Alex Rodriguez is one of the most polarizing baseball players of all time. He is no stranger to controversy. Despite the negative attention and the media’s fixation with A-Rod throughout and after his Major League Baseball career, no one can deny he got absolutely paid over his 22-year career. Let’s break down how exactly a teenage shortstop from Miami turned his once-in-a-generation talent on the diamond into a fortune worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Alexander Emmanuel Rodriguez was actually born in Manhattan, New York City to two Dominican immigrants, Victor and Lourdes Rodriguez. The family moved to the Dominican Republic when he was 4 and then afterward to Miami, where he grew up. It’s hard to overstate how much of a prized baseball prospect he was at South Florida’s Christopher Columbus High School and Westminster Christian School. USA Baseball named him its junior player of the year and Gatorade its national baseball student-athlete of the year. One scout called him the “bigger and better” version of Derek Jeter. In 1993, he tried out for the United State national baseball team. No other high schooler had ever done that in baseball history. The University of Miami recruited Rodríguez heavily and even offered him a chance to play quarterback for the football team. Ultimately, he turned it down and headed for the MLB. The Seattle Mariners took A-Rod first overall in the 1993 MLB Draft, and he signed for a $1.3 million signing bonus, the first of many millions he’d make playing baseball. By 1994, the 18-year-old received the call to the bigs. Two years later as a 20-year-old, A-Rod was an All-Star and finished second in American League MVP voting after hitting a league-best .358, 36 home runs, 123 RBIs, 141 runs and 15 stolen bases. He was a full-fledged superstar. He also couldn’t legally drink. The Mariners gave him a four-year, $10.6 million extension in 1996 but couldn’t capture a World Series title with h