate with Scott Boras. He can not be in the room,’ the Yankee source is quoted as saying. That’s got a Steinbrennerian ring to it.

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It’s in A-Rod’s interests to swallow his enormous pride and follow the script laid out in The Daily News. He needs the biggest spotlight and constant attention, and he gets that nowhere else like he does in New York. It also won’t hurt his legacy to break Barry Bonds’ home run record and whatever records he sets in a Yankee uniform. If he stays with the Yankees, he can go into the Hall of Fame in pinstripes and see his handsome self cast in bronze and mounted in Monument Park. If he leaves, he’ll be on his fourth team halfway through his career, which doesn’t say much about the value of the greatest player in baseball.

The only downside for the Yankees would be that they have to put up with A-Rod making everything about him. The team has worked hard to make it about the team, and until he arrived, they’d succeeded. But for four years, it’s always been about A-Rod. He’s helped them succeed in the regular season, but he hasn’t helped them win the World Series.

They can get along without him at third base. They failed to win the title with him, they can fail to win it without him. But life is easier with him in the middle of the batting order. If he’ll meet the team’s conditions, they’ll take him back.

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