When I finished interviewing 21-year-old Alex Rodriguez that spring training morning in 1997, I went to find a telephone (this was before cell phones) to call my wife.

“I just found another child for us,” I said jokingly but clearly impressed with this young man.

I wrote it, too.

“At the age of 21, Rodriguez is also a phenomenal baseball player. He may be an even more phenomenal person. It is easy to walk away from a conversation with him wanting to take him home to be another child in the family.”

I don’t know how long it took me to find out how wrong I was, but I found out. Rodriguez, as young as he was, was a con man, full of charm and guile. He had learned how to fool people with a scripted delivery guaranteed to make listeners walk away shaking their heads over the impressive child they had just met.

Nearly two decades later, most of us know the real Alex Rodriguez. Hal Steinbrenner, the managing general partner of the New York Yankees, should know him, but he has ignored what he knows, planning a festive farewell for Rodriguez at Yankee Stadium as well as, in effect, hiring him to work with the Yankees’ minor leaguers and serve as an advisor to the owner.

The Yankees could have simply released the 41-year-old Rodriguez and paid him $25,573,377 they would owe him after his final game Friday. That was one of three options Steinbrenner offered Rodriguez when they met privately last week:

• The Yankees could release him and pay him, and he could seek another team, which would pay him a pro-rated minimum salary.
• He could stay with the Yankees the remainder of the season but not play.
• He could be released and sign a new contract to serve as an adviser to Steinbrenner and work with the organization’s young players.

George Steinbrenner used to give players second chances, many of whom had had drug problems, as in cocaine. Hal had different issues to consider with Rodriguez, and he would have been justified in giving him a check for $25 million and sending him on his way.

Rodriguez cheated the Yankees, he lied repeatedly to them and he sued them. What else does a multi-million-dollar player have to do to earn the enmity of his employer?

Just last year the Yankees refused to give Rodriguez a $6 million bonus when he matched Willie Mays’ 660 career home runs, as provided in his contract, and club and player had to negotiate a settlement of the provision. Rodriguez has 696 homers and will not reach his next bonus level – Babe Ruth’s 714. Nor will he match Hank Aaron’s 755 or the 762 hit by his fellow cheater and liar Barry Bonds.

Now the Yankees are honoring Rodriguez. For what? Lying to them and cheating? That will make him an excellent role model for the young players Steinbrenner talked about.

“We have an exciting group of talented young players at every level of our system,” Steinbrenner said in a statement announcing the Rodriguez deal. “Our job as an organization is to utilize every resource possible to allow them to reach their potential, and I expect Alex to directly contribute to their growth and success.”

Why would the Yankees want someone with Rodriguez’s background advising, counseling and mentoring young players? What’s he going to teach them, how to cheat until they get caught?

On the other hand, whatever else he can contribute, Rodriguez can show these young kids how to use performance-enhancing drugs and how to get away with it and lie about it. Not everyone has that talent.

But then, maybe this whole PED business is overblown. The Yankees held a Rodriguez news conference last Sunday, and the word steroids and the initials PEDs never came up. It was as if Rodriguez had played a wonderful, clean career, and the Yankees were now celebrating it and honoring him for it, and the writers joined in. Yes, those writers, the big tough New York writers.

These were the questions they asked Rodriguez, except three that were asked and answered in Spanish:

• At what point in time did you know that this was going to be the end? Did you reach out to him or did he reach out to you?
• Do you think that you can no longer play baseball? The fact that you thought you had some home runs left in you, why are you choosing to walk away now?
• When Hal approached you, how did he approach you? Did he ask you to retire?
• Was this your idea or was it Hal’s to work with kids or the plethora of shortstops down there?
• There was a time a few years ago when relations between you and the Yankees weren’t good. How did you change that dynamic to the point where now you’re going to be a central advisor to the owner?
• Why Friday to stop playing and you’re so close to so many immortals. How hard is it to walk away? How hard is it to walk away knowing you’re that close?
• Did the Yankees essentially give you an ultimatum…?
• How long would you say you wrestled with the idea of taking Hal up on this offer? Did you consider the chances of playing for another team?
• Have you thought about whether it will be surreal to be involved in the game, to be mentoring young players, but not to walk on the field?
• How did we get here, individually for you and individually for the team?
• What’s your most memorable time with the New York Yankees?
• How do you think you should be remembered in baseball history?
• What’s it been like for you personally to not be in the lineup for the last month or so? What have you been going through? And have you requested and received any assurances that you will play in these last four games?
• Your contract goes to Dec. 31, 2017. Is this something that is a graceful way for you to exit? Or are you seriously thinking about being a coach for the future?
• Does your new agreement allow you to continue to do something like that on television and radio?
• When you play on Friday do you then stay with the team and work with the younger players or do you go home after Friday?

These are questions the writers didn’t ask Rodriguez:

• Looking back on your career, what effect do you think steroids or PEDs had on it?
• What effect do you think steroids and PEDs will have on your chances of getting into the Hall of Fame?
• If you were starting your career over, would you use steroids or PEDs?
• How good do you think you would have been without steroids and PEDs?
• How do you feel about the increasing feeling among players who oppose the use of steroids and PEDs?
• Looking at it from this distance, how do you feel about having lied about your use of steroids and/or PEDs?
• If any of the young Yankees asked you about using steroids and PEDs, what would you tell them?

There are others, but these would have made a good start. Just as the writers didn’t mention steroids, Rodriguez didn’t. But he came closer than the writers and actually gave them two openings to ask steroids questions, but they let them go by and went to the next innocuous question.

Asked how he thought he would be remembered, Rodriguez said, “I’m hopefully going to be remembered as someone who tripped and fell a lot but someone that kept getting up.”

How could the next writer not have asked him to explain his tripping and falling? Sad.

In another instance, Rodriguez said, “And for a guy like me that’s been to hell and back and made every mistake in the book, I think they can learn equally from all the mistakes that I’ve made and hopefully not make them.”

Again, no one asked him to expand on his mistakes and his trip to “hell and back.” Pathetic.

Before the news conference Jack Curry, a reporter for the Yankees’ YES network, said on air about Rodriguez, “His numbers and his career are going to stand on their own. This guy is one of the greatest players of this or any other generation.”

Too bad Curry doesn’t recognize a chemically-aided fraud when he sees one.