Rodriguez youngest to hit home run No. 600

It's a number. A nice round number, but still, just a number.

The 600th career home run by Alex Rodriguez on Wednesday took some of the immediate pressure off him, but the drama prince called A-Rod is never far from pressure, some of it self-inflicted.

This numerical milestone, making him the youngest major-league slugger to reach 600 — he hit his first 189 with the Mariners — is no guarantee Rodriguez will gain automatic acceptance into the Baseball Hall of Fame when he becomes eligible five years after retirement.

He is 35, in great shape and presumably a decade or more from that moment of truth. But Rodriguez is well aware that his admitted dalliance with steroids — only from 2001 to 2003, before he came to the Yankees, he said — will stay with him.

Rodriguez is part of a quartet of sluggers who carry the scarlet letter S on their broad backs. The retired stars Barry Bonds (the career leader with 762 homers) and Sammy Sosa (609) and Mark McGwire (583) are all linked, to one degree or another, to performance-enhancing drugs.

They are stacked up in the stratosphere, waiting to see if the writers who vote for membership in the Hall will ultimately accept them. At the moment, there are no guarantees. McGwire eked his way up to 24 percent in January, far short of the 75 percent needed.

This overt withholding of honor is the legacy of the steroid era that began in the last decade, when McGwire, Sosa and Bonds all had surprisingly high home-run totals at advanced ages when most great sluggers are tailing off.

On his own, Rodriguez brought up his link with steroids Wednesday after the Yankees defeated Toronto 5-1 at Yankee Stadium.

"There are people who have doubts because of what happened in the past," Rodriguez volunteered to Suzyn Waldman of WCBS Radio.

Nothing comes easily for Rodriguez, one of the greatest combinations of power and gracefulness to play this sport. It is tempting to blame fans and the media for making a fuss over this artificial barrier, but the deeper reality is that No. 600 was yet another business venture for A-Rod, with specially marked balls used to avoid counterfeiting.

What's a few more million among friends? No doubt Rodriguez and the Yankees and other memorabilia hucksters will make money off subsequent home-run balls as he chases Sosa, then Ken Griffey Jr. (630), Willie Mays (660), Babe Ruth (714), Hank Aaron (755), all four free of steroid suspicions, and heads toward Bonds, who is still being investigated for perjury in 2003.

All fans know there are no asterisks in baseball records. But there are memories. The fans know McGwire has admitted using steroids. Sosa is suspected of testing positive for steroids before there were penalties, and Bonds was implicated with the notorious BALCO laboratory. In the public mind, A-Rod is running on the McGwire-Sosa-Bonds ticket.