We’ve all so heard so much about “the Yankee way” over the years that even the confirmed and true-believing Yankee hater — the hardcore Red Sox or Mets fan with a visceral hatred for pinstripes, pride, and tradition — will usually admit it exists and laud Mariano Rivera, Bernie Williams, Jorge Posada, and, most of all, captain Derek Jeter and manager Joe Torre for their professionalism, integrity, and sense of winning play. Generally, this has been fair.

After this week, though, you can toss any notion of a Yankee way in the dustbin, unless it involves the large-scale, public, unprecedented betrayal of a teammate.

The controversy over the excellent article on Alex Rodriguez by Tom Verducci that ran in this week’s Sports Illustrated entirely misses the point, as far as I can tell. The story here isn’t Rodriguez. The story is his team, his manager, and what they’ve done. I’ve literally never seen anything like it.

Let’s admit two things. First, Alex Rodriguez is really, really weird. There has probably never been a player as good as he is who was so publicly neurotic, so self-conscious in such a refined manner, so basically paralyzed by public perception, and so desperately in need of approval. He’s like a schoolchild who responds to taunts and bullying exactly the way teachers and parents tell children to, and can’t understand why this just inspires harsher taunting and crueler bullying. This isn’t too surprising, though; an art collector who talks publicly about going to therapy for his absolute fear of failure is going to run into hard times in the major leagues.

Second, Rodriguez doesn’t do himself any favors when he points to the numbers he’s putting up. He’s having a horrible season. He’ll end this season with near-MVP caliber statistics, and they won’t matter a whit. His error totals, the absurdly impotent stretch in which he struck out 14 times in 20 trips to the plate, and his repeated failure to drive in the big run have understandably called to most people’s minds not great slumps of yore like the year Reggie Jackson hit .230, but Rick Ankiel and others affected by Steve Blass disease. There’s something terribly wrong with Rodriguez’s game, and if he’s still able to put up numbers that would be excellent by anyone else’s standards it’s just a testament to how awesomely talented he is, and how far short he’s falling of the limits of what he can do with that talent.

Still, none of this is new information. What’s new is that the Yankee Way apparently now involves Yankees publicly sharing private conversations held with teammates about their struggles, the manager holding forth on one-on-one closed door meetings, and the captain refusing to back his teammate up by any other means than saying the press should stop asking him about his problems and comparing him to Chuck Knoblauch, of all people.

Maybe the most telling quote in a telling article came from Jason Giambi, who told Verducci, “Alex doesn’t know who he is. We’re going to find out who he is in the next couple of months.”The implication was that Rodriguez is a fraud and that unless he comes up with some clutch hits in October, he’s going to be confirmed as fraud—a failure as a human being. This implication was backed by more or less everything every other player in the article said, whether or not they were as blunt about it as Giambi.

You have to love baseball, and you have to love Alex Rodriguez for holding his tongue. Just imagine the rich quotes he could have given in response! Giambi is so obviously lacking in the credibility one needs to attack someone else in this way it’s not even worth going into. Others provide nearly equally ripe targets. Wouldn’t you love to hear Rodriguez say something like, “Well, skip’s right, I haven’t been pulling my share of the load, and I’m going to have to pull a lot more in the playoffs when all our relievers give up a bunch of runs because he burns through them all every year even though everyone knows he’s doing it”?

As much as everyone loves to see some honesty in baseball, it’s pretty much impossible to tell how this sort of campaign of Yankee openness directed at the most talented player in the game is supposed to help him, given that his acknowledged problem is, when it comes down to it, insecurity.

If Rodriguez’s problem was laziness, ego, or some similar failing, maybe this all would help. Instead it comes off as naked self-promotion, crass bullying, and ridiculous pandering — at best.

It’s not about A-Rod, and it’s not about whether the criticism is legitimate. It’s about whether the Yankees are truly a team built around public shows of integrity and character, or whether they’re just a new Bronx Zoo with more sophisticated techniques of making asses of themselves. It’s pretty clear to me that the question’s already been answered.