Except that A-Rod won’t be making that chase, as he told ESPN’s Andrew Marchand on Wednesday that he plans to retire after his contract runs out following the 2017 season. For someone who has as much interest in baseball history as Rodriguez does, it’s hard to believe that he doesn’t know what this decision means.

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The signal sent is the ultimate change in A-Rod, moving away from the image of the ultimate self-absorbed ballplayer to someone giving up a chance at history when it could easily be within his reach. There has to be a part of him that wants that record, but at the same time, part of him that knows what it would mean to the game if its most hallowed record went to somebody who was suspended a year for a PED rap.

Yes, Bonds holds the record, and there’s little question about what he did to get it, but the difference is that Bonds never was sanctioned for what he did, and played during a time when Major League Baseball’s stance was to look the other way. With A-Rod, there is no such ambiguity — he’s an admitted user who served a punishment.

By stepping aside, A-Rod avoids the scrutiny that would come with a record chase, and winds up better serving his legacy as someone who learned a lesson from his suspension, as someone who can have a positive association with his name going forward. The guy that everyone saw on Fox last October is and should be the guy that A-Rod wants to be known as.

So, Rodriguez can spend the next two years continuing to build goodwill, rising from the ashes of what he himself burned down with his involvement in the Biogenesis scandal. The Hall of Fame likely is out of the equation for him regardless of where he winds up on the all-time home run list, so that doesn’t provide any extra incentive to chase the record.

As Mets reliever Hansel Robles said Thursday through an interpreter, “If he’s retiring, he must feel like he’s completed his goals.”

A-Rod’s goals assuredly did once include the home run record — he had incentive clauses written into his contract for passing legends on the all-time list. But when he passed Willie Mays last year, and the Yankees initially tried to withhold the bonus, a compromise was reached to donate the bonus money to charity. This is the way for A-Rod to be known as something bigger than a tainted number, and that is the goal he moves on to.