NEW YORK – Sometimes you don’t get the goodbye you want, you just have to take what you are given.
So it was for Robinson Cano, the former New York Yankees and Mets second baseman at Citi Field on Saturday afternoon, the 42-year-old infielder playing in the RD/PR Showdown, the All-Star Game between the LBPRC, Puerto Rico’s winter league, and LIDOM, the Dominican Republic’s winter league where Cano continues to ply his trade with the Estrellas Orientales in his hometown of San Pedro de Macoris.
With one out in the bottom of the seventh inning, Saturday’s All-Star game paused while Cano soaked in the cheers from 20,057 New Yorkers — Mets fans, Yankees fans, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans — who came out on a November day to say farewell.
When Cano first appeared on the diamonds of New York nearly 20 years ago, he met the high expectations of the fans of Major League Baseball’s winningest franchise in the country’s most baseball-mad city, finishing second in the American League Rookie of the Year balloting after hitting .297 with 14 homers and 62 RBIs in his first year as a Yankee.
Four years later, he won his lone World Series in pinstripes when the Yankees defeated the Philadelphia Phillies, batting .320 and hitting 25 homers, having turned into a bona fide star playing alongside Derek Jeter in the Yankees middle infield.
His full body of work as a player in Major League Baseball is possibly Hall of Fame-worthy, at minimum a borderline case, though two suspensions for performance enhancing drugs, the first an 80-game suspension in 2018 after he tested positive for furosemide, and the second wiping out his 2021 season when he tested positive for stanozolol, an anabolic steroid, will likely hurt his chances.
But his resume speaks for itself. Cano has 335 career homers, a career .301 average, 1,306 RBIs, was an eight-time All-Star, a five-time Silver Slugger winner and a two-time Gold Glover. He’s won the 2009 World Series, the 2013 World Baseball Classic, and was the MVP of that WBC, he’s won two championships in the Liga Mexicana de Beisbol and will tyr for a third next summer, won an MVP award in that league, and three Caribbean Series representing the Dominican Republic.
Without much of a supporting cast once he left the Bronx for Seattle after signing a 10-year, $240 million contract before the 2014 season, Cano, despite being one of the game’s great players, had already made his final postseason appearance in Major League Baseball.
And so as the winter league All-Star Game paused in the top of the seventh, and Cano stood alone on the dirt where he patrolled second base for the Mets in the second New York act of his MLB career, it was bittersweet. When he was young, New York expected a lot more from him, more than one World Series, more years in pinstripes, perhaps for less money, and more success when he came back to town with the Mets.
Few, if any, get to leave the baseball field on their own terms, more often than not, the game — whether it’s a coach telling a player he’s not good enough, not good enough anymore, or perhaps an injury — tells you when it’s time, as the old trope goes. Fewer still get to leave the way Cano’s former double play partner Jeter did, driving in the game-winning run at Yankee Stadium against the division rival Baltimore Orioles in the final game of his career.
For almost four minutes, Cano repeatedly tipped his cap. He scooped up some infield dirt. Shed some tears and eiped his eyes. Scooped up some more dirt, and walked over and hugged his teammates. And he waved to the fans of New York, answering their final letter, conceding he’s less a God than a man.
And then Cano, having gone 1-for-3 with a walk and made a slick barehanded play in the field, walked off a New York diamond as a professional baseball player for the last time, those in the stands cheering, blowing horns, scraping guiras, understanding that flawed greatness like his is still greatness, content to be present for it one last time on a November afternoon.
Photo: New York Yankees’ Mark Teixeira, left to right, Mariano Rivera and Robinson Cano celebrate after the ninth inning of Game 6 of the Major League Baseball World Series against the Philadelphia Phillies Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2009, in New York. The Yankees won 7-3. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)
