Through the first five games of this series, the Texas Rangers have succeeded for the most part in stifling Mr. Rodriguez, the Yankees third baseman. He has just three hits in 17 at-bats for a .176 batting average and hasn’t hit a home run.
Mr. Rodriguez, who earlier this year became the youngest player to reach the 600-home run mark, was supposed to have buried the notion that he wilted amid the pressure of October baseball. He batted .365 with six home runs in 15 postseason games last year, and Yankees manager Joe Girardi said Thursday that this season has been easier for Mr. Rodriguez because he hasn’t had to answer similar questions about his playoff performance.
– Mike Sielski, Wall Street Journal.
The excerpted portion isn’t really a fair representation of Sielski’s piece, since it later examines the way the Rangers are approaching A-Rod and considers the possibility that he’s just not getting too much to hit.
But it’s completely baffling to me that A-Rod’s performance just last postseason didn’t seem to teach anyone anything about the nature of that stigma. Rodriguez now has a .927 career postseason OPS and a .958 career regular-season OPS.
I’m sorry this story sucks: Sample size. Sample size. Sample size. Even great players, the best of their generation, endure rough 17 or 28 at-bat stretches sometimes. When they are isolated and magnified by a short playoff series, we fixate on them and assume that they are somehow meaningful.
Also — allow an only tangentially related rant — Mike Lupica’s column on the same subject is epically Lupica-esque. Allen Barra produced this monumental and must-read bit of trolling earlier this week, exposing Lupica’s tendency to belabor the obvious, and it helped me grasp exactly why I find Lupica’s stuff so frustrating to read. In this particular piece he uses nearly 1,000 words to say, essentially, “A-Rod should hit a home run tonight.”
Tedquarters 
I like to dump on A-rod as much as the next guy, but think whole unclutch thing is such nonsense. The way the writters compartmentalize each series or postseason (SMALL SAMPLE SIZES) and analyze them alone is ridiculous instead of looking at the overall history of a guys post season numebrs. These guys point to the bad series’ and ignore the monster ones.
If you take A-rods 162 game averages for his career, and thentake his career post season numbers and project them over 162 games, they are not far off what he normally does. I wont type out all the numbers but trust me they are similar.
And considering all the dumping on Arod, why does Mr. Tiexiera Face get a free ride here in terms of clutchness in the post season. This guys career post season numbers are horrid. In 5 playoff series with the Yanks this year and last year his BA’s have been .167, .222, .136, .308. and .000 this ALCS before he got hurt. And even with themonster series with LAA in 2008 his post season BA is only .214 and OPS .650. Thats Francoeur like and no one says a word about it.
Solid meta criticism of Sielski by using an unfair sample size of his article.
It’s clear Sielski still just hates A-Rod for stealing all of the home-run-milestone attention when his chase for 600 coincided with Francoeur’s run at 100.
“Solid meta criticism of Sielski by using an unfair sample size of his article.”
Excellent.
“Hey, Mister Piazza, hit a home run tonight!”
I don’t remember what that commercial was for, but I do remember that line.
Also, that Allen Barra piece was awesome.
It’s not that people think A-Rod shouldn’t go 17 or 28 at-bats without a hit; it’s that it always seems to happen in the playoffs. He has MVP-caliber regular seasons, then miraculously has 3 for 28 stretches in the playoffs. If it happened once, you could convince people it was randomness. But when it seems to happen pretty consistently, it’s hard to convince people.
But the point is it’s not miraculous and it doesn’t happen consistently. All those MVP-caliber seasons have plenty of 17 or 28 at-bat cold stretches, and look at his OPS, by playoff series (excluding the two at-bats he had in 1995):
.875, .615, 1.253, 1.213, .895, .635, .205, .820, 1.500, 1.519, .973, .580, .569.
That’s five excellent postseason series, five terrible ones, and three in the good-for-anyone-but-A-Rod .820-.895 range.
I imagine if you took any 272-plate appearance portion of any of A-Rod’s regular seasons, divided it into 13 sections and listed their OPSes like that, it would look more or less the same.
I mean, if Beltran can be unclutch after his ’04 postseason (EIGHT HOMERS IN 12 GAMES!) because he got frozen by one of the nastiest curves I’ve ever seen, A-Rod can definitely go right back to being the goat. I’m not sure if it’s a failure to understand sample size or just a purely emotional reaction combined with a short memory.
Either way, A-Rod should put goat horns on his centaur paintings.
I’m glad people keep moving the goal posts on A-Rod.
He can’t hit in the playoffs! (He crushed it in Seattle)
He can’t handle playoff pressure in NY! (He did pretty well against the Twins and the first 3 games against Boston in 2004)
He can’t handle real ALCS/World Series pressure! (He puts up historic numbers in 2009 ALCS/World Series)
He can’t do it two years in a row!