Johnette Howard

The idea of what exactly Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez will be playing for when the World Series against the Phillies begins Wednesday night in the Bronx is one of the most compelling questions of the series. Rodriguez can win his first championship and validate his 16-year big league career. He can tighten his grip on being the game’s greatest active player and solidify his claim to best ever. But what else would winning it all finally get Rodriguez? Would it finally earn him the public’s love?

It’s hard to remember the last athlete for the ages who was as great as Rodriguez is, and yet so simultaneously good at turning people off. You probably have to go back to sprinter Carl Lewis. Thirteen years removed from his last Olympic race, Lewis still gets lampooned on the sports highlight shows now and then for singing a pre-game rendition of the national anthem that — there’s just no nice way to say this — sounded like a cat with its tail stuck beneath a rocking chair.

Like Lewis once upon a time, Rodriguez is the most sublimely talented athlete in his sport. That alone makes him the biggest lightning rod and most fascinating character in this Yankees-Philadelphia World Series matchup that has all the makings of a classic.

Rodriguez hits for average, hits for power, steals bases and fields like a Gold Glover. His swing is so classically beautiful and effortless it can play tricks on your mind. It’s often hard to tell Rodriguez has just hit another home run unless you simultaneously hear the telltale crack of the bat. He doesn’t corkscrew himself into the dirt like other sluggers. His swing doesn’t change at all. His bat just comes sweeping through the strike zone, same as it ever has, and he’s so strong the ball just goes flying off toward the stands. He makes it look easy.

The way Rodriguez carried the Yankees offense in the first two playoff rounds has probably inoculated him from any further charges that he’s a playoff choker. Even if he has a bad World Series, folks will say the Yankees wouldn’t have gotten there at all without him, or a man can’t possibly stay as hot and clutch as Rodriguez was while strafing the Minnesota Twins and Los Angeles Angels for five homers, 12 RBIs, a .438 batting average, and nine walks in nine games. His on-base percentage was .548. He was clutch in the regular season, too.

But then how do you figure this: Even in the afterglow of the Yankees’ Game 6 ALCS clincher, a morning-after internet poll that asked fans “Are you rooting for or against A-Rod in the World Series?” showed 51 percent were rooting against Rodriguez, and 49 percent were pulling for him when nearly 2,500 votes had been cast.

The idea of seeing A-Rod this close to his first championship at age 34 hasn’t yet turned into the sentimental journey it was for other ring-chasing greats such as Don Mattingly or Dan Marino or John Elway. Is it because this latest A-Rod incarnation is still too new to trust?

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(As a New Yorker who has covered Rodriguez’s entire Yankees career, I’d like to believe Rodriguez’s claim he’s a changed man. But I also remember the last time I found myself sitting atop Idiot Hill because of A-Rod. It was a couple years ago, and I had just written a column for my newspaper applauding how Rodriguez had been drama-free for eight months. A week later, Madonna’s Manhattan doorman ratted them out to the tabloids, saying that A-Rod was sneaking in and out of her apartment in the middle of the night for visits neither of their spouses were invited to. I remember thinking, 1.) Did The Material Girl forget to tip the doorman for Christmas? Whoops! and 2.) I’ve had yogurt in my refrigerator that stayed good longer than that stupid column. What a dope I’d been.)

The complete list of A-Rod’s mortifying screwups and scandals and shows of narcissism is too long and tedious to repeat here. And why pile on a guy when he’s up?

Suffice to say in the past year or two alone, there’s also been a steroid admission and strippers involved, a cheesily timed contract opt-out and a divorce, a much-maligned magazine shoot in which he kissed himself in the mirror, and a best-selling book in which his former manager, long-sainted Joe Torre, damningly wrote how even some of Rodriguez’s Yankees teammates called him “A-Fraud.”

All the seamheads who are now waving their exotic stats and saying that A-Rod’s past playoff failures were overstated — noting, say, that his OPS wasn’t all that different than sacred cow Derek Jeter’s — are engaging in a little sabermetrical sleight of hand.

A-Rod stunk, all right.

The other coalescing, replacement storyline that is gaining steam around A-Rod now — this idea that man meets adversity, man hits rock bottom, man falls in love (with starlet Kate Hudson) and being in love lifts him to elusive success and inner peace in the rest of his life — is a tidy little construct, too. But at least it’s more fun.

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