Fenway Park was the stage on which Alex Rodriguez was first introduced to Major League Baseball. It was a cool, rainy evening in Boston on July 8, 1994, and the gathering specter of a players’ strike threatened to shut down the sport.
Rodriguez was 18 and nervous, but the moment hardly registered with Red Sox fans, who years later would come to regard that skinny youngster batting ninth as a villainous character.
Fans in Baltimore, St. Petersburg and Detroit have given Rodriguez relatively painless receptions in the three cities the Yankees have visited this season, all in the wake of his yearlong suspension for his role in the Biogenesis scandal.