What if A-Rod had gone to Boston?

It all happened on Presidents’ Day weekend in 2004, when the Yankees made one of the biggest trades in their history by acquiring Alex Rodriguez.

The change was announced on Valentine’s Day and Rodríguez was presenting on February 16 inside the Hall of Fame Club of the old Yankee Stadium. It was a move that was supposed to change baseball history, for both the Yankees and the Red Sox.

So it was. Though not in the way everyone thought at the time.

The Red Sox had made an effort to acquire Rodriguez from the Rangers, but those negotiations eventually fell through. The Yankees needed a third baseman because Aaron Boone — the hero of Game 7 of the American League Championship Series against Boston in October of the previous year — had suffered knee tears playing casual basketball in the winter.

The solution was Rodríguez, one of the elite shortstops in the sport and who agreed to move to third base because the Yankees already had a luxury shortstop in Derek Jeter. In this way, Rodríguez–who had been the Rangers’ No. 3–became the Yankees’ No. 13. No. 3 was not available in the Bronx, because it had been used by Babe Ruth, who was also once part of a major transaction.

I was in Boston the weekend the Rodriguez deal was announced. Four months after Boone’s home run off Tim Wakefield in the bottom of the 11th inning, the city was still mired in a baseball hangover, because that moment seemed to symbolize everything that had passed between the Yankees and Red Sox since Ruth.

I went to a Red Sox store across the street from Fenway Park and one of the young guys who worked there said, “At least we got Brady.”

He was referring to Tom Brady, the quarterback who a few weeks earlier had guided the Patriots to their second Super Bowl title by defeating the Carolina Panthers in Houston.

The mood in Boston as far as baseball was concerned – my friend Mike Barnicle of MSNBC has always said in Boston the Red Sox are not a matter of life and death, but much more serious – was that the arrival of Rodriguez to the Yankees was the end of everything Somehow, the Yankees, dubbed “The Evil Empire” by Red Sox president Larry Lucchino, had become an even more evil Empire of Evil, from the point of view of Red Sox fans.

But the Rodriguez trade was not the end for Red Sox Nation. It turned out to be just the opposite, because since that change occurred, the Red Sox have won four World Series this century, while the Yankees have only won one, in 2009, with Rodríguez as a member of their team.

The twist in their story, of course, would actually begin when they again fell three-nil to the Yankees in the 2004 ALCS. That was months after the Yankees had essentially agreed to trade Alfonso Soriano for Rodriguez, and the Rangers agreed to pay some of the money they owed Rodriguez in order to get out of the massive 10-year, $252 million contract they had awarded the slugger in December 2000.

This is what Lucchino later had to say about that moment in his team’s history and the history of the Yankees to Boston’s WEEI.com:

“It was the starkest reminder of the old adage: The best changes are often the ones that never happen. It was also a reminder of the power and influence of the Major League Baseball Players Association, which would not allow Rodriguez to accept less money than he was earning in Texas to play for the Red Sox. I can’t say how it would have affected our operations going forward. It would be completely hypothetical. I’m not going to try… [Pero] Having won three in 10 years, we take satisfaction and pride in what has developed instead of an A-Rod-led Red Sox.”

This was before the Red Sox won their fourth World Series since 2004 in 2018, long after Rodríguez stood in front of the cameras and microphones at Yankee Stadium and stated, “At this point in my career, I What matters to me is winning.”

In the middle of that 2004 season, Rodríguez would star in the famous fight at Fenway Park with Jason Varitek, on a day in which the Red Sox came from behind to beat the Yankees. Bill Mueller hit a walk-off home run off Panama’s Mariano Rivera that day. In October, in Game 4 of the ALCS, it would be Mueller who would tie the game with a single against Rivera to keep the Red Sox alive in the greatest season in franchise history.

It all started 18 years ago, one Presidents Day weekend. Rodríguez to the Yankees and not the Red Sox. It was supposed to be the end of everything for Boston baseball. It turned out to be the start of the best baseball streak the Red Sox have ever had, even though they still had Ruth before the Bambino’s move to the Yankees in 1920. Now in Boston they think the Rodriguez trade, because it came in a long weekend, must be a baseball holiday. For them.