One phone call convinced Alex Rodriguez to stop fighting MLB and apologize

Alex Rodriguez is back on the baseball field for the first time in two years and he returns as a more humbled person thanks to one phone call he made in January, 2014 in the midst of his war with the Yankees and MLB.

J. R. Moehringer has written a fascinating article on A-Rod for ESPN the Magazine on how the Yankees slugger finally learned to accept responsibility for what he has done.

In the article, Rodriguez comes off as human for once, a flawed human to be sure, but no longer the perfectly scripted robot that A-Rod always seemed to think fans wanted to see. And it all started when he left his inner-circle and reached out to a 73-year-old criminal defense attorney in Washington d.C. who once represented President George W. Bush.

On January 11, 2014, Rodriguez was suspended for the entire 2014 season. Later that day, A-Rod vowed to "take this fight to federal court."

But the next day, according to Moehringer, Rodriguez started to doubt the fight ("the fight has begun to feel doomed, futile -- wrong. He is, after all, at fault") and he reached out to attorney Jim Sharp, a former member of the Navy JAG Corps.

Sharp was brutally honest with Rodriguez telling him "you're ruining your life."

According to Moehringer this is when it hit A-Rod that something needed to change.

"That jolts him. That sinks in. That's the thing that makes Rodriguez stop and take stock ... Now, he sits. Through the pain (following hip surgery), through the fatigue, he sees with new, dazzling clarity that Sharp is right. It's over. He calls off his dogs, tells his inner circle to issue a statement that he's dropping all litigation, accepting his suspension, effective immediately."

At this point, A-Rod's inner circle urged him to fight on. Instead, A-Rod formed a new circle consisting of what Moehringer describes as "levelheaded Midwesterners, peacemakers -- and deal makers."

A-Rod's next move was to make a list of names that included friends, owners, and players. Rodriguez called each one on the list and apologized for all the drama he had caused.

Rodriguez then made a list of people who deserved an even deeper apology with a more complete explanation, one that "will be a thousand times more difficult to deliver" according to Moehringer. The only name on that list was A-Rod's 9-year-old daughter, Natasha.

It is unclear if people will forgive Rodriguez for using performance-enhancing drugs and lying about it for so long. But it sounds like Rodriguez has at least come to the realization that the previous path he was on was doomed and this new path at least has some semblance of hope and he can thank Sharp for the brutal honesty A-Rod needed to hear.