R and R (and R?)
After a nice win last night, the Yanks plan to throw their gloves on the field in a concession to Halladay's dominance and their own aches and pains. Jeter, Giambi, and Damon are all dinged and won't play and I wouldn't be at all surprised to see Abreu or Posada or Melky join them on the pine. It does make sense for Torre to get some rest for a veteran, read aging, team like the Yanks, especially one so ridiculously fragile. this season Giambi, Jeter, Damon, Matsui, Sheffield, Cano, AROD, Cairo have all missed stretches of at least 4-5 games due to injury or, in AROD's case, illness. Sending this team off to a Swiss sanitarium for a week would make sense. But there is just one little problem. The Tigers are only 2 games back of the Yanks and, more to the point, the Twins are just 2 and 1/2 back and poised to overtake the Tigers. Does one worry about ceding home field advantage for the ALCS? Does one worry about ceding it to the Twins, when Santana is virtually unbeatable there and mortal elsewhere? If you have home field, they can only maximize their silver bullet by pitching him exclusively on the road. If you let them get the advantage then you are 2 games back to start with. Interesting conundrum.
Well the article Michael put me onto and I mentioned yesterday has certainly created huge buzz among the scribes, who have done everything from re-psychoanalyzing AROD (I'm not certain he's all that deep), to re-psychoanalyzing the our reaction to him, to invoking the ghost of Bronx Zoo past in wondering how his teammates scarcely concealed antipathy for this fellow will affect their playoff run. One thing the scribbler community has signally failed to do is apologize for their now obvious sin of treating Yankee fans as, in BGW's phrase, besotted yahoos who somehow invented, out of their own mean-spiritedness and unreasonable expectations, Arod's proclivity to gag. We fans, treated as lemmings with a bad case of empty nestegg syndrome, closely approximated in our estimate of how AROD has performed all of the jocks whose straps these same scribes find so intoxicating. We were the clear-eyed judges of performance and the so-called experts, all of them, were the besotted ones.
As for how this will affect everyone, I suspect the publication of AROD's unpopularity will free him up to play for himself rather than for the team, which was never really in his DNA anyway. He would have to play better if his performance on the field were purely an extension of his self-love, which, as the article reveals, is considerable. If Freud were writing his classic article "On Narcissism" today, he would add AROD to cats and beautiful women in his list of creatures made fascinating to others by the depths of their self-absorption.
Well the article Michael put me onto and I mentioned yesterday has certainly created huge buzz among the scribes, who have done everything from re-psychoanalyzing AROD (I'm not certain he's all that deep), to re-psychoanalyzing the our reaction to him, to invoking the ghost of Bronx Zoo past in wondering how his teammates scarcely concealed antipathy for this fellow will affect their playoff run. One thing the scribbler community has signally failed to do is apologize for their now obvious sin of treating Yankee fans as, in BGW's phrase, besotted yahoos who somehow invented, out of their own mean-spiritedness and unreasonable expectations, Arod's proclivity to gag. We fans, treated as lemmings with a bad case of empty nestegg syndrome, closely approximated in our estimate of how AROD has performed all of the jocks whose straps these same scribes find so intoxicating. We were the clear-eyed judges of performance and the so-called experts, all of them, were the besotted ones.
As for how this will affect everyone, I suspect the publication of AROD's unpopularity will free him up to play for himself rather than for the team, which was never really in his DNA anyway. He would have to play better if his performance on the field were purely an extension of his self-love, which, as the article reveals, is considerable. If Freud were writing his classic article "On Narcissism" today, he would add AROD to cats and beautiful women in his list of creatures made fascinating to others by the depths of their self-absorption.
posted by joe valente | 3:53 PM
2 Comments:
You know it's really interesting. In the article, AROD states categorically that his troubles with the fans stem mainly from his contract. Then he goes on to quizzically complain that Mussina makes a "boatload of money," Giambi makes 20 mill per year etc. and yet "they get a pass." But that fact alone should suggest to AROD, who proclaims himself very smart, that it's not the money that infuriates the fans about him. he's not "getting a pass" or rather not deserving one for other reasons. And really is so painfully simple as to merit no analysis at all. you don't do what it takes to live up to a mantra that more defines Yankeedom more than it defines the organization (the Raiders) that authored it: Just Win, Baby. Do it for the team (Jeter, O'Neill, Munson), do it for yourself (Jackson, Gossage, Mussina), do it for your God (Chad Curtis, Mariano Rivera), we don't care, Just Win.
Ok, I admit it: I don't know what the third, parenthetical R refers to. Is it just me being an idiot?
Not much of a game tonight.
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