A Big Day

Before I get to what the title of this post refers to, I just wanna make a couple of quick, unrelated points, because this is my space to vent my hate filled soul onto you, the unwitting public.

Do you realise Tyler Thigpen was 2/13 for 12 yards with 2 interceptions at one point last week? TWO OF THIRTEEN. I literally think I might be able to do that, a screen pass or something to Larry Johnson. At least I'd lack the arm strength to throw the interceptions. I cannot wait to see how bad Kansas City are gonna be this year. It's gonna be FANTASTIC. I was texting friends of mine saying "he's 1-10 for -1 with an int!". It was at that point that I realised I was becoming Bill Simmons, and after a long, heart to heart with a whiskey bottle, I hope I have learnt my lesson.

Also, my preseason NFC predictions are going great, thanks for asking. My proposed six playoff teams are a sterling 8-10, with St.Louis looking like the most audacious back-to-back fuckup pick of our generation. I'm not too worried about Minny or Seattle, but New Orleans has major secondary issues still and it has the looks of "not their season" with all the injuries (Gay, Glenn, Shockey, Colston, even Jamaal Brown), so yeah. Not so hot.

But it doesn't matter because today is a very special day.

Today is the day I get to lampoon my very own A-Rod Suxors column. Today I am officially a member of the sports blogging community. Ian O'Connor, I will always remember you fondly as my first.

Just a note, this thing made me waaaaaaaaay madder than writing on this blog ever should, so I will not be writing on A-Rod again.

Before long, A-Rod will escape from New York

In the business of sportswriting, nothing carries less redeeming social value than a prediction. I printed one, anyway, on Nov. 13, 2003, and it was the subject of some ridicule from longtime colleagues and friends.

I authored a column around the notion that Alex Rodriguez was destined to end up with the Yankees. "Put it in the books," I wrote. "Theirs will be a marriage of necessity over convenience, a union colored by a player's desperate bid for his first ring and an owner's obsessive bid for his seventh."

The piece in The Journal News of New York inspired a roundtable segment on Madison Square Garden TV, featuring a couple of nationally renowned baseball columnists (Joel Sherman and Jack Curry) swinging heavy lumber at the pinata disguised as me.

A martyr of our age.

There are no links provided, and I guess he has no reason to lie, but like, why was he vilified in such a way? Were Joel Sherman and Jack Curry like; "oh Ian! Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian! You poor misguided fool. Let me get this straight, you think the New York Yankees - who NEVER spend to buy players like, I dunno, Jason Giambi, or Mike Mussina et al. These New York Yankees? Will spend money to get the best player in baseball to play for them? They'd have to be mad wouldn't they? What a sunken cost that would be. You do realise he has only hit 156 homers in the last three seasons right? An OPS of just 1.016? That's a mere 184 points higher than Paul O'Neill! And, if you've done your research, niave Ian, you'd realise he's missed a total of one game in the last three years. It's a liability the Yankees can ill afford with their tight payroll and modest ambitions."

Seriously, Joel Sherman is a douche and Jack Curry not much better, but you'd have to know negative amounts about baseball to make this argument.

On one level, the prediction made little sense. The Yankees would never ask Derek Jeter to vacate the shortstop position, A-Rod was nobody's idea of a second baseman, third baseman Aaron Boone had just delivered one of the most dramatic home runs in franchise history, and Joe Torre had won four championships with a selfless approach that Rodriguez didn't exactly personify.

a) they had a DH spot if needs be
b) if Alfonso Soriano can play second base, I'm pretty sure a 28 year old A-Rod could have gotten away with it
c) I'm not even going to do the stats stuff - Aaron Boone was Aaron Boone, Alex Rodriguez was Alex Rodriguez, case closed
d) on what basis did Alex Rodriguez not personify a selfless approach? Give me one, ONE example of this

On another level, A-Rod clearly wanted to leave Texas, the hated Red Sox were reportedly interested in acquiring him, and the spend-crazy Yanks hadn't won it all in three long years.

...and Alex Rodriguez was awesome right? Right? Wrong, ok.

