“Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”

It’s an old saying, but it says a lot. After reading a piece about Alex Rodriguez in The New York Times Sunday magazine earlier this month, I decided I didn’t want to be fooled a second time.

Indeed, Rodriguez fooled me once. He fooled me big time. It was in spring training in 1997, and it was the first time I met or interviewed him. The previous year, his first full season in the majors, Rodriguez made a huge splash with a tidal wave of a season. Playing for the Seattle Mariners, the 21-year-old shortstop drove in 123 runs, hit 36 homers and batted .358 with a .414 on-base percentage and .631 slugging percentage. The Sporting News named him Major League Player of the Year.

“At the age of 21,” I wrote in the Times, “Rodriguez is also a phenomenal baseball player. He may be an even more phenomenal person. It is easy to walk away from a conversation with him wanting to take him home to be another child in the family.”

Yes, I wrote that uncharacteristically effusive assessment of Rodriguez. Worse, though, I called my wife after I left the Mariners’ clubhouse and told her I had just found another child for us.

I should feel embarrassed to disclose that thought, but I don’t. I realize I’m only one of many Rodriguez has fooled over the intervening years. Call him a charmer, call him a con man. Whatever you want to call him, he was successfully adept at luring a listener into his web of likeability.

Is Rodriguez still fooling us, or at least trying to? I’d have to say yes. Maybe he deserves more credit for his redemption, but there are reasons to withhold that credit.

This is the start of the piece in the Times Sunday magazine by David Marchese:

“Alex Rodriguez has, in retirement, fashioned a comeback that far exceeds any reversals he engineered on a baseball field. It wasn’t all that long ago that the former Yankee was one of professional sports’ biggest bad guys, and not without reason. He was suspended for the 2014 season for violating the league’s antidoping rules. Even aside from that, he was widely considered to be vain and disingenuous, especially in his hometown.”

A-Rod’s biggest redemptive step has been his employment by ESPN to serve as an in-game analyst. He is good at what he does, but there is mixed in-house feeling about his willingness to talk about his use of performance-enhancing drugs. Depending on the point of view, he has talked enough about his use or he has declined to accede to the wishes of his superiors to discuss it more.

We can go back four years when Rodriguez was still playing and returned from his season-long suspension. He issued a handwritten statement but avoided mention of steroids use.

“I take full responsibility for the mistakes that led to my suspension for the 2014 season. I regret that my actions made the situation worse than it needed to be. To Major League Baseball, the Yankees, the Steinbrenner family, the Players Association and you, the fans, I can only say I’m sorry.

“I accept the fact that many of you will not believe my apology or anything that I say at this point. I understand why and that’s on me. It was gracious of the Yankees to offer me the use of Yankee Stadium for this apology but I decided the next time I am in Yankee Stadium, I should be in pinstripes doing my job.”

Mistakes and actions but no acknowledgement of his use of steroids, his cheating and his lying. Maybe some ESPN officials would have liked him to admit that he cheated and lied, but those comments have not been forthcoming.

He has gone only so far as to say, “I made my bed and I have to lie in it.” At least he’s not blaming anyone else.

Rodriguez also has overlooked his outrageous behavior at the grievance hearing in 2014 in which he was challenging his suspension. When it came time for Rodriguez to testify, he threw a temper tantrum and stormed out of the hearing room. He concocted an excuse for his action, but the real reason was he didn’t want to have to testify under oath.

That was Rodriguez at his scheming but obvious best.

We still don’t know the truth of A-Rod’s use of PEDs. He has admitted using them but only when he was caught. Ten years ago Selena Roberts wrote a book filled with accusations that Rodriguez used PEDs as early as high school.

I was brutally critical of the book not because of Roberts’ allegations but because of her book-filled use of anonymous sources. It seemed that Roberts didn’t talk to an anonymous source whom she didn’t quote.

In the end, maybe Roberts was right about Rodriguez’s use of steroids, but to be fair to the accused and to the book’s readers the ton of accusations had to be supported by something other than anonymity.

Back on that day in spring training in 1997, when I was ready to adopt A-Rod, he talked about his 22-year-old friend Derek Jeter.

“I love Derek like a brother,” Rodriguez said. “We respect each other an awful lot.”

