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Alex Rodriguez celebrates after their 7-3 win against the Philadelphia Phillies in Game Six of the 2009 MLB World Series at Yankee Stadium on November 4, 2009 .

NEW YORK - Hideki Matsui was knocking balls from here to the moon, delivering a World Series performance out of Reggie Jackson's past. The slugger from Japan was everybody's all-American, a designated hero in every sense of the term.

But for each blast off Matsui's bat on this indelible Bronx night, and for all the old glories revisited by Derek Jeter and Andy Pettitte and Mariano Rivera, one player was most responsible for this 27th championship - the most improbable player of all.

So yes, Alex Emmanuel Rodriguez, you just became a full-blooded Yankee. Welcome to the club.

At 34, you finally realized it's much better to make a World Series dent with your talent than with an opt-out clause in your contract.

"This is even better than I imagined," Rodriguez said. He was wearing a championship t-shirt and cap soaked with champagne, this after a delirious Jeter jumped him in the clubhouse, doused him with a bottle of Moet & Chandon, and nearly knocked him to the floor.

"I've waited 16 years for this," A-Rod added, "and it's an incredible feeling."

When the Yankees finished off the Phillies, 7-3, in Game 6, Rodriguez lifted the World Series trophy toward the heavens from a stage behind the mound. He stepped onto the field, carried the trophy in his arms as if it were a newborn, then stopped at the dugout and lifted it again for the fans.

"I just wanted to be one of the guys this year," A-Rod said. "I'm part of a championship team, and I couldn't be happier."

If Rodriguez does indeed have paintings of himself as a centaur in his bedroom, A-Rod's A-OK on that. He's a mythical figure now, a Yankee god, a champion forever.

Rodriguez set a franchise record with 18 postseason RBI. As the final Philly out was recorded by Rivera, a Shane Victorino grounder to second, Rodriguez threw up his arms and ran like mad toward Jeter and the rest.

A-Rod wrapped Rivera in a bear hug, picked him off the ground, and twirled him around. Matsui was named World Series MVP, but there was no question who was the uncrowned MVP of the fall.

"Man, I'm happy for him," Jeter said of A-Rod. "He had a great postseason and really helped us win."

In the clubhouse, a champion again for the first time since 2000, Jeter playfully shouted to Rodriguez, "Hey Alex, What does this mean to you?"

"It means the world," A-Rod answered.

Rodriguez was the big star in the division series and ALCS, and at times the big star against the Phillies, changing the World Series with one Game 3 cut against Cole Hamels.

But Rodriguez wasn't the big star Wednesday night, and that's precisely the point. After committing himself to "staying in the moment," Rodriguez drew a pair of walks and willingly played the role of Pippen to Matsui's Jordan.

Once the game's most selfish player, A-Rod took a selfless route to his elusive ring and helped Jeet and Mo and Andy and Jorge win one for their thumbs. "Now the rest of his career is going to be nice and easy," Brian Cashman said. "Alex is one of the greatest players of all time, and now he can just play.

"There's nothing anybody can say anymore. He's proved everything. He's done it all, so now hopefully he can just continue adding to our trophy case."

Rodriguez needed only one title to become a made man in the Bronx, a truth buried in the fine print of his $305 million deal. He didn't need Yogi Berra's 10, or Mickey Mantle's seven, or Jeter's five.

Just one charmed turn of fortune at the intersection of World Series pressure and fate.

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PHILADELPHIA - On any list of wild and crazy World Series questions you thought would never be posed for public consumption, this one takes first, second and third place:

Is anyone around here going to give A-Rod a little help?

Yes, Mark Teixeira, consider this your $180 million hint.

Monday night, while representing the tying run, Teixeira advanced his wretched World Series with a game-ending strikeout recorded by Ryan Madson, who was practically sucking from an oxygen mask. The Phillies sent the Yankees and case after case of unopened champagne back to the Bronx, back to a place Joe Girardi didn't want to visit in the worst way.

Game 6. No, make that Game 6 with a 37-year-old pitcher going on short rest.

