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A Poll by The Times Finds That Rodriguez Is Alienating Many Yankees Fans

Will Alex Rodriguez’s return to Yankee Stadium on Friday be met with cheers or jeers?

According to a new poll of New York City residents, the jeers may win out.

Only 1 in 5 Yankees fans have a favorable opinion of Rodriguez, and about twice as many view him unfavorably, according to a New York Times poll conducted from Friday through Wednesday, which included the time Major League Baseball penalized Rodriguez with a 211-game suspension and levied 50-game suspensions on a dozen other players connected to the Biogenesis anti-aging clinic.

Over the three days after the penalties were announced, the poll found Rodriguez’s unfavorable rating had increased among Yankees fans as more became aware of the allegations.

“I’ve been a Yankee fan my whole life,” said Debbie Dunham, a restaurateur from Whitestone, Queens. “I always liked A-Rod. He was a great player and brought excitement to the team and helped our team out. It’s all so disappointing. He’s putting his body at risk, for one thing. And I don’t want my grandkids to see somebody like him lying and getting away with it. ”

Rodriguez returned Monday from hip surgery and a quadriceps strain. Although the suspension was set to begin Thursday, he can continue to play during an appeal process, which is not likely to conclude until November.

The poll found that nearly half of New York City adults are baseball fans, saying they are very or somewhat interested in following Major League Baseball. Yankees fans far outnumber Mets fans, 55 percent to 21 percent, with another 5 percent saying they like them both. About 1 in 5 New York baseball followers say they do not root for either team.

A majority of the baseball followers are concerned that baseball players are using steroids, with nearly half saying they care a lot about the use of performance-enhancing drugs.

Baseball followers in the city are divided over how widespread steroid use is in the sport: more than a third said only a few players are using them, while nearly the same number said half or more of ballplayers are users.

“The whole steroid thing won’t stop me from watching and loving the sport,” said Thomas Ventri, a Yankees fan and a retired schoolteacher from Brooklyn. “You’ve got players like Jeter, real gentlemen, and just a small percentage who are doing the steroids. Most of them haven’t touched the stuff.”

Joe Caruso, a salesman from Brooklyn, had a different take on the Rodriguez situation.

“They’re all looking for an edge,” he said. “Maybe if I didn’t work out, didn’t understand that athletic culture, I would be less tolerant and less understanding. If there was some magic pill on the market that boosts our performance, makes us lose weight, makes us younger, we all want that.”

A national poll from Monmouth University in New Jersey conducted at the end of July, after the suspension of the Milwaukee Brewers’ Ryan Braun but before Monday’s announcements, found that only half of American adults said they had a favorable impression of Major League Baseball. A year ago, two-thirds of Americans said they had a favorable impression of the majors, in a poll by ABC News/Washington Post.

Most Americans had heard allegations of baseball players using performance-enhancing drugs, according to the Monmouth poll. Those who had heard were divided on the effectiveness of baseball’s testing and increased penalties for the use of performance-enhancing drugs.

The Monmouth poll found that while few Americans supported barring a baseball player for life if he was found to have used performance-enhancing drugs more than once, majorities favored penalties like a season-long ban, the erasure of a player’s records and barring a player from the Hall of Fame.

Andrea Roschelle, a lawyer from Manhattan, said she was a lifelong Yankees fan, having inherited her passion for the team from her father. She sees M.L.B.’s enforcement policy as flawed. “While I’m not crazy about what Alex Rodriguez has done, I’m sympathetic to him in his current situation and the situation the Yankees are in,” she said. “What Major League Baseball has done is unfair and heavy-handed and would certainly not hold up in a court of law.”

For many New Yorkers, the accusations against Rodriguez will not undo their dedication to the game.

“I love the sport,” Ventri said. “My father was a big DiMaggio fan, and I remember listening to Mel Allen on our black-and-white television in our living room. We were the only Yankee fans in our Brooklyn neighborhood, because of Joltin’ Joe and Yogi Berra. Everyone else was a Dodgers fan. Then, one day, we went to see a game at Yankee Stadium, and there it was in all its pastoral living colors of grass green and clay brown, and I’d never seen anything like it. It’s in our blood.”

As to Rodriguez’s return, Dunham said she would be rooting for him to help the Yankees, who she said are “doing really lousy. Now I know what my husband feels like all the time. He’s a Mets fan.”

The telephone poll was conducted by landline and cellphone from Aug. 2-7 among 1,029 New York City adults, of whom 484 followed baseball, with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 14 of the New York edition with the headline: A Poll by The Times Finds That Rodriguez Is Alienating Many Yankees Fans. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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