Not even an MVP award in 2005 helped the relationship between Rodriguez and his teammates. "There's this culture of the clubhouse that's very primal, and I think Alex just doesn't fit into that," one of the Rodriguez's non-baseball friends told me. Once, when asked to identify his biggest support on the team, Rodriguez searched for a name before coming up with Rob Thomson, the team's batting-practice pitcher. He became so overwhelmed by his fear of failure that his wife, Cynthia, a former psychology teacher at her high school alma mater, Miami's Gulliver Prep, convinced him to enter therapy. (The couple's first daughter, Natasha, was born in November 2004 and they are expecting another girl this spring. Rodriguez has said that being a father is the "most rewarding thing God's ever given to me and my wife... Before, everything was about us or what we wanted to do. Now, you think about yourself third or fourth.") And his continued struggles in the postseason got so bad that in the last game of the 2006 playoffs, then manager Joe Torre dropped Rodriguez to eighth in the batting order. It was the farthest down he'd hit since May 7, 1996.

Jeter, the Yankees captain and leader, refused to help Rodriguez gain acceptance on the team. Still, the two players continued to deny that A-Rod's comments had affected their friendship. That charade ended last February, when Rodriguez told reporters at the Yankees' spring-training complex in Tampa that it was "important" for him to come clean about the "change in the relationship" with the Yankee captain. The situation, he said, was "obviously not as great" as it used to be. "We were like blood brothers." For Rodriguez, it was a return — albeit a temporary one — to the openness he so often exhibited early in his career, when he talked freely about both his personal and professional struggles.

Jeter was annoyed by Rodriguez's announcement, but A-Rod appeared liberated. As the season progressed, he seemed more in control, less likely to be thrown off stride by every bit of news. Even the May revelation that he'd spent a night at a Toronto strip club with a woman other than his wife didn't stop his offensive assault. In July, he freed himself of another crutch he'd relied on when he stopped working with Jim Fannin, who says he's not sure why his best-known client stopped calling on him other than the fact that Rodriguez was having "a good year." That he most definitely was, topping the majors in home runs (54), RBIs (156), slugging percentage (.645), and runs scored (143).

Finally, after the World Series announcement, Rodriguez apparently put the brakes on his relationship with Boras. "I have the experience now to know what feels right and the conviction to raise my hand when something doesn't," he wrote. Instead of sitting back and waiting for someone else to tell him what to do, Rodriguez got in touch with Warren Buffett, whom he's become friendly with since a meeting between the two several years earlier. (Buffett has a signed Rodriguez jersey hanging in the headquarters of his company, Berkshire Hathaway, in Omaha.) Buffett advised A-Rod that if he truly wanted to go back to the Yankees, he had to be proactive. Rodriguez then sent word through a friend at Goldman Sachs that he wanted to meet with the Yankees owners on his own. Within weeks, the outline of a new 10-year, $275-million contract was in place. For the second time in less than a decade, Rodriguez had signed the richest deal in team-sports history.

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