Mike Celizic

In the season’s biggest moment, the highest salary in the game stepped to the plate for the most celebrated and successful team in the history of American sports. And the mighty A-Rod blew it.

I had said coming into the playoffs that it was time for A-Rod to earn his pinstripes, to take the New York Yankees on his back and have the kind of postseason that so many pinstriped heroes of the past have forged when the stakes were highest.

He hadn’t distinguished himself in the first four games against the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, but in the fifth and deciding game of the American League Division Series, he could make it all better, because legends are known by what they do in the deciding game of the big series, not by what they do in the first game.

Last year, in the final four losses to Boston in the ALCS, A-Rod had pretty much disappeared.  But this year was supposed to be different. He was more relaxed and his stats were among the best in the league — .321 batting average, 48 home runs, 130 RBIs. He had settled in as a Yankee, he was ready to shine.

That was the theory, anyway, and it sounded good at the time it was presented. But here’s what A-Rod’s night looked like:

In the first, after Derek Jeter’s lead-off single, A-Rod popped up. It was no ordinary pop-up, but a really, really good pop-up, a major-league pop-up, a pop-up to second that carried halfway to right field, a pop-up that Babe Ruth might have envied.

He came up again in the second with two runs already on the board for the Yankees. On the hill was a rookie, Ervin Santana, who had been called in to replace starter Bartolo Colon, who had had to leave with a bad shoulder.

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Santana was as shaky as an aspen leaf in a hurricane and one hit could have finished him. A runner was waiting at second for the hit that would bring him home. A-Rod saw his opportunity and struck out — swinging.

In the fifth, A-Rod picked up his production, getting in the way of an inside pitch and taking one for the team. But no one could drive him in. In the seventh, after Jeter led off with a home run to cut the Angels’ lead to 5-3, A-Rod grounded out. Like his first-inning pop-up, it was a terrific ground out, the ball hit as hard as any one-hopper ever hit directly to a shortstop by any of the greatest players in the game.

Finally, in the ninth, after Jeter ripped a single to left to lead off the inning — his third hit, including the home run, of the night — A-Rod stepped to the plate to do what Yankee heroes have always done, to claim his place in history and send another uppity opponent slinking home to contemplate the futility of daring to think it could beat the Yankees.

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The Yankees were two runs down and a home run would have tied it. A single would have kept the rally going for Jason Giambi and Gary Sheffield. And A-Rod, by his own agent’s admission the best player ever to pull on a uniform, swung at a ball near his ankles and hit into a double play.

Giambi and Gary Sheffield would follow with singles, setting the stage for Hideki Matsui to strand his eighth runner of the game with the final out, but A-Rod’s at-bat sucked the air and the life out of the Yankees. In the biggest moment of his life, he didn’t just make an out, he made two of them.

And when the composite box scores were compiled, A-Rod would have two hits in 15 at-bats and zero RBIs.

So much for claiming his pinstripes.