Alex Rodriguez

Before they were NEXT

Two MVP awards, 400 home runs and 1,119 RBIs ago, he was the 22-year-old starting shortstop for the Seattle Mariners, and we were, well, just starting. In March 1998, we put A-Rod—along with Kobe Bryant, Kordell Stewart and Eric Lindros—on the first cover of ESPN The Magazine, to herald both their arrival and ours. Every year since, we've tried to identify the athletes who will change the face of their sports. So as our 10th birthday approaches, we've decided to take an occasional look at those picks, to go back in time and meet them Before They Were Next. Batting leadoff (beats batting eighth): Alex Emmanuel Rodriguez.

GOING FOR BROKE As a tyke growing up in New York City, Rodriguez caught baseball fever from his father, Victor, a former pro catcher in the Dominican Republic and a rabid Mets fan. "I saw how passionate he was about the game, how closely he paid attention to it," says A-Rod, who recalls swinging a giant red plastic bat inside the family shoe store. "That rubbed off on me." Maybe too much: After breaking three lamps in one week, little Alex had his big bopper taken away.

YARD WORK When Alex was 4, his folks moved the clan (he has two older sibs, Joe and Susy) back to their native Dominican Republic. That's where the budding All-Star learned how to handle the leather—at second base. "I was too little to throw from short," Rodriguez says. But not too little to get hooked on homers. Alex was 8 and playing at a park that actually had a fence the first time he went yard: "It felt so good to just jog around the bases."

CATCHING ON The Rodriguez family moved again, to Miami, when Alex was in fifth grade. He spent afternoons sitting under a tree at Everglades Elementary, watching the local Little League team practice. Short on players one day, the Caribes coach asked him if he could catch. "Alex hated catching," says J.D. Arteaga, a buddy who has known Rodriguez since before he was A-Rod (or, for that matter, Lightning Rod). "But he was the only guy who could do it." Which is why the shortstop played backstop—old-school Lance Parrish mitt and all—for the Caribes as they won their league's title game. "Nowadays Alex throws down the gel," says Caribes teammate Pepi Gomez, laughing. "But back then his hair was everywhere!"

HORSEPLAY One of Alex's first trophies came for winning the batting title in the 11-to-12 division at the Southwest Miami Boys & Girls Club—with a .614 average. He did it again the next year, hitting .580. "Batting titles are like SAT scores," says Rodriguez, who led the majors by hitting .358 his first full year in the bigs. "You always remember the number." But what childhood teammates remember is how scrawny their shortstop was. In fact, they nicknamed him Penco, which means Skinny Horse in Spanish. Says Arteaga, "His knees were the thickest part of his legs."

BULK FOODS When he wasn't suiting up for Miami's Westminster Christian School, Penco was busy beefing up. After practice, Rodriguez tackled Sizzler's bottomless wings with his teammates. Between games, he and Arteaga rode bikes to 7-Eleven for a fix of their favorite munchies: BBQ potato chips. "I'd eat a bag and gain three pounds of fat," Arteaga says. "He'd eat a bag and gain three pounds of muscle." By the time 11th grade rolled around, Rodriguez—whose pregame grub these days is PB&J on wheat—had gone from Skinny Horse to just plain Horse, having added 30 pounds to his frame and 100 to his bench press.

AMERICAN IDOLS Cal Ripken was his favorite shortstop, but Rodriguez rocked a 3 on his Westminster uni in honor of boyhood idol Dale Murphy. "He was big and strong and played every day," says the 10-time All-Star, who's missed just 16 games the past six seasons. "And he could hit it out to right-center." Ditto for Rodriguez, who once belted two homers during a 13-run first inning, including a moon shot to the opposite field. "Oppo in high school is ridiculous … you just don't do it," says WCS and Yankees teammate Doug Mientkiewicz. "But Al did it all the time."

MAN OF STEAL "Here Comes Miami Westminster's Superman," read the St. Petersburg Times headline when WCS visited Seminole High during Rodriguez's senior year. As a junior he hit .477 and stole 42 bags in just 35 games, leading the Warriors to the 1992 national title. He also quarterbacked the football team to a 9—1 mark, throwing for 1,636 yards and 21 TDs (with 10 to TE Mientkiewicz). Rodriguez even made a short-lived but memorable cameo as a swingman on the hoops squad. "We were a .500 team," Mientkiewicz says. "But for the eight games that Al played, we beat the everlasting snot out of people."

LEADING OFF Even Superman is human. In his final high school baseball game, in the regional semis, the normally sure-handed shortstop committed three errors, including a botched throw to second during extra innings that squirted into rightfield and allowed the winning run to score. That'll sound familiar to Yankees fans, who watched an awkward A-Rod struggle at third base in 2006. But looking back on it all, Seattle's decision to make him the top pick of the '93 draft is still an easy call for the official scorer: No error.

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