NEW YORK — Long before a wild and crazy night made the new Yankee Stadium feel like the old Yankee Stadium for the very first time, Alex Rodriguez was seen looking and asking for directions all over the park.

It was a perfect scene for an imperfect man who forever wanders like a lost little boy.
Rodriguez had to follow someone to the players’ entrance, to the clubhouse, to the batting cages and, ultimately, to his outdoor office.
“I know where the field is now,” he said while standing near his dugout steps.
Rodriguez was speaking hours before a 5-4 victory over the Twins made possible by A-Rod’s fourth walk in five at-bats, and by Melky Cabrera’s two-out, sudden-death single that brought home A-Rod’s designated runner, Ramiro Pena, with the clinching run. “That was awesome,” Rodriguez gushed at his upgraded locker. He looked perfectly happy to be playing and talking baseball at last.
“It’s like you’re back in Little League,” he said.
This was a stormy, testy, down-to-the-last-stroke game borrowed from the Stadium across the street, a fight made complete by the sight of Joe Girardi and Ron Gardenhire screaming at each other over a he-said, he-said play at first.
But A-Rod was in the middle of it all, for the sake of old times.
He returned to polite cheers, nothing more, nothing less, when he stepped to the plate at 7:37 p.m. for his first official Bronx at-bat as an admitted cheat and chemically enhanced fraud. Nobody was heard booing, but then again, Tino Martinez got a bigger hand when his face was flashed on the center field board.
A-Rod managed a non-event walk and yet didn’t need long to turn the house against him. With the bases loaded and one out in the third, the slugger swung through three Francisco Liriano pitches with one-armed flails.
It felt like early October had come to the middle of May, and the fans jeered A-Rod on the spot. At least they didn’t hit him as hard as they hit the video images of Bill O’Reilly and Donald Trump.
Rodriguez walked again in the sixth, again in the seventh, and again with the Yankees rallying in the ninth. Then Cabrera gave his team its most dramatic victory with his liner to left-center.
“A loss would’ve been a big setback,” A-Rod said.
Brett Gardner wouldn’t let that happen, not with his leadoff triple in the ninth and an earlier inside-the-park homer that honored the request of a young cancer patient at Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital, a girl who figured the requested homer would have to clear the wall.
On this night the Yankees did most of their work base to base. As it turned out, Rodriguez could’ve seriously damaged the cause had he been less patient at the plate.
“A walk is as good as a hit,” he said. “In many ways it’s better than a hit sometimes because you get to see five or six pitches.”
There’s no good reason to believe a healthy A-Rod won’t hit for average and power this year, because, manager Joe Girardi said, “There’s nothing in his lifetime that has told him any different.”
But there’s nothing in A-Rod’s lifetime that has told him he can concentrate on baseball, and only baseball, for the balance of his career, either. Rodriguez swears he’s done with steroids, outlandish photo shoots, graying pop icons and the rest, and yet why in the world would anyone believe him?
“I feel right where I need to be,” he said. “I think ’07 was a year that, if I can follow that blueprint, I’m going to be fine, which is (to) focus on baseball and only baseball and that’s exactly where I am right now, having a good time.”
Rodriguez dominated in ’07, when he refused to field any question or honor any request that didn’t have to do with a bat and a ball. And then his uberagent, Scott Boras, executed the cop out of an opt-out in the middle of the clinching game of the World Series, breathing new life into a Frankenstein monster that only recently was caged.
A-Rod was nailed on the subject of performance enhancing drugs by Sports Illustrated’s Selena Roberts, whose subsequent book painted the third baseman as a pitch-tipping, skirt-chasing, Jeter-obsessing cad. When Rodriguez rehabbed his surgically-repaired hip in Colorado, he sought a different kind of healing in the mile-high air.
He decided to “cut the fat” out of his life. In other words, concentrate on being a great ballplayer rather than a lousy celebrity.
Toward that end, Rodriguez finally neutralized the army of advisers around him, the people who could tell him everything except how to hit a curve.
A-Rod stopped listening to Guy Oseary, Madonna’s manager, and to Ben Porritt, John McCain’s strategist. He has marginalized Boras and another PR man, Richard Rubenstein.
Rodriguez has traded away all these high-powered spinsters and re-embraced a longtime friend, Gui Socarras, who is said to have Alex’s best interests at heart (imagine that!).
A-Rod wants a clean slate, and the vast majority of reporters who cover him and fans who watch him will have no problem granting one.
“New York fans have always been fans that have given people second chances,” Girardi said. “They are fans that have given people third chances, too. ...”
But A-Rod has to earn his second, third and fourth chances first.
“Alex has owned up to his mistakes,” Girardi said.
Some of them, anyway. He has to do more than he did in 2007, when maintaining an all-baseball, all-the-time edge served his free-agent ambitions.
Rodriguez has to remain clear of all public relations messes for at least two seasons, and prove he cares more about the team’s winning percentage than his own Q-rating.
For the time being, Rodriguez has to figure out the new park. He called the place “amazing” and “absolutely gorgeous” and noted that he liked to hit the ball toward right field, where a mystery jet stream has turned the Stadium into Coors Field East. “It’s a good aiming spot,” A-Rod said.
He needs one, too.
For his team, his career, and his life.