Two months later, there was Jeter at the news conference to introduce A-Rod as his teammate. Even though Rodriguez had agreed to change positions, Jeter looked as if someone had stolen his bike, his supermodel girlfriend, or both.

sleepovers would never be the same again.

Sure, a strange set of circumstances was needed to put the deal in place. The Rodriguez-to-Boston trade had to unravel in a hard-to-believe way, Boone had to wreck his knee in a pickup basketball game, and one of the greatest shortstops of all time had to agree to move to third.

you had to keep on the Boone angle, didn't you O'Connor? We all know this is a waste of time but you keep pushing my buttons, fine, I'll find your Aaron Boone 2003 stats, but I don't have to like it. Boone OPS .756, Rodriguez OPS .996. And I am supposed to believe, as a sentient being, that it was Aaron Boone's injury that opened the door for Alex Rodriguez. Of course I'm not, you're fucking with me in your incredibly stupid way, and I bit, I took the bait. Are you happy you son of a bitch?

Yet this context is offered as a way of pumping some much-needed credibility into this next absurd prediction: Alex Rodriguez will be a member of the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim by the start of the 2011 season.

absurd, crazy! Want an out-there prediction? Go to Ian O'Connor. Alex Rodriguez will be playing for a team other than the Yankees, one of the other two fucking teams that can afford him. Wow, what a McCain style maverick you are sir.

(political editorial btw, did anyone watch the GOP convention? They had Republican supporters with these McCain "Mavrick" signs. You would have thought someone would have consulted a dictionary at some point, it is only the legitimacy of your party beamed to the entire world. Awesome. /political editorial)

OK, maybe not the Angels, and maybe not 2011. But the point is, he won't be a Yankee for the duration of his 10-year, $275 million contract, not even close.

wow, this prediction just gets more outrageous by the minute! You're telling me, that Alex Rodriguez, will, in the next ten years, be playing for another team, somewhere, at some point. I'd also like to think he was saying he will be "not even close" to being a Yankee, like, a professional sychronised swimmer for the Guam Confederates or something, but sadly, I think he means not close to ten years.

But the Yankees missed the playoffs this year for the first time since 1993, and Sunday night sure sounded like the beginning of A-Rod's end in the Bronx. During Yankee Stadium's closing ceremony, a moment for players past and present to be celebrated like never before, Rodriguez was the one Yank to draw some boos from the crowd.

unlike before he signed that ten year deal, when New York celebrated "Alex Rodriguez is the Coolest!" day every November 3rd. Yes, it's a very different time now.

No, it wasn't a full-throttle boo; the cheers slightly beat out the jeers.

please, continue. Let me hear more about the Ian O'Connor scale of booing, I, and no doubt your entire readership are rapt with attention. What is a three quarter throttle boo? Would you call it a subdued, eloquant boo, or whimsical, enigmatic boo? What about the pitch of the boo? Was it consistant? Could the crowd hold the "o" sound for longer than the seven consecutive seconds required by the famous Mike Celzic scale of booing for a player to be run out of town? These are things I desperately need to know.

And no matter what he does, A-Rod can't win any public debate with Jeter.

what public debate? Honest to fucking God, what are you talking about? Do you think Jeter and A-Rod are ever like "Jesus Christ dude, should we just kiss just to give these single chromosome morons something else to talk about?". I gotta be honest, I think I would. I think if I were Derek Jeter, I'd kiss Alex Rodriguez, tongue action, the whole lot. Just to get the reaction. I mean, honestly, the tabloid world is waiting for it. This is the "will they or won't they?" story of baseball apparently. Kissing isn't enough, fuck - on the field - start a website, get married, whatever, I am sick to death of this. Have you heard me world of sports journalism?

SICK

TO

DEATH

The man drove the Yanks to the playoffs last year, and he has put up megastar regular-season numbers since his arrival. A-Rod even had a hell of a postseason run going for himself in 2004, when he hit .421 against the Twins in the Division Series and saved the Yanks from an 0-2 deficit with a 12th-inning double. In fact, Rodriguez would've stood among the heroes of a League Championship Series sweep of Boston had Mariano Rivera put away Game 4.

