The A-Rod Chronology Project

[Seattle1]

Mods please close this thread!!!

Hey!

.....

[Whitesoxnut]

I think A-rod needed it a lot too. Nice win.

[mojorisin71]

Shouldn't this be in the NYY forum?

[jsmets92]

A-Rod and Vlad will have an amazing back and forth MVP race in the American League this season.

Watch out for Sizemore too.

[Whitesoxnut]

Watch out for Sizemore too.

Dont even mention Superman after what he did against us. We were lucky to get even 1 win from the Tribe who look like a different team then the under-acheiving tribe of '06.

[AutographCollector]

Shouldn't this be in the NYY forum?

My thoughts exactly. Moved...

[DoubleX]

I've decided that this thread will now just be the A-Rod discussion thread for the season, so please people, don't start new A-Rod threads right and left. Try to keep it all here.

All A-Rod threads that sprung up today, with the exception of the poll predicting his final numbers, will be merged into this thread.

[clipper]

All Right ARod !!!

WOW. I love baseball for these moments. A ROD really really made my day. I was working, checking the score, didn't hear about it until after the game and I thought we lost - I'm going to smile all week. And I was worried this thread was going to be all negative and nothing positive. Boy was I wrong. And 6 RBIs. This should quiet the boobirds for awhile.

OUTSTANDING, GREAT, UNBELIEVABLE,

Clipper

[mikesty]

Today was my 18th and I was getting ready to head out. I had my favorite shirt in hand, and I was on the phone with my dad (he's in NJ watching the game on TV), and I was watching it on GameDay. Low and behold, he tells me A-Rod just hit a grand slam to center field. I said a bunch of expletives, but he was right!

I put down my favorite shirt and went out with my Rodriguez jersey

I got a nasty glare from a guy in a Red Sox hat

[DoubleX]

ESPN just flashed a little stat that with the Yankees, A-Rod is a .388 hitter with bases loaded including four grand slams. That sounds pretty good to me.

[Mattingly]

I remember a comment during the game (must've been around the 7th, 8th inning or so), Suzyn asked Alex something like "Whatever happened to that kid from Seattle and Texas that we knew?"

I think that he'd responded that he was now having more fun. Instead of worrying about Derek Jeter, he needs to have more fun. Perhaps between either no longer being the big fish in the tiny acquarium (relatively small market city) or switching positions, but he definitely needed to have more fun. Stop thinking about himself so much (not good) and get back to being a kid at a ballgame. I remembered this from here:

A-Rod blasts two homers, has six RBIs in Yankees win

Quotable: "It felt awesome," Rodriguez said. "I was so excited, I felt like a fool running around the bases, like it was Little League."

I do hope that he acts like a kid again. He's playing a kid's game, so he should have fun. He's an awesome slugger, and hitting into the black certainly helps. That's why he's being paid so handsomely, so he may as well go out there and do his thing with the bat.

[monkey333]

Heartless stat padder, he only needed to single in two runs.

[mikesty]

Heartless stat padder, he only needed to single in two runs.

Whateva :P

I'd say for 95%+ of major-league caliber hitters, that ball would have been a long fly ball for an out in center field. A-Rod's swing is brutal. The hit itself was just as beautiful as was winning the game.

[Mattingly]

Heartless stat padder, he only needed to single in two runs.

How is it stat padding? I'd much rather see him succeed and get those runs in than fail and strikeout.

Something's strange when a player not only gets booed when he fails, but gets criticized when he succeeds. To me, the better he hits, the happier I am.

[iPod]

There's usually one moment in every game where the outcome is decided. It usually happens somewhere from the seventh inning on. Everyone gets their turn sooner or later. Last night it was in the eighth. A-Rod bitched out again. Lets' just have 2 columns:
CHOKES MAN'S UP

It should be "Mans up," not "Man's up."

