As Alex Rodriguez steams toward 600 home runs, he is accumulating a list of on-the-record insults that no one in the sport can match.  ANAHEIM, Calif. — According to some of his peers, Alex Rodriguez is a hypocrite and a “prima donna.” He is not the “Yankee type,” either, and he has “monopolized all the attention” since arriving in the Bronx in 2004. Others have described his on-field conduct as “bush league,” “a little cheap,” an “unsportsmanlike act of cheating” and more typical of “junior high school baseball.” Tough crowd.  As Rodriguez steams toward 600 career home runs, he is accumulating a list of on-the-record insults that no one in the sport can match. It has become a fashionable phenomenon to bash Rodriguez, something as popular as the Rally Monkey or the Phillie Phanatic. And it appears to be that way for all sorts of reasons, some of them his own doing — his weird flair for testing baseball’s boundaries, his lavish contracts — and some, well, just because he is who he is. When baseball season starts, it’s open season on Rodriguez.  “I guess it’s because they don’t like that he’s a $500 million guy, he’s with the Yankees, stuff like that,” said the Angels’ Torii Hunter, who has known Rodriguez since they were 16-year-olds competing against each other in a tournament in Boise, Idaho. “I think people hate good stuff. If you’ve got a nice shirt on, people are going to call it ugly.”  Rodriguez’s critics have come from every stratum within the sport — from opposing managers (Ozzie Guillen, John Gibbons) to his own (Joe Torre), from a World Series most valuable player (Curt Schilling) to an American League M.V.P. (Dustin Pedroia).  The latest salvo came on Thursday from Oakland’s Dallas Braden, who, as a 26-year-old pitcher with 50 career starts, would fall into the demographic of Rodriguez critics who were hardly great players themselves but were quite willing to knock him, people like the former pitcher Matt Mantei (he called Rodriguez a “big-timer”) and the catcher Paul Lo Duca (he said Rodriguez was “disrespectful”).  Braden started in on Rodriguez in the sixth inning of Thursday’s game and then raised the volume of his remarks afterward. Rodriguez had started a neat around-the-horn triple play during the game, and has a new World Series ring that he wears around the clubhouse. Yet there he was, being skewered by a fairly anonymous pitcher.  From Braden’s point of view, Rodriguez had committed an unconscionable slight: on his way back to first base after a foul ball, Rodriguez had crossed over the pitcher’s mound and stepped on the rubber. Braden said the mound was his territory, that other pitchers felt the same and that no opposing player should cross over it while he was pitching.  On Thursday, Rodriguez thought Braden’s reaction was amusing, and a day later, he seemed even more inclined to laugh it off. Between chews of bubble gum, Rodriguez smiled as he repeated that he did not understand the uproar. Asked whether he wondered why he often found himself at the center of controversy — big and, in this instance, maybe not so big — Rodriguez laughed.  “It hasn’t been big at all,” Rodriguez said. “It’s been small.”  Small on his scale, he was told, and Rodriguez laughed again.  Many of baseball’s unwritten rules, like not barreling over catchers in spring training, are obvious. Crossing over the pitcher’s mound would seem to be a lesser offense. Still, it was a bizarre thing for Rodriguez to do, just one more instance in which he has acted out of sync with the baseball norm. He has slapped a ball out of a pitcher’s hand during a key playoff game. He has yelled “Ha!” while running past an infielder trying to catch a pop-up. And with an expanse of green grass all around him, Rodriguez jogged over the mound.  Maybe it was a calculated tweak designed to disrupt Braden. Maybe Rodriguez was totally oblivious to what he was doing. Maybe that obliviousness indicated a disregard for players not as good as he is. Whatever the reason, the fact that so much of the criticism directed at Rodriguez has occurred since he joined the Yankees is probably not a coincidence. More visibility has made him a bigger target.  “That’s the curse of being a great player,” Yankees Manager Joe Girardi said before Friday’s game. “People are going to evaluate everything you do and watch every move that you make.”  It does not help Rodriguez that he plays alongside the Yankees’ widely admired captain, Derek Jeter. Whenever Rodriguez does something to irk opposing players, they only need to look to Jeter, a few feet to Rodriguez’s left, and the contrast is stark.  Sure enough, Braden sarcastically advised Rodriguez to “maybe watch his captain a little more often.” It was a familiar critique. In October 2004, Schilling, talking about Rodriguez’s slap play against Boston in the American League Championship Series, said: “That’s not the way you play the game. Bottom line: Would Derek Jeter ever do that? No chance.”  On and on it went, and still goes. In early 2005, another Red Sox player, Trot Nixon, lambasted Rodriguez, in part over a magazine interview in which Rodriguez boasted of his early-morning off-season workouts. Nixon felt Rodriguez was inferring that other players were not as dedicated as he was, even though some of those players, like himself, had kids to take to school.  A year later, it was the White Sox who were upset. Their manager, Guillen, called him a “hypocrite” for wavering and then ultimately deciding to play for the United States in the World Baseball Classic instead of the Dominican Republic.  Guillen is Venezuelan, not Dominican. Why he was so annoyed at Rodriguez was never fully clear. But then again, Rodriguez has a way of setting people off. No one does it better.
Alex Rodriguez has a penchant for acting out of sync within the baseball norm and drawing the ire of others in the sport.