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I didn't write it. Send your e-mails to Gregg Doyle at CBS....
Major League Baseball recently announced big news: Overall attendance is on pace for a record in excess of 75 million.
The New York Yankees, with crowds averaging 51,000 per game for a record 4.2 million pace, have the best fans in baseball.
Wait a minute. Sorry. Got a word wrong in that sentence.
The Yankees have the worst fans in baseball.
There. Much more accurate.
You know what this is about. It's about the same thing every story on the Yankees has been about all season. This is about Alex Rodriguez.
For months, as his batting average sank and his error tally rose, Yankees fans booed A-Rod. It got to the point where daily game stories out of New York focused on two equally compelling story lines: Yankees vs. Visitors, and Yankee Stadium vs. A-Rod.
And then A-Rod got hot. It started on the last day of August with three hits, bled into Sept. 1 with two home runs, and has continued for two weeks. Yankee Stadium can't get enough of A-Rod now. He's their guy. After Jeter of course. And the steroid-user. And Matsui. A-Rod's fourth, though. And fourth is special.
This is no defense of A-Rod. He's not a pitiful creature. He's a grown man with a great life and an enormous salary, so he'll get no tears because he got booed.
Instead, let's laugh at Yankees fans.
Look, Yankees fans, if you've really hated A-Rod for most of this summer, then hate him. Hate him for making more money per game ($158,532) than most people make in a year. Hate him for questioning Derek Jeter's leadership in that infamous Esquire interview of 2001. Hate him for being better looking than you, for having a prettier wife than you, for taking off his shirt this summer in Central Park.
But to hate him for the sin of struggling on the baseball field? That's dumb -- and more than dumb, it's counter-productive.
And that, Yankees fans, is why you're the worst fans in baseball.
Do fans everywhere boo the home team, or a home player, on occasion? Sure they do, though I'll never understand it. Barring something detestable like displaying a lack of effort or committing off-field violence against women -- and not in that order -- a player should never be booed at home. Just shouldn't happen. But it does, everywhere. Fine.
But only in Yankee Stadium, and only with A-Rod, does it happen with such intensity, such glee.
"(T)here was a period when they were booing (A-Rod) when it was inappropriate," Yankees general manager Brian Cashman told the New York Daily News last week. "It became the thing to do like, you go to a Broadway show, you boo Alex. It was almost like a little fad."
For months it was like Yankees fans wanted A-Rod to fail. Watching him get hits and make defensive plays would have been nice, perhaps, but it was more enjoyable to watch him throw another ball away and then strike out with men on base -- and then let him have it!
The thing was, as the booing got worse, so did A-Rod. A trickle of throwing errors became a torrent. Strikeouts piled up. Runners were left in scoring position by the bushel. And the Yankees were the poorer for it. With their best player having his worst season, the Yankees were trailing Boston in the American League East in a season where, with the rise of the AL Central, the wild-card wasn't looking like a viable safety net.
Yankees fans -- spoiled as they are by a system that funnels rich teams like the Yankees and the ... Yankees toward October -- weren't helping the cause. They were hurting it. You idiots. More than football, more than basketball, baseball is a mental game. Get inside a player's head, and he's done. Name a basketball player who simply lost his shooting touch and was hounded out of the NBA. Name a quarterback who lost his accuracy at the peak of his career. It doesn't happen in those sports.
In baseball, it happens. There's a syndrome for it, and of course it's named for a baseball player, Steve Blass, who inexplicably lost the ability to throw strikes and by 1974 was out of baseball at age 32, two years after winning 19 games. The same mental block struck down the promising pitching careers of Rick Ankiel and Sam Militello, hastened Chuck Knoblauch's retirement as a second baseman and ruined catcher Mackey Sasser.
Militello and Knoblauch, like Rodriguez, were afflicted when they were Yankees. (Sasser was a New York Met.) Coincidence? Perhaps. Or perhaps the stress of performing on the world's brightest stage, hindered by routine confidence issues and exacerbated by 50,000 booing enemies at home, made a small problem massive.
Anyway, it's a dead issue now. A-Rod's out of his funk, in the field and at the plate.
