Clemens Syndrome.

I'm on vacation and it's time to ramble ...

On the post-game the other day, Michael Kay claimed that Jeter was having his best season ever. After I did a Danny Thomas spit take, I thought, "Didn't Jeter hit .349 one season?"

Yes, he did, a whole five seasons ago, but apparently too long ago for Michael Kay to remember.

Marvel at Jeter's 1999: .349 ba, 91 walks, 19 stolen bases, .438 ob%, .552 slugging%, 24 hrs, 37 doubles, 9 triples, 134 runs, 102 rbis.

But 2004 is supposedly Jeter's best season because he has rebounded from a dismal April and May and might actually crack a .300 batting average.

Jeter's a great player who will end up in the Hall of Fame and he is having another great season. But it's just flat-out incorrect to claim 2004 is the best season of his career. Not even close.

My sense is that Michael Kay or Mike Lupica or Joel Sherman can claim something, no matter how ingorant or incorrect, and this statement simply goes unchecked and unexamined by the majority of listeners. Then it gets repeated on WFAN and on Eyewitness News Talking Head Sports and, next thing you know, it's a Fact.

But let's say you want to clean the Jeter slate from April and May (those months still qualify as part of the "season," by the way). Let's say you want to marvel at the fact that Jeter's average has risen by 101 points since the depths of .189 on May 25th.

Why don't we apply the same logic to ARod? ARod's Achilles' Heel this season is the much-maligned RISP.

Do you remember when ARod was hitting under .200 with RISP? Less than a month ago, August 25th, ARod was batting under .200 with RISP.

Today, he's batting .245 with RISP (still badfor the entire season, of course). But 23-for-117 got quickly turned around to 35-for-147.

In his first pennant race in the spotlight of New York when the games really count, so-called Mr. April is 12-for-30 (.400) when it really counts.

So why doesn't ARod get the same praise that Jeter gets?

It's the Clemens Syndrome. It's writers and fans who use different criteria to evaluate different players.

Clemens came to NY and he wasn't a True Yankee. He wasn't a big game pitcher. He had two straight Cy Youngs and Triple Crowns in Toronto. Add all this up, and expectations were unreasonable and many writers and fans are, in essence, rooting against him.

The Clemens Syndrome reached its peak in 2001 when Clemens went 20-3 and won a Cy Young. Scrutiny of his Run Support and Strength of Competition. Don't you remember this silliness?

You have never seen a 20-game winner before or since scrutinized in the same way. Any pitcher, for that matter. Nobody mentions that Schilling couldn't win 20 this year without lots of run support or if he had to face the Yankees every game (say, did Schilling duck out of the recent weekend against the Yankees to face the Devil Rays?).

That's the Clemens Syndrome. When a player is simply judged with new and different criteria than every other player. ARod has 35 hrs and 101 rbis, that's the bottom line. Trust me when I say this: Some of those hrs and rbis were valuable and helped the Yankees win.