Even his teammate, Al Leiter brought this out during the August 18th Boston series last season, the series that essentially knocked the Bosox out of it. The Yanks held a tenuous 3.5 game lead going into that series. After the sweep, (BOSTON MASSACRE ll) the lead was 6.5 and Boston was essentially done for the year. In the Friday night game, after the Yanks had taken the day game, Jeter came up with the bases loaded and 2 out in the seventh, the Yanks trailing 10-8. His bases clearing double turned a 10-8 Red Sox lead into a 11-10 Yankee lead. Abreu followed with a walk and then A-Rod padded that with a run-scoring double. Al Leiter said, "You know, there's a big difference in the mindset between Jeters hit and A-Rod's" . Why would a recent teammate (Leiter retired after spring training) even bring that up in a broadcast?

An RBI to put your team two runs ahead when the other team has already scored ten runs is hardly "padding." Of course Jeter's hit was more noteworthy, but that doesn't mean A-Rod's was worthless. Come on, use your common sense here.

I still say that A-Rod would flourish in California where people show up in the third inning, leave in the seventh to beat traffic and spend most of the game on their cell phones.

That's only the beginning. We also have antennae, walk on all fours and eat our young. Let me know if you need help getting off that high horse of yours.

He'll get cheered for his homeruns when the team is up 9-2 in the eighth. He might even get his ring with Artie Moreno's Angels. He'll hit 67 homeruns, drive in 150 and bat .350 with the spotlight off. I would take Ervin Santana or Kelvim Escober, along with Chone Figgins (he'll be off the DL soon enough) in a heartbeat and never look back even if A-Rod won the MVP every year until he retired. Why? Because he can't get it done under the New York spotlight.

What are you talking about? A-Rod already won an MVP in New York. He's already performed well in the postseason at least a couple of times; that's the thing that's so bizarre about all this. Are Yankee fans' memories really so bad that I need to remind you about the 2004 postseason, or was that so scarring that you've just all blocked it out of your minds completely?

In 2 out of the 3 Yankee wins in the 2004 ALDS against the Twins, Rodriguez was directly involved in the process of driving in the winning run.

Game 2:
Bottom of the ninth, 1 out, Cairo is on second, Jeter on first, and the Yankees are down 6-5. Can everyone here agree this is a clutch situation for A-Rod? Yes? OK, good.

A-Rod doubled in that at-bat, scoring Cairo (hence, tying the game) and sending Jeter to third with only one out. That set up a Matsui sac fly and ended the game.

Game 4:
Top of the ninth, none on, none out, score tied 5-5. A run would obviously give the Yankees the lead, which if they manage to hold in the bottom of the ninth, would clinch the series. Would everyone agree this is a clutch situation for A-Rod?

A-Rod doubled in that at-bat too, putting the Yankees in pretty freakin' good position to win the series, considering Sheffield, Matsui and Williams were coming up. The Yankees didn't score; 2 strikeouts and a pop out to second followed.

Top of the eleventh, none on, one out (Jeter, who K'ed), score still tied 5-5. Again, a clutch situation.

A-Rod doubled yet again, and stole third base for good measure, scoring on a wild pitch. The Yankees behind him quickly went down in order; pop out to second and strikeout. They held the lead and won the series. Rodriguez hit .421 in that series with 4 extra-base hits.

That's A-Rod's best performance in the postseason, granted, but he hasn't been a complete zero besides that. He had a .378 OBP and .516 slugging percent in the ALCS that year, both exceeding the team average (compared to Jeter's .333 OBP and .233 slugging). In the bottom of the 8th of game 1, with the Yankees only ahead 8-7 and the game still in doubt, A-Rod singled to start a 2-run rally which put the game away. In game 3 of that series, he homered in the 3rd to tie the game 4-4. Granted it's only the third, but how many game tying HRs do you have to hit in the postseason before people stop calling you a choker?

And he's had other good postseason series not with the Yankees too. You say he can't perform with the Yankees in the postseason; well, if the pressure of the Yankees is so great, why did he perform so well against the Yankees in the 2000 ALCS? In that series, he hit .409 and had a .773 slugging percentage, driving in 5 of the Mariners 18 total runs. They (the Mariners) lost that series, but then again, it's hard to win a postseason series when your teammates hit .189 collectively, and your pitchers have a team ERA of 5.37.