Don't applaud yourselves, Yankees fans. You had nothing to do with it.
Major League Baseball recently announced big news: Overall attendance is on pace for a record in excess of 75 million.
The New York Yankees, with crowds averaging 51,000 per game for a record 4.2 million pace, have the best fans in baseball.
Wait a minute. Sorry. Got a word wrong in that sentence.
The Yankees have the worst fans in baseball.
There. Much more accurate.
You know what this is about. It's about the same thing every story on the Yankees has been about all season. This is about Alex Rodriguez.
For months, as his batting average sank and his error tally rose, Yankees fans booed A-Rod. It got to the point where daily game stories out of New York focused on two equally compelling story lines: Yankees vs. Visitors, and Yankee Stadium vs. A-Rod.
And then A-Rod got hot. It started on the last day of August with three hits, bled into Sept. 1 with two home runs, and has continued for two weeks. Yankee Stadium can't get enough of A-Rod now. He's their guy. After Jeter of course. And the steroid-user. And Matsui. A-Rod's fourth, though. And fourth is special.
This is no defense of A-Rod. He's not a pitiful creature. He's a grown man with a great life and an enormous salary, so he'll get no tears because he got booed.
Instead, let's laugh at Yankees fans.
Look, Yankees fans, if you've really hated A-Rod for most of this summer, then hate him. Hate him for making more money per game ($158,532) than most people make in a year. Hate him for questioning Derek Jeter's leadership in that infamous Esquire interview of 2001. Hate him for being better looking than you, for having a prettier wife than you, for taking off his shirt this summer in Central Park.
But to hate him for the sin of struggling on the baseball field? That's dumb -- and more than dumb, it's counter-productive.
And that, Yankees fans, is why you're the worst fans in baseball.
Do fans everywhere boo the home team, or a home player, on occasion? Sure they do, though I'll never understand it. Barring something detestable like displaying a lack of effort or committing off-field violence against women -- and not in that order -- a player should never be booed at home. Just shouldn't happen. But it does, everywhere. Fine.
But only in Yankee Stadium, and only with A-Rod, does it happen with such intensity, such glee.
"(T)here was a period when they were booing (A-Rod) when it was inappropriate," Yankees general manager Brian Cashman told the New York Daily News last week. "It became the thing to do like, you go to a Broadway show, you boo Alex. It was almost like a little fad."
For months it was like Yankees fans wanted A-Rod to fail. Watching him get hits and make defensive plays would have been nice, perhaps, but it was more enjoyable to watch him throw another ball away and then strike out with men on base -- and then let him have it!
The thing was, as the booing got worse, so did A-Rod. A trickle of throwing errors became a torrent. Strikeouts piled up. Runners were left in scoring position by the bushel. And the Yankees were the poorer for it. With their best player having his worst season, the Yankees were trailing Boston in the American League East in a season where, with the rise of the AL Central, the wild-card wasn't looking like a viable safety net.
Yankees fans -- spoiled as they are by a system that funnels rich teams like the Yankees and the ... Yankees toward October -- weren't helping the cause. They were hurting it. You idiots. More than football, more than basketball, baseball is a mental game. Get inside a player's head, and he's done. Name a basketball player who simply lost his shooting touch and was hounded out of the NBA. Name a quarterback who lost his accuracy at the peak of his career. It doesn't happen in those sports.
In baseball, it happens. There's a syndrome for it, and of course it's named for a baseball player, Steve Blass, who inexplicably lost the ability to throw strikes and by 1974 was out of baseball at age 32, two years after winning 19 games. The same mental block struck down the promising pitching careers of Rick Ankiel and Sam Militello, hastened Chuck Knoblauch's retirement as a second baseman and ruined catcher Mackey Sasser.
Militello and Knoblauch, like Rodriguez, were afflicted when they were Yankees. (Sasser was a New York Met.) Coincidence? Perhaps. Or perhaps the stress of performing on the world's brightest stage, hindered by routine confidence issues and exacerbated by 50,000 booing enemies at home, made a small problem massive.
Anyway, it's a dead issue now. A-Rod's out of his funk, in the field and at the plate.
Don't applaud yourselves, Yankees fans. You had nothing to do with it.
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