Bedeviled by Life's Curveballs, Rodriguez Misses the Guideposts Alex Rodriguez played for the Trenton Thunder in a rehab game on Saturday. The singular event in the life of Alex Rodriguez is not his imminent suspension, or the career home run record that now will never happen. The event that makes him so remote, so rudderless, took place when he was 9, when his father disappeared. This is not pop psychology to explain a man who blundered into the airplane propeller of adult reality. This is his own theory. Back when he was a young major leaguer, Rodriguez would occasionally explain himself in terms of his missing father. His mother was strong and smart, and remains so to this day, but he expressed bewilderment that a father could just take off. People who knew him in Seattle accepted that as the flaw in that apparently perfect equipment - the willowy shortstop with power, who worked so hard and innately understood the game but not life. He went from earnest to clueless, with no warning light - "always on the outside of whatever side there was," as Dylan wrote about the gangster Joey Gallo. Barely into his 20s, Rodriguez once told a reporter a poignant tale that in his spare time on the road he visited college campuses, like Harvard, asking students how they chose the college, and what they studied. He had once feinted toward taking a few courses at the University of Miami, probably as a negotiating tactic with the Seattle Mariners, before taking their huge bonus. Now he claimed he was sampling that alternative life - but common sense, self-protection, could not be grafted on by visiting a campus or accumulating elegant business suits. Many athletes, many people, grow up without a parent or two. Some get through it. But Rodriguez stands on the brink of the suspension that will take him out of baseball, perhaps through the 2014 season, or forever. It is quite safe to say he would not be paying his newest set of lawyers - he is always changing authority figures - if baseball did not have a huge case against him. In the rational age of Michael Weiner, the players association needs to protect the bulk of its constituency, the players who stay clean. The labor-management agreement on testing, the bans on certain stimulants and bodybuilding drugs, may seem like the restraint of free will, but the rules keep many athletes and aspiring youngsters from gobbling down unknown pills and potions. Baseball seems to have evidence on Rodriguez, going back to his admission that he used the stuff from 2001 to 2003 - when he was young and foolish, he later contended. Now A-Rod is like the Zelig of baseball, popping up in pushing a civil rights rationale for not having drug testing. And Rodriguez shows up in the spotlight on the busy Canadian doctor, Anthony Galea, who helped bulk up American superstars. And now he is unable to bury his tracks leading to the anti-aging clinic - whatever that is - Biogenesis in Coral Gables, Fla. He was a five-tool player. Now he is a multitool cheater, rejected, like a badly grafted body part, by the main corpus of the New York Yankees. One does not have to be a Yankees fan to understand that there are two kinds of Yankee stars: Rent-a-Yankees Yankees and Real Yankees. Roger Clemens, that swaggering bully, apart from any drug or legal issues, was not a Real Yankee. Wade Boggs was just seeking the brass ring on the merry-go-round. What about Dave Winfield? Ask the Bleacher Bums to take a vote. But Paul O'Neill and Hideki Matsui became Real Yankees, instantly. Maybe A-Rod never had a chance to be a Real Yankee, but he ruined his image permanently with his scandals and machinations and posturing. He missed the voice in his childhood saying, "Alex, cut that out." "Dad left us when I was 9," Rodriguez told Bob Finnigan of The Seattle Times in the spring of 1998. What did I know back then? I thought he was coming back. I thought he had gone to the store or something. But he never came back. ... It still hurts. His father ran a shoe store, but after moving from New York to the Dominican Republic to Miami, he suddenly left. "He had been so good to me, actually spoiled me because I was the baby of the family," Rodriguez told Finnigan, adding: "I couldn't understand what he had done. To this day, I still don't really know how a man could do that to his family: turn his back. His mother remarried and did well in business, but Rodriguez said he was still upset over the split. "After a while, I lied to myself," Rodriguez said. I tried to tell myself that it didn't matter, that I didn't care. But times I was alone, I often cried. Where was my father? To this day, I still can't get close to people. By contrast, Derek Jeter has a father, Charles, who was a drug counselor and a mother, Dorothy, who was an accountant, as well as a sister. The family seems to have sent him a message: "Derek, whatever you do, don't be a jerk." Which he never has been. Rodriguez and Jeter discovered each other when they were teenagers, and in their early years in the majors offered the spare room on trips to Seattle and New York. E-mail: geovec@nytimes.com