It was uncanny that the day after I called for Hank to fire somebody or send people down, he gave the team a tonguelashing and a warning that players would be sent down soon. It worked for exactly one game, before the Yankees turned in perhaps their worst performance all year on Thursday night. Once again the failure to field (big error by Jeter) and the failure to hit in big spots did them in. Thew same thing today. And as always the poster child for the category of superstar loser is AROD. With the Yankees up 12-7 Wednesday night, AROD launches one of his typically pointless 3 run homers to pull him within one of Mickey Mantle, one fo the greatest clutch players in the history of the game. Last night, with the Yanks having given up 2 in the first on the Jeter error, AROD comes up with runners on first and third, one out. It is the type of situation in which you have to produce a run--to close the gap, to put pressure on Lester, to make him throw more pitches. Instead, Mr. Overrated gets impatient and swings at a ball eight inches wide of the strike zone for a K. It sets off a contagion of impatience on the Yankees part--they start swinging at every first pitch. Today, AROD comes up with the bases loaded, 2 outs, bottom of the seventh. The Yankees have chased Beckett, but thanks to a mike Lowell home run they trail 6-3. AROD proceeds to bounce out, killing the rally and consolidating the Yankees spot as the worst hitting team with the bases loaded in all of baseball.
This is no coincedence. With AROD's lifetime contract in place, the Yankees are his team and they have increasingly taken on his personality, or I should say gag reflex. No sooner is he installed as the permanent "man" on the team than their RISP numbers, never great, go through the floor. He is Mr. Unheimlich--in the sense of Mr. Uncanny, a superstar who not only doesn't make the players around him better but actually makes them worse--and in the sense of Mr. Unheimlich Maneuver, the man who just can't stop choking.
When AROD tried to do the Yankees the same favor slow Joe did by opting out of his contract, I said right off let him go and then overpay significantly to get Mike Lowell--knowing of course that even an obscene overpayment would still be dwarfed by the AROD contract. Well, I was right. Not only is Lowell much cheaper, not only is he one of the great clubhouse presences in all of baseball, not only is he a proven winner to AROD's proven loser, he is a better all-around baseball player than AROD: a better glove at third, a better arm at third, a much better hitter in big situations with men on base.
For whatever reason, the fans at the stadium have stopped making AROD's life miserable. Have they bought into the pundit's excoriation of their lack of taste or baseball knowledge, have they just gotten tired, have they been discouraged by the 10 year contract? I wish they would start again, because it is only by tormenting him that we can ever get rid of him. I've given up on the idea that he will ever be a winner as well as a superstar.
And frankly I don't see how his recent move from common whores to celebrity skanks can help.
2 comments:
Just wondering, what is ARod doing to make his teammates worse? Is he passing out loser pills to everybody?
What about Abreu popping out with the bases loaded just before ARod came up? He's getting paid a ton of money too.
Teams take the personality of their alpha-male. That's AROD, and his personality is look spectacular when it doesn't matter; let the team down when it does. The Yankees were the best fclutch team in baseball, with some of the same players, until they got AROD. His legacy is four years of losing, often disgracefully--from the 2004 collapse, when he tried to hit the ball out of the pitcher's glove like a girl, to the series ending double play against the Angels, to his sub-200 playoff performance generally, to his latest failures. Abreu was always soft: ask any Phillies fan. But he's not the big dog on this team. Unfortunately the big dog on this team is more poodle than rotweiler.
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