Category Archives: Yankees
It makes more sense to call [Alex Rodriguez] the same kind of October bust he was for the Yankees before he had his one shining moment in 2009….
Benoit struck him out, swinging.
Two outs now. Still a big swing from Mark Teixeira – who has so often been as small as a jockey in his big games for the Yankees – would bust the game open. Only Teixeira seemed perfectly content to take a walk in that moment, take the walk that made it 3-2.
- Mike Lupica, N.Y. Daily News.
A Mostly Mets podcast listener emailed in a good question last week about the Mets’ worrisome home-road split in 2011. He wondered why the Mets went 31-44 at Citi Field this season and 42-36 on the road.
The obvious, satisfying answer is that the park got into the Mets’ heads. All year long we heard about the psychological effects Citi Field’s distant home-run fences had on the Mets’ hitters, and then late in the season we even heard from Dan Warthen say that the dimensions let some of the team’s pitchers grow comfortable throwing bad pitches they felt they could get away with due to the spacious outfield.
And maybe that’s true, despite the randomness suggested by Patrick Flood’s research. Maybe some of that did happen, or maybe it happened even a few times — enough to convince the team’s coaches that it happened frequently, and then, you know, confirmation bias and all that.
Either way, it’s not likely to continue happening. In 2010, in fact, the Mets finished 47-34 at home and 32-49 on the road. Jerry Manuel suggested then that the team’s hitters pressed on the road, swinging too hard for the home runs they knew they wouldn’t compile in Citi Field. In 2009 they finished 41-40 at home and 29-52 on the road. They were much better at Shea Stadium than elsewhere in 2008, but much worse at home than on the road in 2007.
Perhaps calling any of that random statistical noise is too easy. Maybe there was something unique about the makeup of each of those teams and their coaching staffs that could explain the way they performed at home and on the road, even if rosters (and sometimes coaching staffs) tend to be fluid throughout a season.
Point is, none of it appeared to be continuous from year to year.
So here we have A-Rod, great in the playoffs in 2000 and 2004, bad in 2005 and 2006, pretty good in 2007, great in 2009, and bad again in 2010 and 2011. His aggregate postseason batting line looks a whole lot like his career regular season line, but hell, maybe he really did tighten up under the pressure in those down years. Anyone watching the games will say with certainty that he looked more comfortable in that 2009 postseason, though, of course, players generally look pretty comfortable when they’re beating the hell out of the ball.
And everyone in this great city knows that only New York players dictate clutchness, that guys from Detroit and everywhere else in flyover country are more or less robots performing to their expected levels with remarkable consistency. Who cares if Jose Valverde is now 51-for-51 in save situations this year? If A-Rod were clutch he could have overcome that. And if Mark Teixeira were clutch he would have knocked a pitch off the plate over the wall in the seventh.
Let’s forget for now that A-Rod and Teixeira have thrived in countless pressure situations throughout their baseball careers: in high school when big-league scouts came to watch, in the Minors with promotions looming, and in thousands of regular-season at-bats in the Majors. Let’s say for the sake of argument that postseason baseball represents some magical threshold at which the weight of pressure becomes overwhelming for even professional athletes accustomed to it, and that in those situations A-Rod and Teixeira are no different from all of us run-of-the-mill human beings, subject to the whims and burdens of our pathetically imperfect constitutions.
My question to Mike Lupica and the legions of Yankee fans convinced A-Rod is irreparably unclutch, then, is this: Have you ever failed in a big spot? Have you struggled with an important test or botched your lines in the school play or panicked on the parkway or frozen up in a job interview or embarrassed yourself on a date with someone beautiful?
I bet you have. We all have. It happens.
But do you expect it will always happen like that? Do you think that because you failed once or twice or even three times under pressure that you are doomed to do so every single time?
I don’t. Maybe you do. But I imagine anyone with such a defeatist attitude doesn’t often allow himself the opportunity to achieve great successes, and certainly nothing on par with a flourishing career in professional sports.