Jeter, who has never been associated with performance-enhacing drugs, has never had the need to be the public personality Rodriguez craves. Despite Rodriguez’s comments in 1997 there is nearly an entire field of study on his relationship with Jeter. I don’t know where their relationship stands now, if there is a relationship, but it did not flourish while they were still teammates in New York. Perhaps drugs had something to do with it.

While Rodriguez cleaned himself up and set out on the road to redemption, Jeter pursued his own path and became the chief executive officer and minority partner of the Miami Marlins.

Jeter’s group paid $1.1 billion for the Marlins, an astounding sum for a team so beaten and battered over the years. The Bruce Sherman group paid that price to Jeffrey Loria because legal sports betting was on the horizon and owners old and new anticipated a gold rush as their share of the legal sports handle.

However, no shares have been forthcoming because Major League Baseball, nor any of the other leagues, has negotiated a revenue-sharing agreement.

Meanwhile, the Marlins have traded away their best and costliest players and are struggling to stay afloat. Jeter, I have been told, is devastated over the developments. Perhaps Jeter could call his old friend A-Rod, and they could have a chat for old-time sake.

It’s probably trite to say this, but if George Steinbrenner were alive and running the Yankees, Steve Donohue would be out of a job. Donohue is the New York Yankees’ trainer and in Steinbrenner’s eyes would be responsible for the multitude of injuries the Yankees have encountered.

Aaron Judge, the team’s multi-talented right fielder, is its latest starting player to suffer a disabling injury. He singled in the sixth inning of last Saturday’s game with Kansas City, winced as he started out of the batter’s box, got to first base and then went directly to the dugout, not passing “Go” nor collecting $200.

On Sunday he joined a dozen teammates, most of them starters, on the major league Injured List.

Judge’s journey to the list, which was formerly known as the disabled list, enabled him to reunite with the large contingent of Yankees already there. If he thought they were missing, he has now discovered where they have been.

This is the Yankees’ latest injury-list roster (subject to updates minute by minute):

• RF Aaron Judge (left oblique)
• CF Aaron Hicks (strained lower back)
• CF Jacoby Ellsbury (multiple injures)
• LF/DH Giancarlo Stanton (strained biceps)
• C Gary Sanchez (calf)
• 1B/DH Greg Bird (foot)
• SS Didi Gregorius (elbow surgery)
• SS Troy Tulowitzki (calf)
• 3B Miguel Andujar (torn labrum)
• Pitcher Luis Severino (shoulder)
• Pitcher Dellin Betances (shoulder)
• Pitcher Jordan Montgomery (elbow)
• Pitcher Ben Heller (Tommy John surgery)

CC Sabathia started the season on the injured list following an off-season heart procedure but is back on the active roster and pitching.

So what does George Steinbrenner have to do with all of these injuries? Nothing except when he was alive, if the Yankees had suffered so many injuries he would have blamed the trainer and fired him. Donohue escapes that fate because Steinbrenner died in 2010, and his son, Hal, now the managing partner, operates 180 degrees from his father’s philosophy.

The same goes for Brian Cashman. The general manager would be working elsewhere, if at all, if the elder Steinbrenner were steering the Yankees’ ship. Sometimes a guy just gets lucky.

Think of all of the general managers who would have loved to have been in Cashman’s position, among them Cedric Tallis, Bill Bergesch, Murray Cook, Clyde King, Woody Woodward, Bob Quinn, Pete Peterson. On the other hand, Lou Piniella, Gene Michael and Bob Watson had their opportunities to remain in or return to the job and said thanks but no thanks.

Cashman seemed to come close at one point to saying no to Steinbrenner but got what he wanted and wound up outlasting Steinbrenner.

Despite spending alarmingly more money on players during Cashman’s tenure than any other team, the Yankees have won only a single World Series in the last 18 years, all under Cashman.

Cashman oversaw World Series championships in his first three seasons as general manager (1998-2000), but oversee was all he did. Gene Michael, a Cashman predecessor, constructed the foundation that put those three World Series rings on Cashman’s fingers.

Putting Cashman’s tenure in perspective, the Yankees’ 18-year stretch with a lone World Series title,a decade ago in 2009, is the franchise’s least successful period since its pre-Babe Ruth days. When the Yankees bought Ruth from the Boston Red Sox in December 1919, they had played their first 16 years without a World Series appearance (there was no Series in 1904).

