By Seth Mnookin

updated 4:46 p.m. ET March 25, 2008

On Opening Day last season, New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez hit a two-run home run to help cement the team's first win of the season. Five days later, he hit a game-winning grand slam in the bottom of the ninth inning against the Baltimore Orioles, and less than two weeks after that, he won yet another game with a walk-off moon shot. By the end of the month, Rodriguez had hit 14 home runs, a new American League record for April. He didn't ease up for the rest of the season, carrying the struggling Yankees on his back for weeks at a time. When the dust cleared, the man universally known as A-Rod had put together what was arguably the best season of his career. Even another anemic playoff performance — he went 4 for 15 in New York's four-game loss to the Cleveland Indians in the opening round — did little to mar his accomplishments.

Rodriguez's 2007 season shouldn't have come as a surprise. After 13 years in the majors, he is an 11-time All-Star who, at one time or another, has led the league in most offensive categories. At the end of the 2007 season, the 32-year-old Rodriguez had hit more home runs, amassed more total bases, and scored more runs than any other player his age ever. But during his first three years in New York, A-Rod — the $25-million-a-year man with a reputation for disappearing in the clutch — seemed to drag the Yankees down as often as he picked them up. It wasn't until last year that he finally proved his worth and, in doing so, won the affection of the most storied baseball town in the country.

Then, just after 11:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Oct. 28, Fox sportscaster Joe Buck informed the 21 million or so Americans watching Game 4 of the 2007 World Series that there was "big news brewing": Rodriguez, the owner of the richest individual deal in team-sports history, had exercised a provision in his contract that allowed him to opt out of the last three years of his deal with the Yankees in order to see what he could get on the open market.

In an instant, all that hard-won goodwill was destroyed. A New York Post columnist wrote that if this "final dash out the side door" were, in fact, the end of the slugger's stint in Yankee pinstripes, it would be "part of a perfect A-Rod opera, a me-first symphony that would be appalling if it weren't so predictable." Bob DuPuy, the president of Major League Baseball, said the mid-game announcement had "showed significant disregard for the core principle that baseball is a team game and not an individual sport."

Once again, Rodriguez had become radioactive — which is, in fact, exactly how one New York sportswriter described him to me. When I got in touch with a spokesman for the Yankees, I was told that he'd be unable to arrange a single interview concerning Rodriguez with anyone associated with the team. After several conversations and without any explanation, a personal friend of the superstar's stopped returning my calls. Many of the friends, journalists, players, and baseball executives who would speak insisted that their comments be off the record.

Even Rodriguez seems unsure of how best to present himself to the world. After sitting for a photo shoot for this magazine and agreeing to let a reporter visit him at his house in Miami, Rodriguez decided he'd be more comfortable answering questions e-mailed to his new handler, Guy Oseary, a man better known for managing the affairs of Madonna and Lenny Kravitz. Still, Rodriguez refused to respond to a handful of queries on such subjects as his reputation among his peers and his well-documented insecurity.

A-Rod's workout A-Rod's epic off-season workout keeps the Yankee in fighting trim. Between the World Series and Opening Day, Alex Rodriguez stays fit for battle with four punishing hours of big-league conditioning every day. Beginning at 7:30 a.m. with 30 minutes of stationary biking, 300 crunches, and lower-body weightlifting, A-Rod keeps a staggered routine to avoid any exercise slumps. On Mondays, it's a series of 440-, 220-, and 110-yard sprints, never more than a mile at a time ("When you run long distances, you start getting slower," he says). Tuesdays: sandpit workout and stair sprints. Wednesdays: 18 straight 110-yard dashes. Thursdays: uphill runs. Fridays: high-speed plyometric movements to build muscle. On weekends, it's a spinning class or, come January, back to the batting cage. All this exertion in the Miami heat burns off quite a few calories, so Rodriguez averages six meals a day, alternating protein shakes with carbohydrate-rich platters of brown rice and sweet potatoes and plenty of water. Throw in eight solid hours of sleep and hold the alcohol and the sugar, and he's already halfway to next year's All-Star game.

But A-Rod did answer questions about what happened on that October night when it looked like he was leaving the Yankees for good. "I was at home with my wife eating dinner and all of a sudden it came on the television," he wrote. "When my wife talks about that day, she says I looked like a ghost." Scott Boras, Rodriguez's cutthroat agent, had fed the news, apparently without his client's knowledge, to Sports Illustrated and the Associated Press less than an hour before Buck announced it on national television. That move, Rodriguez said, resulted in his estrangement from Boras, who is one in a long line of father figures that he has relied on since his own dad walked out when he was just nine years old. In his answers to me, Rodriguez described that night as if it had closed a long, drawn-out, complicated chapter in his life: "I'm glad that time is behind me."

This June will bring the 15th anniversary of the day that Rodriguez, then all of 17 years old, was chosen by the Seattle Mariners with the first pick in the 1993 amateur baseball draft. In 1996, his first full year in the bigs, A-Rod hit .358, the highest average posted by a right-handed batter since Joe DiMaggio hit .381 in 1939. He also led the American League in runs, total bases, and doubles. Some baseball insiders consider A-Rod's '96 season — one in which he couldn't legally drink a beer until after the All-Star break — to be the best ever by a shortstop.

To all outside appearances, Rodriguez's transition from high school to the majors had been seamless, but it was harder than it looked. It wasn't only his age and skill that set him apart. The peer pressure and snap judgments in big-league clubhouses are every bit as severe as those in high school locker rooms, and Rodriguez's staid habits further highlighted the differences between him and his teammates: He preferred ice cream at home to nights out, Frank Sinatra to Snoop Dogg or Nirvana. In a sport that celebrated hard-living icons such as Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle, the teenage Rodriguez was an avowed fan of art history who loved visiting museums. (He has named Leonardo da Vinci as an inspiration.) Even his heroes were straitlaced: The number 3 he wore on his back was in honor of Dale Murphy, a Mormon convert who played for the Atlanta Braves in the eighties.

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