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arm strength, and fi elding ability— often crowding around, hoping for a little face time with the hottest prospect since Ken Griffey, Jr., had come out of high school in 1987. They held their clipboards close to their chests as they scrib-bled love notes about Alex’s talent. They were almost unanimous in their belief that he would be the fi rst or second player chosen in the upcoming amateur draft. The Seattle Mariners had the top pick, and they, too, were swooning.
    Alex seemed to feed off the scrutiny; he hit an unworldly .606
    through the fi rst month of his senior season. He clearly liked the attention.
    Throughout Westminster’s 1993 season, a Mariners scout poked the lens of his video camera through the chain-link backstop to capture Alex’s every twitch at the plate on fi lm. “We wanted to make sure if he got injured, we’d know it,” says Roger Jongewaard, the head of the Mariners scouting and development that year. “We had lots of video on him.”
    One spring afternoon, Alex ripped through his BP pitches in the Westminster cage, then leaned in close to the camera being held by a Mariners scout and said, “Hey, Chuck, this is Alex. And I can’t wait to get to Seattle.” (Chuck Armstrong was then and still is the president of the Mariners.) “He was the most confi dent high school kid I’ve ever seen,” says Jongewaard. “How many kids would have the nerve to say that to the president of a major-league team?
    Chuck was impressed.”
    Alex, like any star, needed the camera, but in a way that went deeper than vanity. If people were looking, they cared— and Alex felt validated.
    The attention tempered the insecurity that played tricks with his mind and even his sense of who he was. He would constantly ask friends if he was considered popular. On bus rides after away games, far from the scouts and media, he would ask teammates, even after going four for four, “How did I play today?” He needed to be told that he was good, that he was special. That he was loved.
    When Victor Rodriguez left his family to return to New York City in 1985, Alex was devastated. Why had his father left? What had he done?
    Everyone around Alex poured love into the space vacated by his father. “He was doted on,” Susy says. That’s what families do.
    They rally, even if they overcompensate. The family encircled the 10-year- old Alex as if he were the subject of a seance, as if it were their common mission to lift his spirits.
    But still he cried, longing for his father and not understanding why he wasn’t coming home. Until the last day Victor was in the house in Miami, he had hugged and held and kissed Alex, made him feel nurtured. Victor was very good at doing that for people— customers and sons alike. He would make them feel beautiful and wonderful and irreplaceable. And then he would leave.
    It jarred Alex. At such a young age, his emotions ranged from guilt to anger and, ultimately, resentment. “I lied to myself,” Alex explained in 1998. “I tried to tell myself it didn’t matter. But when I was alone, I often cried. Where was my father? Finally, my hope dried up. Dad never came back. I have to let go of that anger to move forward. The problem is, I can’t forget what he did.”
    For months, Alex would lean on the frame of his front door, watching the street. Neighbors could see the little boy craning his neck to scrutinize every man walking toward him. Is that Daddy?
    Alex would come home from school and sometimes check his parents’ bedroom, hoping that his father would be there, napping.
    His pain often distorted reality. Later in his life, Alex would speak of years going by without hearing from his father, even
though Victor called and sent him gifts. “I tried all the time to talk to him,” Victor insists. “I loved him. He was always with me, I thought. I sent as much home as I could.”
    Over the holidays, in the winter of 1985, a TV materialized in a bedroom Alex shared with his Cal Ripken,