In the 1997 ALDS against the Orioles, A-Rod hit .312 and had a .562 slugging percentage. Essentially the same story as the 2000 ALDS. The Mariners dropped the series, but I would say the collective batting average of A-Rod's teammates (.205), and the Mariners' team ERA (5.91) had a lot more to do with it than he did.

So there you go; that's 3 very good postseason series (1997 ALDS, 2000 ALDS, 2004 ALDS), and one that's good but not great (2004 ALCS). To say this guy can't play in the playoffs is just flat out factually wrong. We know it's factually wrong, because he has performed well in the playoffs, as a Yankee, as a non-Yankee playing the Yankees, and as a non-Yankee not playing the Yankees.

The fact that he had two consecutive postseason series that were very bad tells you very, very little in reality. Derek Jeter, for example, has had 2 consecutive poor series on 2 separate occasions:

1998 ALDS: .111 .273 .111
1998 ALCS: .200 .259 .320

2001 ALCS: .118 .200 .118
2001 WS: .148 .179 .259

Plus he's had 2 other bad series, the 2000 ALDS vs Oakland, and (already mentioned) the 2004 ALCS against Boston.

The 2005 ALDS is when this all really gained momentum, especially game 5, the ninth inning. It was just this perfect image, of the saintly Jeter singling and the false prophet Rodriguez doubling the two of them off, essentially ending the Yankees' season and capping off a terrible series. But why was A-Rod blamed for that loss and not Mike Mussina, who got knocked out in the 3rd inning? I would say getting your starting pitcher knocked out in the third is more damaging than one of your hitters going 0-4. Why not Hideki Matsui, who went 0-5 and had 8 LOB to A-Rod's 3?

More generally, why is that series blamed on A-Rod? Yes, he performed terribly. But so did a lot of Yankees. In Rodriguez's favor he did have a .381 OBP; he was getting on base that series, even if his BA was only .133. Bernie Williams didn't hit much better, .211, but his OBP was .250, well below A-Rod's. Randy Johnson pitched terribly in 2 games out of that series. Mike Mussina essentially put the Yankees in position to lose game 5.

Why is it that A-Rod is the one said to cause these failures? Because he's paid the most. But that doesn't make sense. If your pitcher gives up 5 runs in 2.2 innings, he's clearly the one who caused the failure, regardless of who gets paid what. People are confusing the two ideas.

Which leads me to my next point, which is that to the Yankees, A-Rod's contract really isn't that ridiculous, nor is it preventing the Yankees from going out and getting other players. The "A-Rod is our guy and for the money we're giving him he has to perform for us" argument is one that we non-Yankee fans will tolerate because if we were paying him that much money, he would cripple our team's financial flexibility to the point where we wouldn't have other dependable players. We just don't think about it further than that. But on the Yankees, it's an irrelevant argument. A-Rod is only barely the Yankees' top paid player. 2006 salaries:

Alex Rodriguez $ 21,680,727
Derek Jeter $ 20,600,000
Jason Giambi $ 20,428,571
Mike Mussina $ 19,000,000
Randy Johnson $ 15,661,427
Johnny Damon $ 13,000,000
Hideki Matsui $ 13,000,000
Jorge Posada $ 12,000,000
Gary Sheffield $ 10,756,171
Mariano Rivera $ 10,500,000

The Yankees are paying Jason Giambi and Mike Mussina essentially exactly the same amount of money as they are paying Alex Rodriguez. Where were the outcries after Mussina coughed up the season on October 10, 2005? "Mussina's gotta pitch the big games if he's going to earn the money we're paying him! The Yankees don't care about anything but championships!" Nowhere, that's where they were. Why? It's more fun to pretend how smart and perceptive we all are by making wild accusations like "A-Rod is a choker."

Never let the truth get in the way of a good story, I suppose.