Existence precedes essence, and A-Rod is essentially one of the greatest athletes of his generation. That he struck out to end the game last night — while playing through injury, no less — should imply nothing other than that he struck out to end the game last night. He will undoubtedly find himself in many pressure situations to come. In some he will certainly fail, and in others he will just as certainly succeed.
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From Deadspin, via Jimmy Traina.
First:
Then:
Extra-Base Omir Santos, god of thunder, is on the Tigers’ playoff roster.
Somehow that did not come up in SNY.tv’s series preview with Al Beaton from BlessYouBoys.com.
Marc writes about the Red Sox at Over the Monster and Tweets @marc_normandin. Here’s me getting shticky:
“I couldn’t believe they were cheering me for hitting into a double play,” Swisher said. “I said: ‘Whoa, what’s this? And then I looked at the bullpen and saw Mo coming out and I said: ‘Now I get it!’ This was the greatest double play of my life.”
“Runners at first and second…it was unbelievable,” Rivera said. “I don’t ever want my teammates to do bad so I can pitch, but this time I was happy for the opportunity. I’m listening to the fans and I said: ‘Wow, these guys are into it!’”
Can a newly single A-Rod smack more doubles and triples?
The Yankees slugging third baseman is due back in the lineup Friday night against Toronto for the first time since his split with Cameron Diaz – and fans hope the heartbreak means home runs….
Rodriguez, who was also linked with Madonna after his divorce, memorably dated “Almost Famous” actress Kate Hudson during the Yankees’ 2009 championship run.
The blond Hollywood honey received much of the credit when A-Rod reversed a disastrous post-season slump as the Yankees won the World Series.
- Larry McShane, N.Y. Daily News.
A-Rod’s hitting line, by celebrity girlfriend:
Madonna (August 2008 – end 2008): .258/.366/.511 in 50 games.
Kate Hudson (Late May 2009 – end 2009): .302/.419/.560 in 129 games, including postseason.
Cameron Diaz (July 2010 – Sept. 15, 2011): .274/.349/.498 in 156 games.
By my best estimates of when he started dating each based on the maximum number of celebrity-gossip articles I could stomach.
It’s worth noting that while dating Hudson, A-Rod enjoyed his best batting average with balls in play.
Oh, indeed.
Presumably you’ve heard that Mariano Rivera saved his 600th game last night. Sometime this week he’ll save his 601st game, and before the season is done he’ll save his 602nd game and break the all-time saves record, just in case anyone is silly enough to need that figure for evidence that Rivera is the greatest closer of all-time.
By allowing a single hit last night, Rivera maintained his career 1.000 WHIP. To date he has thrown 1206 innings, yielded 932 hits and walked 274 batters. That is, if you’re scoring at home, awesome.
Adjusted ERA+ factors park- and league-effects into earned-run average and scales it so that 100 is average — sort of like IQ tests and the old SATs. Among pitchers with over 1000 innings pitched, Pedro Martinez has the second best ERA+ of all time with 154. Third is someone named Jim Devlin, who dominated hitters for three seasons in the 1870s and managed a career 151 mark. Fourth and fifth are Hall of Famers Lefty Grove and Walter Johnson, with 148 and 147, respectively. Those men were pitching geniuses.
Rivera’s career adjusted ERA+ is 205, more than 50 points higher than the next best ever. Isaac Newton stuff, in this imperfect metaphor.
Of course, any discussion placing Rivera among the best pitchers ever must be qualified with the fact that his dominance almost always came in one-inning stints. Who knows what Johnson or Grove or Pedro would have done if afforded that luxury? Who knows if Rivera would have been anywhere near as effective if asked to throw 120 relief innings every year the way Rollie Fingers once did, or — heaven forbid — to start games.
It never happened, so it doesn’t matter much now. Rivera happened to emerge and succeed in the era of the one-inning closer, a role he has come to define better than Tony La Russa ever could.
And though there’s evidence to show that teams leading after the 8th inning have won the same rate of games since the dawn of the closer as they did in all the years before that, perhaps increased specialization in bullpens was an adjustment necessary to maintain that percentage in the contemporary game rather than a needless rejiggering of an already effective system.
Either way, Rivera is awesome. That’s the main thing.
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