Rivera failed, the Red Sox managed their own deferred sweep, Rodriguez was widely mocked for slapping at Bronson Arroyo's glove on a putout, and the rest is history.

In the 2005 Division Series loss to the Angels, A-Rod hit .133 and then announced he had "played like a dog." In the 2006 Division Series loss to the Tigers, A-Rod hit .071 and compelled Torre to bat him eighth in the order. In last year's Division Series loss to the Indians, A-Rod managed a .267 batting average and his first postseason RBI since the calamitous Boston series of '04.

In between, Rodriguez hardened his status as the game's leading drama queen. The World Baseball Classic waffling, the World Series opt-out, the poker clubs, Madonna and so much more.

you did that. You. The media, you did all this. He decided to play for one team and not another. He opted out of his clause at the end of the season. The poker clubs I don't even know about but I guess he was living his life. Is the Madonna thing even true? Or were you leeches just following him around with a camera and a pair of scissors, happy to paste A-Rod's face on some guy and snickering about it? You do this, you make this ridiculous non-story, peddle it out every two months as substantive analysis and get paid hundreds of thousands for the luxury. And not only that, you then have the gall to turn this on the poor bastard and accuse him of cultivating this imaginary status and being "undeserving" of the legacy of a team that played fucking ten years ago, when the man is just playing baseball, every day, and doing so very well.

ENOUGH.

A-Rod carries too much baggage to the plate in critical, must-hit situations, and the process is wearing out a fan base still hopelessly in love with the Jeter-led team that built a dynasty around pitching, chemistry, clutch hitting and a commitment to treating little things as big things.

Nobody doubts A-Rod's otherworldly talent...

everyone doubts it. Everyone. You say you don't, but that's in bad faith. It might not be "hitting the ball" talent, but you doubt his talent to play winning baseball, as though there were some pixie dust delivered by Santa Claus, as though he's sold his soul or something. You buy into the Jeter-love and the stupidity of the whole exercise by writing this column. You aren't defending A-Rod and saying "stop being a bunch of ungrateful-bandwagon hopping-front running-no guts-less humanity-free spending-joy killing-low life morons who are booing an incredible, once in a generation (ok, twice, Pujols) player. Stop it." You could do this, you don't, and that makes you as culpable as anyone with a "full-throttle boo" in that stadium.

but everybody questions whether he'll ever get it.

exactly.

At the All-Star Game in July, another goodbye event for Yankee Stadium, Jeter understood it was important to stay for all 15 innings, while Rodriguez had checked out hours earlier.

So amazingly enough, Yankee fans talk about being "stuck" with A-Rod for another nine years, all the way through 2017, despite the fact he might finish his career with more than 800 homers and 4,000 hits.

"We can win three World Series," Rodriguez said after winning the 2005 American League MVP award, "(and) with me it's never going to be over. My benchmark is so high that no matter what I do, it's never going to be enough."

he said, selfishly. While killing a puppy. With ivory poached from an unnecessarily large group of elephants. That he stole. From orphans. With diseases. He gave them.

That's what happens when you sign two contracts worth more than half a billion dollars combined. Fair or not, Yankees fans hold A-Rod largely responsible for the postseason failures of the last five years.

the answer is not. Don't pretend this doesn't matter. It does. You're supposed to be the person who sets people straight, who can actually make people think "yeah, maybe this is fucked up". You write for FOX SPORTS dude, you're not writing for some backwater blog, people read this shit, and you just sit by and go "well, people can be unreasonable and retarded, and I'm perfectly fine with that, far be it for me to interfere".

They'll need to persuade Rodriguez to waive his veto power for the good of all concerned, and they'll need to convince themselves that eating tens upon tens of millions of dollars — and trading away the home-run record to boot — makes sound business sense.

if they couldn't do it last year, they sure as hell wouldn't do it now. If I were Alex Rodriguez, I'd be asking for more fucking money, the shit they put him through.

I'm done man, before I have a goddamn heart attack over this petty, dumbing down shit.