"I Hate ARod, I Love Jeter" is just an opinion. I can't rip Lupica for his opinion, though I think it's the kind of worthwhile and deep baseball analysis that one might expect from 12-year-old girls at the mall.
Lupica doesn't explain if he thinks Posada is cute or if Sheffield is icky, but he offer several other bizarre interpretations of reality that he seems to think are fact.
Decide for yourself if the following are Fact or Fiction:
" ... the last Yankee dynasty, the one that was supposed to go on and on until Jeter had won the World Series as many times as Joe DiMaggio did, or Yogi." Jeter was "supposed to" get ten rings? Ten?
"If you can't whip them on the field anymore, the way the old Yankees used to, money-whip them."
"George has forgotten the essence of who they were," one American League executive said this week. "He didn't put together the team that won all the time by buying up all the good players." He didn't? That's news to me. He didn't buy players like Boggs, Fielder, Key, Rogers, Neagle, Cone, Wetteland, Clemens, Wells, Knoblauch? He didn't steal Paul O'Neill and Tino Martinez from cash-strapped teams? He didn't outbid Boston for Bernie after the 1998 season?
Or perhaps all those free agents (and free-agent-eligibles) were just not "good players"?
Because the Yankees had good players and they came from somewhere. They didn't grow on trees and they didn't play for free.
"Stars everywhere. The new Yankees! The rest of the American League, even the Red Sox, weren't even supposed to play the season!" Foulke! Schilling! Halladay! Tejada! No Pettitte, Clemens, or Wells! The Yankees weren't even supposed to make the playoffs this season!
"Once more, almost unbelievably, A-Rod's former team got better and his new team didn't." Why would anybody find it "unbelievable" that the Rangers got better? They got better pitching. ARod doesn't pitch. Duh.
"Let me ask you a question: Who's set up better for the future right now: the Yankees with A-Rod or the Rangers without him?" Uhhh, are you joking? The Yankees. With ARod.
But in five years, or ten years, when ARod has some rings and the Texas Rangers don't, Lupica will forget he ever wrote this. Kind of like he forgot that he wrote, at the All Star Break, that the Mets were poised to take over New York baseball.
3 comments:
On the Sports Reporters, Lupica said that ARod is now the face of the post-2000 yankees. The face of the players that chased greed to the yankees, in search of the ring.
I dunno. I kinda like his face.
Also, Lupica was GIDDY with delight, feet, not touching the floor, swinging with the excitement of an 8-year old boy, that he was not on that set the week before, helping nail the red sox coffin shut. Not because he wouldn't have been Captain Nailgun that day, but because they don't get to play back his comments, never made, in his soup of crow. There's something upsetting watching a guy revel in the luck that he wasn't himself at a time when he should have been, and he knows it.
I wish I could do a video blog. Lupica on the Sports Reporters, feet swinging in the air, bouncing out of his chair, giddy with schadenfreude as he tries to get this great line in: "$194 million doesn't buy as much as it used to in baseball!"
Great line, you nerd.
We all know the Yankees didn't quite spend $194 mill on their payroll, and Lupica sometimes admits this, but he mostly just keeps repeating is as though it's true.
But more to the point ... it's not that funny. It's not that shocking that the Red Sox beat the Yankees, even if it's quite shocking that they came from 3-zip down in the series.
If ARod is the new face of the Yankees, I'll take my chances. When he gets his rings, Lupica will just dismiss it as another case where the Yankees had to buy the title. Which is what they always do. This year, Boston is trying to buy the title. Duh. As if Schilling & Foulke play for Yankee-Hatin' Love of the Game.
I won't shut up about this, will I? But think of the notion that the 2004 Yankees are merely mercenaries.
They tried hard enoguh to win 101 games, 6 more in the playoffs, but then ... one win from their WS shares ... it's time to pack it in? Get a start of the summer vacation early?
Losing sucks, winning is great. I don't deny the possibility that a high-paid team will mail it in and give a halfhearted effort. If you want to see what that team looks like, it's the 2004 Mets, not the 2004 Yankees.
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