Girardi loves Andy Pettitte. Heck, everybody loves Andy Petttitte, who has successfully cloaked those three scarlet letters  HGH  with his talent, demeanor and grace.

But Girardi saw what the Phillies did to a younger man on short rest in Game 5. A.J. Burnett wasn't nearly as tough as his Bruce Lee tattoo, or as Philly's otherworldly second baseman, Chase Utley, and now the defending champs will face Pettitte  who admitted he was "gassed" in Game 3 -- with a renewed confidence and a nothing-to-lose approach.

That means the Yankees will need to score some runs to win their 27th championship.

And that means Mark Teixeira will need to wake up to win Alex Rodriguez's first.

"You try to help your team win every single night," Teixeira said. "Sometimes you do, sometimes you don't.

Consider this the new "MT curse": Teixeira is 2 for 19 in this World Series, a horror show that can't go on.

"I feel like I've done a lot this postseason to help the team win," he said. "That's what I'm going to try to do tomorrow."

Teixeira isn't paid to be in the business of trying; he's paid to be in the business of doing.

After a history of postseason meltdowns, Rodriguez has figured out the formula. Even though A-Rod has but four hits and seven strikeouts in the World Series, he has met the responsibilities of a clutch franchise player and cleanup man in October and November.

Rodriguez dominated the Twins, dominated the Angels, and recovered from six whiffs in the first two games against the Phillies to seize the World Series with one flick of his Game 3 wrists. A-Rod slammed a homer off a TV camera, reduced Cole Hamels to a puddle of goo, and left the Phillies burdened by doubt.

In the decisive sequence of Game 4, after Johnny Damon drove Brad Lidge batty in the ninth, Rodriguez laced a Lidge fastball for the winning two-out double.

"There's no question, I have never had a bigger hit," A-Rod said afterward. "But again, if you look at what Mark Teixeira and I have done in the World Series [it's] not much..."

On the surface, that comment  or the Teixeira part of it -- exposes A-Rod's insecure core. He was sitting in a postgame news conference when he said it, basking in the lights, camera and action afforded the Game 4

Why did A-Rod feel the need to bring the first baseman into it? Why didn't A-Rod take a public poke at himself and leave it at that?

Why? Because Teixeira deserved some public scrutiny, for one.

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PHILADELPHIA - The Yankees would not let the home team escape. They would not let the Phillies get away with a 4-4 score and a chance to take the World Series to a most frightening ninth-inning place.

Brad Lidge was one precious Game 4 strike away from sweet liberation, and an old, broken down left fielder running on the fumes of an expiring contract wouldn't give it to him.

Jurassic Johnny Damon waged a holy baseball war against Lidge in the top of the ninth, two outs, nobody on, with the Phillies' closer ready to flip Citizens Bank Park onto its ear. Damon dug out of a 1-2 count, fouled off five pitches and saw eight nasty offerings in all before Lidge caved on Pitch No. 9.

Damon ripped it into left field, stole second base, and continued onto third when the Mark Teixeira shift gave him the free pass. At that point, Lidge was a hopelessly lost soul on the mound, a defeated man who had built the Yanks their latest bridge to a ticker-tape parade.

Damon had outlasted Lidge the way Paulie and Bernie and Tino and Brosius always outlasted the other guy's closer across Joe Torre's dynastic run. Lidge would hit Teixeira, and then would stand absolutely no chance when Alex Rodriguez stepped to the plate.

A-Rod lashed his double that broke a million Broad Street hearts.

"I have never had a bigger hit," Rodriguez said.

Jorge Posada followed with his two-run single, and the Yankees had a 7-4 victory and a credible link to the glories of their not-too-distant past.

Sunday night, with everything going against them, Joe Girardi's Yanks looked as resilient and as worthy as Torre's four championship teams.

"We're down," Charlie Manuel said, "but you know what? We're still breathing."

Not for long. Not after Damon made his daring dash for third, and not after A-Rod tied Bernie Williams and Scott Brosius for the franchise record with his 15th postseason RBI.

