You look at Alex Rodriguez after another failure to produce sitting in the dugout like an exhibit in Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum, and you don’t see the best player in baseball. You see Ed Whitson.
It’s time to unload him, because once a player gets the Ed Whitson Look, he’s never going to recover.
To be fair, there have been a lot of screaming heads calling for the Yankees to "unload" ARod recently. It's not just HatGuy. But let's just real quick-like examine that as a possibility:
1. He's arguably the best player in baseball over the last ten years, with a career EqA of .318.
2. He makes $25 million a year.
3. He has a no-trade clause.
4. The Yankees have approached True Yankee Scott Brosius about coming out of retirement to take over 3B, and he declined.
With the exception of #4, all of the above are true. So why are we talking about trading him? Because he had three crappy weeks and got booed by Yankee fans? Jason Giambi took steroids and hit like .190 for two months and got booed every single day. He survived. So will ARod. Because he's good at baseball.
If that sounds drastic, it’s not. A-Rod isn’t just in a slump. He’s shot. The boos and the headlines and the endless abuse on the talk shows have gotten into his head and set up permanent housekeeping. Naturally a man who wants to please everyone in the worst way, he’s pressing so hard to make it all better he can barely swing the bat.
Alex Rod is having probably his worst offensive year ever. He is also projected for these numbers:
R: 117
2B: 25
HR: 35
RBI: 120
OBP: .383
OPS: .500
He’s shot. Toast. Finished as a Yankee, and there’s no sense pretending he can come back and be the man he was advertised to be. He could be that somewhere else, but not in Yankee Stadium, not half a base path across the infield from Derek Jeter, who reminds A-Rod every day simply by taking in oxygen everything he is not, not two bags away from Jason Giambi, who staggered, stumbled, fell, but never stopped being loved because he never lost the knack for getting big hits.
I want you to do me a favor, HatGuy. I want you, when ARod re
For those of you too young to remember the Bronx Zoo years of the 1980s, Ed Whitson was a highly touted pitcher signed to a big free-agent contract by the Yankees. A country boy, Whitson couldn’t deal with the pressure and the crowds of New York. A great talent when he came in, he was little more than a human batting tee by the time he left, a failure in pinstripes who the fans chose to blame for every Yankee failure.
It drove him to such desperation, he ended up beating up Billy Martin, the manager, which in New York was like beating up Santa Claus, and ultimately was blown out of town by a hurricane of Bronx cheers.
Country music fans know what the Ed Whitson Look is. It’s the face of a man whose dog got run over by the Prius-driving liberal who stole his wife, she being the same woman who broke his fishing poles, knocked a hole in the bottom of his bass boat, and took a baseball bat to his truck. It’s the face of that same man sitting at a bar that has just run out of Budweiser and Jack and has nothing left to drink but wine spritzers. And the juke box won’t play anything but hip hop.
He’s lost. He’s hopeless. Life is never going to get any better, and he knows it.
That’s A-Rod in the Yankee dugout.
A week ago, when The Wall Street Journal first suggested that the Yankees might be shopping the $252-million man, I said that he still put up good numbers over the course of the year and was a gold-glove infielder. But it’s gotten worse since then, much worse.
The Yankee crowd, which never really accepted him from the day he came to town before the 2004 season, has turned on him like only it can. After starting July on a little hot streak, his bat has gone colder than a slumlord’s heart. But the depth of his despair is more evidenced by his work in the field. Gold glove winner Alex Rodriguez can’t even throw the ball to first base anymore. Or to home plate. Or anywhere that it needs to be.
It’s gotten so bad, the devilishly clever headline writers at The Daily News have branded him with a nickname that’s never going to go away: “E-Rod.”
It’s not fair, but that’s what selling yourself as the greatest ballplayer who ever lived and coming to town with all that money gets you. Players never think of that end of the bargain when they’re demanding an emperor’s ransom as free agents. The never stop to realize that when you make that much and make such claims, the fans are going to expect you to live up to the hype and the numbers on your paycheck.
If he were making $10 million or even $15 million, the fans wouldn’t care. For the Yankees, that’s just a bit over the average paycheck. But he’s making $25 million, and if he’s going to make $7 million a year more than Jeter, he better be $7 million better than the most popular Yankee since Don Mattingly.
It’s become impossible. He’s blamed for playoff losses. He’s blamed for regular-season losses. He’s blamed for global warming and three-bucks-a-gallon gasoline. He’s in a nose-dive that a person with his mental make-up isn’t going to pull out of.
Even Michael Kay, the Yankees YES Network broadcaster, is talking on his ESPN Radio show about moving A-Rod. What makes that significant is that when Kay starts criticizing players, it’s not just with the approval of George Steinbrenner, but sometimes at the Boss’ direction.
In Chicago, there’s speculation that the Cubs, who need to do something to revive interest in this lost season, might be interested in him and would be willing to part with Aramis Ramirez to get him. They’d probably throw in Greg Maddux, too, and the Yankees are so desperate for a bat and any pitcher who can go five innings while holding the opposition to six runs, they might go for that deal.
It’s really up to A-Rod. He’s got a no-trade clause, and he keeps saying he wants to make it work in New York. But this can’t be fun, and, given the chance to start over with a clean slate somewhere else, he may be persuaded to see the benefits of getting out of town on his own before the fans chase him out.
He really doesn’t have much of a choice. He can go somewhere where the demands aren’t as high and the fans friendlier, the sort of place in which he’s always thrived. Or he can continue being Ed Whitson.
I know which option I’d take.
Labels: arod, HatGuy, mike celizic
