You have to be a great player to hit 30 home runs as a right-hander in Yankee Stadium, and there’s no mystery as to why. In its original incarnation, it was 490 feet to left center. Its 1976 renovation brought the fence in to a less absurd 430 feet, and it has been moved in twice since, but even at 399 feet, the outfield wall remains a brutal target. This is especially true since it’s very rare for a right-handed slugger to be a true pull hitter; most righties have their power in the left-center gap, which is precisely the hardest area of the stands to reach in the Stadium.

Since its inaugural season in 1923, nine Yankee righties have hit 30 or more home runs. Four of them – Joe DiMaggio, Dave Winfield, Gary Sheffield, and Alex Rodriguez – are or will be Hall of Famers. The others – Bob Meusel, Joe Gordon, Bobby Bonds, Danny Tartabull, and Alfonso Soriano – were all excellent players who might in different circumstances have become Hall of Famers themselves. But only one of these hitters ever managed to surpass 40 homers in a season (DiMaggio had 46 in 1937).

So what Alex Rodriguez is doing this year – he leads the league in home runs with 17, an astonishing 12 of which he’s hit in the Bronx – is more or less unprecedented. It’s something like a Colorado Rockies pitcher leading the league in ERA. Rodriguez’s tremendous May, in which he’s gotten on base in more than half his plate appearances and is slugging over .700, has seen the Yankees climb out of the basement, go 17-9, and position themselves to win the American League East yet again.

And yet, despite having carried his team back into contention, having reasserted himself as the best hitter in the American League, and having put himself in position to achieve something no one has ever done before – he’s on pace to become the only right-handed Yankee to surpass 50 homers in a season – A-Rod seems to be curiously neglected. You hear and read a great deal more about his uncharacteristically clumsy fielding, his therapy sessions, and his supposed lack of clutch ability these days than you do about the fact that he’s having his best season with the bat, one to rival any DiMaggio ever had.

This probably shouldn’t come as a surprise. Rodriguez is something of a victim of his circumstances. After hitting .358 and scoring 141 runs as a 20-year-old in 1996, nothing he ever did would live up to the expectations placed upon him. He hit 40 home runs for six straight years as a shortstop, going as high as 57, while turning himself into a Gold Glover – and people more or less shrugged, figuring that was what he was supposed to do.

For three years, A-Rod emulated his idol Cal Ripken Jr. by playing in every game, only to be ostentatiously benched on the last day of the 2003 season amid rumors that his iron-man streak was just another selfish achievement. He’s hit .330 AVG/.395 OBA/.583 SLG in 103 post-season at bats, and yet his playoff achievements seem to boil down to one bad play where he tried to slap a ball out of a pitcher’s hand.

He’s been a victim of subtler circumstances, too. His best three seasons came in the American League’s best hitter’s park, which inflated his raw statistics beyond all reason. Looking just at his road numbers, Rodriguez hit as well last year as he did when he was playing for the Texas Rangers. The fact that he was moving from a great hitter’s park to a tough one didn’t seem to enter into anyone’s mind when he was branded a failure after having an excellent season last year.

The point of all this isn’t that anyone needs to feel sorry for Rodriguez, who still struggles to find a natural role for himself on the Yankees even as he dominates the game. The pressure that comes with his talent and his contract is something he has to deal with, just as DiMaggio and Mantle and Ruth did in their days. He seems, for whatever it’s worth, to be dealing with it quite a lot better than any of them did – going to a therapist and giving out some awkward, self-deprecating quotes about earning the right to call yourself a Yankee is an infinitely better idea than becoming a surly misanthrope or an alcoholic.

Rather, the point is that it’s a very bad idea for fans to take Rodriguez for granted, to yawn as he hits 50 home runs yet again, and to gripe about how he never drives in runs against the Red Sox. True, he isn’t the most exciting player in the world, and there is something stupefying about his almost mechanical perfection. That doesn’t change the fact that in the long, oft-touted history of the Yankees, no one has done what he is doing. Nor does it change the fact that his supposed inability to perform under pressure hasn’t kept him from driving the Yankees back into the pennant race. He might be expected to do these things, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be celebrated.