"He's the reason why we're sitting here," Damon said of A-Rod.

Rodriguez doesn't stand alone. As a whole, the Yankees have declared themselves as an immovable, do-anything-for-the-cause force.

Their ace, CC Sabathia, made a go of it on short rest, and the Phillies' ace, Cliff Lee, did not.

Their closer, Mariano Rivera, delivered a ninth inning that went one, two, three. The Phillies' closer, Lidge, delivered a ninth inning that went one, two, three hits and three runs.

In between the start and finish, the Yankees also drew strength from their most reliable postseason source - their captain.

Derek Jeter started Game 4 with a semi-tough grounder to Utley's left, of course he did. Jeter keeps his hands inside the ball and goes the other way as easily as the rest of us nurse a cup of morning joe.

What followed next was as much a testament to Jeter's' priceless postseason worth as the first-pitch homer he hit off the Mets' Bobby Jones in a different World Series life.

Sunday night, matched against Joe Blanton, a 35-year-old Jeter proved he's slowing down in his old age. He waited until the second pitch to start shaping this Game 4, and he didn't even get the ball in the Citizens Bank Park air.

It came off his bat as a benign grounder, or so it seemed. Utley is said to be playing hurt, but the guy would play barefoot on an infield of hot coals if it meant winning back-to-back titles.

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PHILADELPHIA  Mariano Rivera was not moving with that familiar athletic grace. At his locker, following a workout at Citizens Bank Park, Rivera projected the body language of the middle-aged accountant who had just emerged from his weekly full-court pickup game.

He gingerly slid his arms into his shirt, and wore the expression of a man looking forward to a hot meal and a warm bath. Rivera had thrown 39 pitches in Game 2, one for every year he's spent on the planet, and he didn't at all look disappointed that Game 3 would have to wait for tonight.

"I don't want to tell you that I don't feel it," Rivera conceded the day after his two-inning save. "Yeah, you feel it. But & we have a lot of time to rest."

Rivera will turn 40 in four weeks, meaning he's reached the point in his epic career where the act of firing the most pitches he's ever thrown in a World Series game doesn't jibe with his right arm.

Only Joe Girardi doesn't have any choice. The manager is suffering a crisis of faith in the rest of his bullpen, and the Phillies represent as potent a World Series lineup as the Derek Jeter Yankees have seen.

So the remaining three, four or five games of Phils-Yanks will come down to a race - Mariano Rivera's race against time.

Counting the regular season and postseason, Rivera's got 1,002 games on his right arm, 1,220 innings, 564 saves. He had shoulder surgery in the off-season. He has a receding hairline to go with his receding velocity.

"We can hit Rivera," Charlie Manuel said after Game 2. "We can hit any closer."

On one level, Manuel wasn't saying anything profound. He'd watched his defending champs throw some good swings and some good at-bats at Rivera over those two scoreless innings and, as Girardi said, "I wouldn't expect any manager to say, 'Well, I don't think we can hit him and the game is over when he comes in.' I mean, that wouldn't be a very good message to send to your club."

But on another level, ask yourself this:

When's the last time any opposing manager leaned into an open mike and allowed himself to spit out the words, "We can hit Rivera"?

It doesn't mean Rivera is on the brink of becoming a shot pitcher - far from it. He's still the best closer in the game by Secretariat lengths.

It does mean the Phillies sense vulnerability in Rivera, who won't find the sanctuary of an off-day over the next three games.

Told of Manuel's comment, Rivera said, "I don't have to say anything about that. They can have whatever solution they want. I have to trust myself."

Girardi has to trust Rivera, too, because he sure doesn't trust Phil Hughes, Joba Chamberlain, or anyone else posing as a reliable link from the Yankee starters to Mo. Girardi limited Rivera's workload in the regular season - not a page out of the Joe Torre playbook - and the closer agreed that the unofficial four-out, April-to-September limit has helped him "a little bit" in October.

