How Did Richard Rodriguez Made In The Natural

There is no doubt about it, Roy Hobbs from The Natural by Bernard Malamud and Alex Rodriguez are both fantastic baseball players. Both players however, flew to close to the sun and fell from public favor. Since both players excelled in their time, became the best of the best, and then both fell from grace and had to start from the bottom again, some might say that Roy and A-Rod are basically the same person. I think that even though both players made almost career ending mistakes, Rodriguez learned from his mistakes and was given a chance at redemption. Also, Rodriguez is able to see a life past baseball while Roy can’t see himself doing anything else. As Rodriguez nears the end of his career he has his sights on more than just baseball.

This is most clearly shown through him calling people whom he has wronged in the past. He calls “Friends, owners, fellow players with whom he should shoot straight... He tells each person on his list that he’s deeply sorry for all the drama he’s caused that he’s determined to regain their trust and he hopes they’ll give him a chance”(Moehringer 4). It is quite clear that Rodriguez is sincere with his apologies. He goes on a media blackout and then he calls each person personally to apologize. The fact that he went dark on social media so he could make each apology personal and not just some generic statement shows that he is truly sorry for what he has done. He used steroids and got caught, he accepted his punishment and is now trying to seek redemption from his colleagues, and his family. With Roy however, it is quite the different story. The Natural begins with Roy being shot by Harriet Bird, an unsavory woman with whom he tried to sleep with. There are several signs from the start that Harriet is not normal, the most apparent one being where she says to Roy “Look I’m a twisted tree”(Malamud 29), basicly calling herself broken goods. She then goes on the shoot Roy in the chest and take him out of baseball for fifteen years. When Roy does go back to baseball, he immediately starts to pursue a married woman named Memo. He goes out on a

Both athletes wanted to leave a legacy, break all of the records, and leave the game of Baseball as one of the greats. They both tained their legacies, Roy more so than Rodriguez. Roy ends his career by accepting a bribe to throw the Knights final game to get money to impress Memo. He loses the game, and rumors start to pop up that Roy threw the game. The commissioner says that if he did throw the game ”He will be excluded from the game and all his records forever destroyed”(Malamud 231). People in the novel talk about how Roy could have been the best in the game and he could have been, but now everything he has worked to accomplish will be for nothing. His legacy and records, gone. While Rodriguez’s punishment is less severe, the stigma around his name is the same. The mere mention his name causes a “Pained ugh. Guttural groan ... Rodriguez has become the steroid era’s Lord Voldemort”(Moehringer 2). He has this stigma that surrounds him now, everything he has done is now taken with a grain of salt. The comparison of Rodriguez to Voldemort just shows how infamous he actually is. People will automatically associate him with steroids now rather than his achievements in baseball, hence the pained groans people make when his name is brought up. Now Rodriguez will be allowed to play baseball again, and five years when he retires he might be voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, but most people will want an asterisk