A-Rod must learn it’s not about getting along
I don't fundamentally disagree with him there. "Must" is a bit strong.
Alex Rodriguez thinks it’s important that he and Derek Jeter don’t get along.
And you think it's so unimportant you're going to write an article about why his thinking that it's not important is important enough that he "must" change for the good of the team? More "important"s in the next sentence? No problem -- this is so unimportant I can't believe I'm bothering to critique how important he thinks it important is important important.
As he said in his first interview in Yankee camp, relations are so strained that the two superstars, who were once fast friends, don’t even do sleepovers any more.
Sleepovers? The word conjures up visions of little A-Rod’s mom calling little Derek’s mom to arrange a play date.
Here HatGuy is extremely charitable about what visions of A-Rod sleeping over at Jeter's place actually conjures up. Kudos on the restraint. Joke grade, though: C.
Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth, the two greatest players on the first Yankee dynasty, didn’t speak to each other, and the Yankees just kept on winning titles. In the 1960s, most of the Dodgers had no use for Don Drysdale, but none of them called press conferences to whimper about it.
Yes. Slap a fedora on me -- HatGuy is making an argument against chemistry!
Every athlete who’s ever played a game realizes that there are going to be teammates who aren’t going to like each other. Everyone would love for every team to be one, big happy family, but it’s not as important as winning.
This paragraph is like the cherry on top of the whipped cream on a hot fudge sundae that I'm eating out of my hat!
A-Rod’s stature is born of the same reality. If his teammates tend to be annoyed with him, it’s not because of how much he makes — they all make plenty — but because he doesn’t come through nearly often enough in the clutch.
Oosh. You had me at "no such thing as chemistry" and then you had to go run your mouth about clutchyclutchness. I think the Yankees probably don't like A-Rod because he's a weird, aloof dick. (And also the clutch thing. They all believe in that stuff, so it's definitely possible.) People hate Barry Bonds because he's a weird, aloof dick -- a much bigger one than A-Rod. Has nothing to do with clutch or not clutch with Barry (not anymore at least).
You could imagine them rolling their eyes at this latest confession by their third baseman and wishing he’d just forget about his image and go out and pound the baseball. That’s all anyone’s ever wanted from A-Rod — performance.
Deep, deep sigh. How many times do we have to go through this? Statistics are a record of what happens on a baseball field -- a measure of "performance," if you will. Certainly, they're an imperfect measure, but a measure nonetheless.
As a New York Yankee, Alex Rodriguez has posted EqAs of .311, .354, and .318. He's hit 119 home runs. He may have been the best player in baseball for one of those seasons. These are great performances. Not historically great, perhaps, but great.
What’s funny is that A-Rod has the reputation for being slick, but it is Jeter who is slicker than snot on a doorknob.
Snot on a doorknob? Snot on a doorknob? That's it. I'm done. Not worth it. I'm out of here. See you later.
[door slam]
[car driving away]
[weekend on private island in Dubai shaped like part of a palm tree]
Okay, I'm back.
Fine, one more section.
What they want is for A-Rod to hit the ball when it counts. They don’t care what he does or doesn’t say, as long as he does his job, which is to get big hits in big games, to carry the team when it’s down, to forget about his image and use his enormous talents to take the game by the throat and not let go.
They don’t care about stats or all-star appearances or endorsement deals. And they absolutely don’t care about his feelings.
They care about what the fans care about — performance.
They don't care about stats, they care about performance? Stats are a measure of performance.
STATS ARE A MEASURE OF PERFORMANCE.
STATS ARE A MEASURE OF PERFORMANCE.
STATS ARE A MEASURE OF PERFORMANCE.
STATS ARE A MEASURE OF PERFORMANCE.
STATS ARE A MEASURE OF PERFORMANCE.
STATS ARE A MEASURE OF PERFORMANCE.
STATS ARE A MEASURE OF PERFORMANCE.
STATS ARE A MEASURE OF PERFORMANCE.
STATS ARE A MEASURE OF PERFORMANCE.
They're not made up numbers that have nothing to do with baseball. They're a pretty good measure of how valuable you've been on a baseball field. Consider this: if you watched all 162 Yankee games last season, could you rank the Yankee players in order of most to least valuable? I bet you'd be pretty wrong in several cases. But stats -- numbers -- can give you a better, more accurate picture. Because you can't catalog, quantify, and remember everything you've seen. You have no idea if A-Rod went 166-572 or 148-593. That's why we write things down. It helps our brains out, it doesn't hurt them. Sure, you can add in things that you observed that are difficult to quantify to your overall evaluation of a player. But I can't stand when people say "stats" are that grossly different from "performance." They're a reasonably close approximation. They just are.
Of course, he pretty much sucked in the last two playoff seriees he played.
P.S. He wasn't that bad in the playoffs before those series.
Labels: arod, arod-jeter sleepovers, f(f(f(x))), HatGuy, mike celizic, yankees