They played their first three seasons with Ruth without winning the Series, meaning if they don’t win it this year they will have endured the second most futile 19-year period in the storied history of the franchise.

Ask members of the Yankees’ hierarchy, though, why they continue to employ Cashman as general manager when general managers are fired all over baseball and they say “we like him.”

Cashman, on the other hand, deserves credit for one thing. The Yankees have developed a productive minor league system. Of course, it took Cashman a decade and a half to realize the value of the system that Michael developed in the early 1990s when Steinbrenner was suspended and absent from the team’s daily operation.

You might remember names like Williams, Jeter, Pettitte, Rivera and Posada. They were the products of Michael’s plan to retain and develop promising young players whereas Steinbrenner always traded them away in exchange for established, more expensive players.

Cashman was there and saw those players grow into World Series champions, but he had a fellow in charge of the minor league system, Mark Newman, whom he refused to fire for 15 years and instead let him turn the farm system into a wasteland.

At the direction of the younger Steinbrenner, the Yankees have reduced their player payroll to avoid the luxury tax and lower their tax rate should they exceed the threshold.

They reached the playoffs in spite of their austerity plan, but didn’t go far, losing to the dreaded Red Sox, who went on to win the World Series while the Yankees went home.

The Red Sox ended last season with baseball’s highest payroll and began this season in the same position. But at $222 million, according to Ron Blum of the Associated Press, they aren’t far ahead of the Cubs’ $209 million and the Yankees’ $207 million. There’s plenty of time for those totals to change.

What is notable, however, is even with all of their injuries, the Yankees haven’t rushed out and latched onto expensive veteran players. For decades, other teams hated the Yankees because they spent lavishly, if necessary, to replace injured players. Using their farm system freely, the Yankees have abandoned that practice, too.

In Cashman’s 22 years as general manager, the Yankees have spent approximately $4 billion on player payrolls. I have not calculated corresponding payrolls for other teams, but I don’t have to do that to understand no other team is close.

Other teams have long complained that where the Yankees are concerned, baseball does not have a level playing field. Now, however, the Yankees are giving other teams a chance by offering to play on a more level field.

The question facing Cashman is if he couldn’t win spending many millions more than other teams, how is he going to win spending the same or less?

The recent intersection of Major League Baseball and the White House suggests that there was nothing Barack Obama did in two terms as president that is safe from Donald Trump’s destruction. If Obama did it, Trump is determined to undo it.

Trump reached into baseball last week for his latest “get-Obama” act. He quashed an agreement the United States had reached during the Obama administration with the Cuban Baseball Federation to allow Cuban players to sign contracts to play in this country without having to defect.

A lawyer friend who follows baseball closely disagreed that Trump’s act was another one aimed at Obama, his presidential predecessor, whom Trump sophomorically belittles at seemingly every opportunity.

The lawyer said he heard an interview with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in which he was asked if the Cuban baseball move was intended to put pressure on Cuba to influence that country’s stance on troubled Venezuela. Pompeo, the lawyer said, answered yes.

In addition, Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, has been quoted as saying the Trump administration didn’t want the Cuban government to be able to use the players as “pawns” in its support of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro.

On the other hand, within days after the agreement last December, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) urged the president to block the deal and there was a growing movement in South Florida, home of many Cubans, to overturn it.

Trump’s decision came just days after the Cuban federation identified 34 players who were eligible to sign with United States teams. Under the agreement, the Cuban government would have received a percentage of a player’s signing bonus.

The last time Trump was involved in baseball was in 1994, when major league players were on strike and a group of entrepreneurs resurrected a 1989 project to start a new league independent of Major League Baseball. Trump was one of them, with his partner Meshulam Riklis, an Israeli financier and husband of the singer and actress Pia Zadora.

The project fell apart when Trump and Riklis failed to appear at an organizing meeting at which the prospective team owners were supposed to put up a substantial amount of money.

Trump initially had expressed great interest in owning a New York area team.

“I see it as a very viable league,” Trump told me in a telephone interview at the time, speaking of the 1989 project. “Otherwise I wouldn’t do it. We’ll have a long-term contract with a major television network or a number of major networks, including cable.”

When Trump’s name first surfaced as a possible owner, the popular speculation was Trump was maneuvering to get into the existing major leagues, similar to what he tried with his involvement in football’s U.S.F.L. However, he denied that was his plan, saying he planned to be in the league on a long-term basis.

