It is fitting that Alex Rodriguez will end his Yankee career in a meaningless game

A-Rod has always been a controversial player and his hurried retirement from playing is in keeping with his years in a New York Yankees uniform

Fans stand to take pictures as Alex Rodriguez prepares to bat during one of his final games for the New York Yankees (AP)

It's ending, as it was fated to, in a mess. Alex Rodriguez, unquestionably one of the greatest – but assuredly also one of the most maddening – baseball players of this or any generation, isn’t getting a farewell retirement tour of the ball parks he has graced in a dazzling 20-year career.

He’s not even being allowed to play out a full final season. Instead his last appearance for the New York Yankees will be on Friday, in a near meaningless mid-August game against Tampa Bay. How did it come to this?

Looking back, the marriage of the Yankees and Rodriguez probably should never have been. He had started out in 1994 as a brilliant young shortstop for the Seattle Mariners. In 2001 he moved to the Texas Rangers in a record breaking $252m 10-year deal. Two years later, he arrived in New York.

Baseball’s perennial biggest spenders didn’t really need him, but the Yankees are the Yankees. To fit him in, they had to persuade him to switch from his accustomed position of short stop to accommodate Derek Jeter, an inferior player but emblem of the franchise, who already occupied that position. Not surprisingly, relations thereafter between the two were fraught. But there was only ever going to be one winner in any battle for New York’s affections, and it wasn’t Alex Rodriguez.

What followed was 13 years of soap opera, played out under the fiercest media spotlight in America. Apart from the rivalry with Jeter, there were spats with management, constant dissection of a lurid private life that included a failed marriage and a rumoured dalliance with Madonna. More generally, Rodriguez somehow had a knack for being a jerk.

Alex Rodriguez missed the whole of the 2014 season for doping (Reuters)

The on-field returns weren’t electrifying either. He helped bring the team just one championship in his 13 years with the club, a meagre return for a franchise that expects to be a permanent winner. Above all however were the drug allegations.

In 2009, he admitted he had used steroids during his time in Texas, while recovering from injury and feeling under pressure to justify that first mega-contract. By then however, the Yankees had signed him up to an even bigger deal, worth $275m that would last until 2017, when he would be 42, geriatric by baseball standards. As a waste of money it took some beating.

By 2013 Rodriguez was front and centre in another drug scandal, this one involving a shady Florida lab called Biogenesis. In the end he was handed one of the longest bans ever, forcing him to miss the entire 2014 season. He only made matters worse by suing Major League Baseball, claiming he was being unfairly victimised.

The tabloid Daily News branded Rodriguez “the most wanted criminal in baseball history”, claiming he had not only lied about his drug use, but had meddled in the investigation. Ultimately he dropped the suit – and the period of enforced reflection evidently helped. 2015 was an Indian summer for A-Rod, as he hit 33 home runs during the year he turned 40. There even seemed to be a new Rodriguez: less spiky, humbler, who didn’t put his foot in it every time he opened his mouth. In short, the model “There’s no I in team” guy.

But the playing renaissance was shortlived. This season has been a bust. By any criterion he wasn’t worth his place in the team (and certainly not the $27m the Yankees owed him this year and next).

Rodriguez struggled to put his Yankees cap on at a press conference to announce his final game (AP)

Usually baseball’s a sentimental business when it comes to last curtain calls for its superstars. Unarguably Rodriguez is one of them: fourth all-time in career home runs, with 696, third in runs batted in, eighth in runs scored and 20th on the all-time hits list. But for the Yankees, those achievements must be set against the PR nightmare Rodriguez has largely been.

Last weekend, player and club struck a deal.

He would be released this weekend (but his contract would be honoured). Instead he is to join the club’s management as a “special adviser.” But students of Rodriguez past antics wonder: will he quietly go along with the deal – or will he sign up with another team prepared to take a chance on a crocked old hitter, in a bid to get those last four homers that would carry him into the exclusive 700 club, alongside Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron and Barry Bonds?

That, probably will be as far as it goes. If suspected drug use has kept Bonds, Roger Clemens (the dominant pitcher of his generation) and a clutch of others out of baseball’s Hall of Fame, the sport’s highest distinction, there’s no reason to believe A-Rod will make it either.

So Friday is the end of the line for Alex Rodriguez, no 13 for the New York Yankees. Let’s just hope, after so many miscues the club, their fans and their departing player get it right on the night. It’s no more than he deserves.