Of course, I just went and brought it up. But the Daily News’ coverage of A-Rod’s 600th home run was so brutal — from the back cover reading “Congrats* (on your tainted milestone)” to Mike Lupica’s moralistic second-person screed — that I wanted to highlight the quote from Reed, the voice of reason.
A-Rod’s bruised left hand didn’t keep him out of the lineup, but he was unable to complete his journey into the 600 club. Rodriguez went 0-for-4, extending his homerless streak to 17 at-bats.
– Mark Feinsand, N.Y. Daily News.
Alex Rodriguez has homered once every 22.1 at-bats this season and once every 14.5 at-bats in his career. I mean, I get it and all, but it’s funny to note a “17 at-bat homerless streak” as if that’s a thing.
Basically, Pettitte has been 17 percent better than the average pitcher. He has 240 wins, with 18 more games in the postseason.
When you scroll down to his Hall of Fame statistics, Pettitte falls short in black ink (times leading the league in an important stat), gray ink (top 10 in important stats), Hall of Fame Monitor (a point-system for worthiness) and Hall of Fame Standards (where you rank relative to other Hall of Famers — basically average or below average).
To summarize, Pettitte falls short in every Hall of Fame metric.
Salfino does a nice job breaking down Pettitte’s Hall of Fame candidacy. I assume Pettitte gets in because of the rings and the Yankees and everything else, though it’s unclear he deserves the merit. He’s certainly better than Jack Morris, but just being better than some guy who’s in the Hall of Fame should not make you a Hall of Famer.
But Salfino neglects to examine what I think is the most interesting thing about Pettitte’s candidacy: He admitted HGH use.
Media and fans seem to buy Pettitte’s claim that he was just using HGH to recover from surgery in 2002 and never again after that. And hey, I have no reason to doubt Pettitte either.
But if we’re going to take his excuse on faith and look past Pettitte’s indiscretion, why not do the same with A-Rod? Is “recovering from surgery” more palatable than “young and stupid”?
Every home run A-Rod hits, people throw around terms like “tainted” and “disgraceful” and everything else. Many seem to insist A-Rod doesn’t belong in the Hall of Fame because he cheated, and yet no one even mentions it when discussing Pettitte’s candidacy.
Just sayin’s all.
UPDATE: Tom Boorstein points out that Jack Morris is not actually in the Hall of Fame, which is good because he doesn’t really deserve to be.
Previewing Yanks-Royals with Jeff Zimmerman of RoyalsReview.com.
You play baseball on Sunday afternoon. You play for the best baseball team, the one that’s the best now and the one that is always the best. All of your teammates get paid a lot, but you are paid the most. You hit your 598th home run in the game and your team wins.
That night, you take a limousine to the ace pitcher’s birthday party at a famous rapper’s nightclub. Your teammates are there. So is the famous rapper and his famous singer wife.
A beautiful blonde moviestar is there to see you, but you don’t speak to her. She is famous, too. You make eye contact across the room. You mouth to her the lyrics to the songs played by the famous DJ.
Before midnight, you make arrangements to leave. You sneak out the back door of the club and the blonde moviestar is waiting in the limousine.
It takes you to the heliport. You grab the blonde and board the helicopter and take off into the night, to some secret getaway for millionaires who date millionaires, someplace accessible by helicopter.
Tuesday, you play baseball again.
Well, not totally. But man is Rev Halofan down on Kazmir and his team:
McCarver takes the game seriously, especially when it comes to management dealings with players and managers, especially Torre, his roommate when they played for the Cardinals. But using murderous dictators to make a baseball point, a point about a darn game, was the portrait of a man making an unconscious decision in a conscious state of mind.
Major League Baseball had McCarver’s spiel pulled from YouTube. They said it was about some copyright thing. Yeah, right.
– Bob Raissman, N.Y. Daily News.
OK, first of all, Major League Baseball pulls every baseball clip it finds from YouTube. That’s no secret. The league’s business model, for better or worse, includes maintaining exclusive rights to all baseball video on the Internet. These sites — SNY.tv’s network — have access to the video only because of a partnership with MLB.com. Technically MLB has the rights to all video taken in a Major League ballpark. Anything that makes any noise on YouTube comes down pretty quickly.
There’s no way Raissman doesn’t know that. I mean, I certainly hope not — he’s the sports media critic for a major newspaper in a huge market. Seems like he’s employing a bit of duplicity to get in a jab at MLB and Fox.
And you know who else distributed misleading information to communicate their platform? That’s right, the Nazis.
Settle down; I’m kidding. And I’m certainly not here to defend Tim McCarver for anything, ever. There are some places people with huge audiences simply should not go, and even mentioning Hitler, Stalin, the Nazis, hell, anything involving genocide — that’s one of them. No doubt. People are pretty sensitive about that stuff, and rightfully so.
But the backlash against McCarver is kind of amazing. I mean, look, the guy went all Godwin’s Law and said something he shouldn’t have. But it’s not like he said, “The Yankees systematically murdered millions of people.” He was arguing — perhaps incorrectly — that the Yankees were ominously ignoring a part of their history, and he pointed out, accurately, that terrible people from yesteryear did something similar.
I guess the thing is, I don’t understand why everyone’s so surprised that Tim McCarver said something stupid. The comparison doesn’t even crack the top 10 things Tim McCarver has said that most offended me. It’s just that this instance happened to be an affront to decency and not to logic, his usual stamping grounds.
Tedquarters 