TAMPA, Fla. -- As he has been for the past decade, Alex Rodriguez will be the most famous man to wear a New York Yankees uniform when he arrives at training camp Wednesday, along with the rest of the position players.

But for the first time in recent memory, Rodriguez will not be the most notorious. This season, Rodriguez cedes that position -- no doubt willingly -- to Aroldis Chapman, the Yankees' new closer who is expected to be suspended for some portion of the regular season for his involvement in a domestic dispute in October.

Rightly or wrongly -- according to the Broward County prosecutor’s office, Chapman will not face criminal charges due to insufficient evidence -- there will be a new center of attention in Yankees camp. The focus is no longer on Alex Rodriguez. That is what makes this Yankees spring training different from all others in the A-Rod Era.

This year, Rodriguez comes to camp riding the momentum of a surprisingly productive 2015 comeback season, in which he led the team with 33 home runs and started more games than any Yankee other than Chase Headley, who is nearly 10 years his junior. Meanwhile, Chapman toils under a cloud of doubt about how long his spring training will last and when his first regular season as a Yankee will begin.

That is why, unlike the past spring, when reporters lined the sidewalk outside the Yankees' minor league complex for a week before position players were scheduled to report, most reporters have stayed across the street at George Steinbrenner Field in an effort to get close to Chapman. As a result, Rodriguez is expected to glide into camp relatively quietly -- or at least as quietly Alex Rodriguez can.

“I think there will be less fanfare," Joe Girardi said. “I think there will be less attention paid on him from the media. I guess I’ll find out on Thursday, but I don’t imagine the press conference about him and the questions I was asked about him will be nearly as numerous as last year."

Last year, Rodriguez came to town with no real expectations and plenty of question marks. This year, there are expectations but very few questions. In fact, the only pertinent question surrounding Rodriguez this season is not “What will he do?" but “Can he do it again?"

In the case of Chapman, however, there are no questions regarding his performance. Everyone who has seen him pitch knows what the powerfully built, left-handed Cuban fireballer can do. The question is: When will he be allowed to do it?

With Chapman back in camp after a one-day excused absence to attend to “family matters" in Miami, his throwing session was the main event Tuesday afternoon. It drew a large number of fans -- including teammates Masahiro Tanaka and Bryan Mitchell, who seemed as curious as any of the paying customers to see what all the fuss was about -- to the Steinbrenner Field bullpens.

Afterward, Chapman was asked once again to share his feelings on something we can only speculate on: the prospect of his Yankees career starting with a suspension. As always, he said little except to offer that he had “never hurt anyone," that he planned to appeal any suspension and that his true personality was being unfairly depicted through media accounts based on police reports of the Oct. 30 incident.

“I never hurt anybody in my life," he said. "That’s not my character or the person I am.”

Girardi said he, too, had read the police reports and noted inconsistencies in the various witness statements. He said he would attempt to get to know Chapman better before forming a judgment as to what really happened between Chapman and his girlfriend that night.

“For me, I just try to listen carefully, to watch how he reacts in certain situations, to talk to him in short spurts, see how he interacts with his teammates and around coaches," Girardi said. "We’ll see him a little bit outside the baseball field in some of the things we do as a team to see how he interacts there. But you know, relationships take time. It’s just little bits and pieces that you try to gather along the way."

It’s a lesson Girardi has learned, in part, from his eight seasons managing Rodriguez, a player who always brought to camp a lot more baggage than just his bat, shoes and glove. Somehow, Girardi managed to stay in Rodriguez’s good graces, and vice versa, despite a stormy 2012 playoff run in which Girardi regularly benched, pinch-hit for and dropped in the lineup his highest-paid, most famous and most notorious player.

In spite of it all, Rodriguez spent much of the past season professing, “I would run through a wall for Joe."

This spring, though he might have to do a little fence-mending with his center fielder, Jacoby Ellsbury, who was benched for the team’s one-game playoff against the Houston Astros, the manager will have to do little or no rehabilitation on his relationship with Rodriguez. That's just as well because Girardi will have a new project to tackle -- one that might turn out to be season-long.

Girardi said he wanted to know everything that went on that eventful night at Chapman’s Davie, Florida, home because “sometimes when you don’t know everything about a person, your imagination could run wild, and it could [seem] worse. So I think you’re probably better off knowing what you’re dealing with, if there is something there and doing your best to be there for him and help him."

Even though Girardi recognizes the seriousness of the accusations leveled at Chapman, as always, he is inclined to support his player.

“I think you give players the benefit of the doubt until they let you down or you feel that they haven't been truthful with you," Girardi said. “It's important that the manager feels that the players trust them, on the field and off the field. I always try to form my own opinions about players, as opposed to taking someone else’s opinion of who they are or what they are."

In a rare spring in which all eyes will be trained not on Alex Rodriguez but on Aroldis Chapman, none will be looking more closely than those of his manager.