Thursday, October 13, 2005

Yankees "stuck" with AL MVP.

Alex Rodriguez had enough big hits this season and has perfomed well enough in the postseason throughout his career that you'd think he'd be immune to this kind of over-the-top nonsense:

"That's the way one American League executive summarized A-Rod's disturbingly uneven performance: good enough for MVP-like numbers in the regular season, but an abysmal failure in October, just like Winfield. 'George is stuck with him,' is what the executive said of Rodriguez.

Five more years, $131 million, to be exact. Steinbrenner is already looking for someone to hold accountable for the way the third baseman has melted since Game 3 of last year's AL Championship Series. In his last 32 postseason at-bats, Rodriguez has four hits, no home runs and no RBI. The trauma was so great, A-Rod never boarded the Yankees' charter flight home Monday night; he stayed in California, according to a friend, to wind down, chill out, sort through the empty at-bats, including the double play grounder in the ninth inning of Game 5 that ruined the Yankees' season.


There'll be some revisionist whispering that it's Torre's fault -that, somehow, he didn't get in A-Rod's face often enough, as if suddenly that was Rodriguez's missing medicine."

Speaking of revisionism, the Yankees do not, "to be exact," owe ARod $131 million over the next five years. The Rangers are picking up about $45 million of that.

Oh, and a double play grounder in the ninth inning of Game 5 can hardly ruin the Yankees' season. That's not even possible. The season lasted 167 games and would have been a complete flop without ARod's production.

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