Only inquiring minds want to know: How long can Rivera maintain this pace? When questioned about his early post-surgical struggles against the Rays and Red Sox, Mo smiled and told reporters, "You guys don't learn."

He's right. Rivera nailed down the final six outs in a win-or-else game and the conversation centered around the Phillies' healthy cuts against his cutter, and the fact that Rivera didn't turn a single bat into an exploding cigar.

"They had good at-bats and they took a lot of borderline pitches," Jeter said, "but Mo still got the job done. At this point I don't care how anything looks. The bottom line is to win or lose, and he came in and pitched two scoreless innings against one of the best teams in baseball. It doesn't make any difference what kind of swings they had if he got the outs.

"He's a once-in-a-lifetime player. There's no one that's done what he's done, and there will probably be no one that will come out and do what he's done."

Rivera has 10 saves in the World Series and 38 in the postseason, both records. He has saved World Series games for nine different pitchers over 12 seasons.

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NEW YORK - Alex Rodriguez was saved at a Tampa restaurant known as Mom's Place. A disgraced and surgically altered ballplayer with a $305 million contract was ordered to straighten up inside a joint where five bucks go a long way.

If this intervention mirrored Christopher's on "The Sopranos", it was defined by one exception:

It worked.

"I sat down with two very close friends and they told me a lot of things," Rodriguez said Tuesday, "things that I had to change. They showed me tough love, and I thought from that breakfast on I've stayed with the plan and it's been a good plan."

Gui Socarras, a longtime friend, and Jason Zillo, the Yankees' director of media relations and an official close to A-Rod, arranged the breakfast at the diner on North Dale Mabry. This was in the first week of May, when the Yankees were in town to play the Rays.

Rodriguez had returned from hip surgery in Colorado, and this wasn't a welcome-back kind of meal. The exchanges were intense, angry, for men only.

In effect, Socarras and Zillo told Rodriguez he needed to stop acting like a horse's rump.

"I'm glad I had two good friends that were very honest with me," A-Rod said, "and told me the way it was."

Zillo declined to discuss the breakfast meeting. Reached by phone Tuesday, Socarras only would say, "Alex is a really good friend, and I don't want to say anything about it other than I'm very happy for him."

Two days after the Tampa intervention, Rodriguez stepped to the plate in Baltimore and hit the very first 2009 pitch he saw for a three-run homer.

Against all odds he managed his 13th 30-homer, 100-RBI season and, of greater consequence, his first trip to the World Series. When Rodriguez bats cleanup in tonight's Game 1 against the Phillies, he will do so as a smarter player and a better man than the lost, insecure soul who needed steroids to feel complete in the batter's box.

"It was obvious in spring training I'd hit rock bottom," Rodriguez said, "and I think you can only hit your head against the wall so many times before you figure out there's another way to get to the other side of the wall. And for some of us it's taken a little longer."

Rodriguez is 34. John Elway was 37 when he helicoptered his way to the first of two Super Bowl titles.

They've talked at length about this, Elway and A-Rod, even though Rodriguez grew up idolizing the quarterback who wore his unlucky 13, Dan Marino, never a Super Bowl champ.

"In many ways Elway and I are similar to each other," Rodriguez said, "that's what [Elway] said. And for him it came at the very end, so hopefully for me it comes a little sooner."

A-Rod said Elway told him "the landscape of our careers was pretty much the same" and explained "how much more he enjoyed it when it came at the end."

Only Rodriguez doesn't want to wait. He was a dominant force against the Angels and Twins, and sure doesn't care to reverse the trend.

But here's the thing: A-Rod can falter against the Phillies and make Dave Winfield's 1-for-22 World Series in '81 look Ruthian in comparison, and he'll still leave this postseason knowing he'll never again be doubted as a money player.

Just review his combined ALCS and ALDS numbers: Five homers. Twelve RBI. Fourteen hits. Nine walks. Ten runs. Thirty-one total bases.

Not even a dizzying procession of double bogeys against Philly could return A-Rod to Greg Norman-hood.

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