Alex Rodriguez Says Baseball Was His 'First Love': 'I Miss the Competition'

Alex Rodriguez is happily engaged to Jennifer Lopez, but that isn’t stopping him from talking about his very first love.

The former New York Yankees slugger, of course, is referring to baseball — the sport he played for more than 20 years, skyrocketing him to stardom.

“I miss baseball every day. It’s my first love, my father played baseball,” Rodriguez, 44, tells PEOPLE. “I was 2 years old when I first grabbed a bat and started knocking the lamps out in my house, and that’s all I’ve ever really done for such a long time.”

Rodriguez, who recently teamed up with Lopez and family friend Kim Kardashian West for Portal from Facebook’s holiday campaign, still works in a baseball capacity as a member of ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball team.

But he says there are still three things he misses most about stepping onto the field and playing for millions.

“I miss the competition, I miss my at-bats and I miss the great fans of New York and all around the world that love baseball,” he says.

Rodriguez made his debut for the Seattle Mariners in 1994 and after a three-year stint with the Texas Rangers he played the rest of his career with the Yankees in New York, retiring in 2016.

Though other former MLB stars have made the transition into managerial roles just a year or two into retirement (Rodriguez’s former teammate Carlos Beltrán was recently hired as the New York Mets’ skipper, while former Chicago Cub David Ross was recently brought on as the team’s manager), Rodriguez kept it coy when asked whether he’d follow suit.

His focus instead, he tells PEOPLE, is that he enjoys “talking about the game of baseball for Fox and ESPN, and I’m having a great time.”

With baseball in the off season, Rodriguez is free from his announcing work to continue his wedding planning with Lopez, 50, to whom he proposed in March.

She appears alongside him in the Portal for Facebook ads, which features the couple wearing face masks as Rodriguez attempts to butt in to Lopez’s party planning with Kardashian West.

Of working with the campaign, Rodriguez says it was “an organic move” as “Facebook is part of our lives almost every day, with us, with our kids, and the fact that we’re almost always on opposite coasts and traveling and hustling.”

Rodriguez shares daughters Natasha, 15, and Ella, 11, with ex-wife Cynthia Scurtis, while Lopez is mom to 11-year-old twins Max and Emme with ex-husband Marc Anthony.