H-bloo On A-rod.(The Talk of the Town)(Alex Rodriguez, Madonna)

Shortly before his regular teatime, one day last week, the Yale literature professor Harold Bloom found an occasion to consider the plight of his beloved Yankees, as they approached the All Star break in third place, and of their star third baseman, Alex Rodriguez. "The poor fellow, you know he's a great player, but he's never been a particularly sympathetic human being," Bloom said. "And he certainly looks rather awful at the moment." Bloom was hard at work on his next book--"I am literally sitting here brooding on Kafka and the Kabbalah"--and had therefore been avoiding the "popular press," as he called it, but the latest rumors involving A-Rod had not escaped him. "My son the other day said to me that you could not pick up either of the tabloids without finding something about the supposed relationship to the famous Madonna." There were at least a couple of nice coincidences in this: Madonna may be the world's most famous adherent of Kabbalah (or "that ghastly sort of adulterated popular Kabbalah," as Bloom put it), and, according to that day's Post, Rodriguez had recently decamped to the Four Seasons, where he was seen sipping tea, more like a scholar of Jewish mysticism than like a slugger.

To recap: Rodriguez's wife, Cynthia, filed for divorce last Monday, citing emotional abandonment, extramarital affairs, and "other marital misconduct" on her husband's part, after it was reported that the three-time M.V.P. had been spotted visiting the Central Park West apartment of the seven-time Grammy-winning pop singer. ("She's my fucking soul mate, dude," A-Rod was reported to have told a friend in February, referring to Madonna, who is seventeen years his senior.) The Rodriguezes are an East Side family, and Cynthia, according to her lawyer, is "a Greek Orthodox lady." She flew to Paris as the scandal broke, and spent some time in the company of Lenny Kravitz, a reputed old Madonna flame, who has, like a born-again virgin, sworn off premarital sex, while Guy Ritchie, Madonna's husband, bravely outfitted his son Rocco in a Yankees T-shirt before facing the paparazzi. No less a moral authority than John Rocker, the former pitcher and Mets' nemesis ("Imagine having to take the 7 train to the ballpark, looking like you're riding through Beirut next to some kid with purple hair, next to some queer with AIDS," he once told Sports Illustrated), stepped forward as a character witness for A-Rod. "He has no STDs," Rocker said. "No illegitimate kids. No multiple wives." Professor Bloom picked a bad week to skip the tabs.

Rodriguez, though a frequent media attraction, has ...