The feeling is mutual.
``I love Johnny," Rodriguez said, interrupting his conversation with a visitor to call out to Damon (``Johnny, you on the bus? I'm with you.")
``He's been here a short while. But he and Mo [Rivera], they're probably my closest guys.
``What's great about this game, the reputation that people want to create, when you have the Jeters, the Johnnys, the Mannys, the Pedros, the Ortizes, the Mos, that stuff really doesn't matter. All that other stuff --`clutch,' `not clutch,' `he's a jerk,' `he's a prima donna,' `he doesn't care' --that's all nonsense."
Damon's embrace of his new teammate is far more enthusiastic than A-Rod receives from many of the natives, even after winning the American League Most Valuable Player award last season, hitting 48 home runs and driving in 124 runs, and breaking Joe DiMaggio's franchise records for home runs by a righthanded hitter and homers by a righthanded hitter in Yankee Stadium.
No matter what he does, A-Rod ludicrously remains the poster boy for Yankee failures, territory he staked out during the Yanks' historic collapse against the Sox in the '04 ALCS, reinforced when the Bombers were bounced from the first round of the playoffs by the Angels last season, and basically is restated after any Yankee loss of consequence.
The Yanks get clocked by Curt Schilling in the first game of this series?
``A-Rod, Yanks Show Up Late," was the headline in the Daily News.
Rodriguez hits a home run off Keith Foulke in the ninth inning of that game?
``If It Doesn't Count, Count on A-Rod," cried Newsday, repeating the widely held conviction that most of A-Rod's biggest hits are hollow at the center, which does not explain, of course, how a man could drive in 124 runs last season -- hitting .290 with runners in scoring position -- and have none of them count.
Just before arriving in Boston, he was clobbered after the Mets took two of three from the Yankees, especially after he stranded 11 runners in the series and hit into a crushing double play with the Bombers down a run in the eighth inning of the rubber game, a 4-3 Yankee defeat.