The leagues, of course, never came into existence, and Trump never became an owner. He did, on the other hand, become president, and it was in that role that he killed the Cuban plan.

Cuban players had been ecstatic about the plan because it created freedoms they had never known.

“It’s a very happy day for the great game we share,” former pitcher Luis Tiant said. “I am thrilled that the next generation of Cuban ballplayers, who only want to succeed in the Major Leagues, will have a safer route to their dreams.”

At the time of the announcement, major leaguer outfielder Yasiel Puig said:

“Today is a day that I am extremely happy. Thank you MLBPA, MLB and the Cuban Federation for reaching an agreement to give Cuban baseball players an opportunity to leave Cuba safely and come to the United States to play baseball. To know future Cuban players will not have to go through what we went through makes me so happy. I want to thank everyone who was involved in making this happen and thank them personally for allowing an opportunity for Cuban baseball players to have the ability to come and show how talented they are. Thank you.”

Offered Yoan Moncada, Chicago White Sox third baseman, “I am extremely happy that an agreement has been reached. It is good to know that players will not have take a risk or be in danger to try and get to the United States to play baseball. I am really happy and wish future players the best. I’ll be waiting for you in the Big Leagues.”

And then Trump pulled the plug, short-circuiting the Cubans’ ecstasy.

NO NATIONAL BASEBALL NEWS FIT TO PRINT

When I began working for The New York Times in 1969, Leonard Koppett was the chief baseball writer. Whatever national baseball news developed he was responsible for covering it. If he developed a previously unknown baseball news story, all the better.

A few years later, Koppett wanted to move to California and craftily concocted a plan to achieve his goal. He convinced the Times editors that with the Yankees and Mets each going to the West Coast twice each season and other events mushrooming in the West it would make more sense to station a reporter in California, thus saving money and manpower.

Then Koppett, after being out West a couple of years, convinced the editors that games finished so late East Coast time that other than the Yankees and Mets the events weren’t worth covering so it didn’t pay for him to go to places like Denver and Seattle.

The primary point of this story is when Koppett went west I inherited the national baseball beat while at the same time I continued to cover the Yankees. I did both assignments through the 1986 season and continued as the national baseball writer until I left the Times in 2008.

As national writer, I took great pride in generally covering baseball news and specifically in creating the coverage of baseball contracts and pioneering an aggressive, intensive style of covering labor developments, not in baseball alone but in all of the major sports.

Tyler Kepner, the Times’ current national baseball writer, covers neither contracts nor labor. He doesn’t cover a team, and he doesn’t cover national news. He writes soft, fluffy features, interviewing players but not developing any stories that are considered exclusive, other than the fact he’s the only reporter who has written those soft, fluffy features.

But the Times, to its shame, doesn’t care because baseball is no longer important to the Times. Baseball kept the Times sports section afloat for decades, but now it is a stepchild to soccer, rugby, cricket and other sports in which American readers could not possibly have any interest.

If you want baseball news, you have to look elsewhere – in USA Today with Bob Nightengale, on ESPN.com with Jeff Passan, or with Ken Rosenthal at TheAthletic.com. When the Times has a baseball news development, it always says someone else reported it first.

For example, the Times reported the Cuban issue with Major League Baseball and the White House, saying it “was first reported by the Wall Street Journal and ESPN.” The Times’ article had two bylines and a line saying a third person had contributed reporting, but none of those reporters was the Times’ national baseball writer.

Perhaps Kepner feels his work would be wasted because of the Times’ dismissive treatment of baseball, but I think not. The Times had a sports editor in the ‘80s, Joe Vecchione, whose operating philosophy was “give me a good news story and I’ll find a place for it.” I did, and he did.

If national baseball writer Kepner gave today’s sports editor good national baseball news stories, the Times would be forced to use them. Instead of digging for stories, though, Kepner takes advantage of the Times’ misguided philosophy and doesn’t work at his job. He seems to think writing soft, fluffy features is his job.

Instead of asking or demanding its national baseball writer to do more, the Times rewarded him by running an excerpt from a book he has written about baseball. Kepner has every right to write a book, but for the first time in his 20 years at the Times, write something that other publications can say it was first reported by the Times.

The absence of that telltale sentence is the saddest development in my 55 years of familiarity with the Times and New York newspapers generally.