Call Him Mayor Jinx! Mike Bloomberg sez Jets are going to the Super Bowl

Oh, great. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the person who jinxed the Yankees' ALCS chances by yakking on his radio show about planning the World Series parade, has done it again. Today, on his weekly WOR radio show, Bloomy said that the Jets are Super Bowl-bound:

"The Jets are going to the Super Bowl. You heard it from me. The Bloomberg prediction,"the mayor said during his radio show.

In an article about Bloomy's comments, the New York Post compares him to Joe Namath guaranteeing that the Jets would win Super Bowl III. Oh, please. As if.

And by the way, even Broadway Joe in his "I want to kiss you, Suzy" phase could have had enough sense not to talk up going to a Broadway show, when most of the city's streets were rendered impassible thanks to the city's ineptness during last month's blizzard.

It wasn't enough that Bloomberg jinxed the Yankees with his parade-planning talk (and besides, what the heck was he talking about regarding planning a parade route. It's called the Canyon of Heroes for a reason -- the ticker tape parades do the same route every time!) Now he's done it with the Jets.

Yeah, yeah, I know I also predicted that the Jets would be going to the Super Bowl -- and even went as far to say they would win -- but I at least was right when I went out on a limb to say that the Giants would beat the Patriots in a Super Bowl. When has Bloomy ever been right on his sports predictions?

I'll let Jet fan Squawker Jon have the last word. He sez that the fact that both myself and Bloomberg think the Jets are Super Bowl-bound shows that we aren't really Jets fans. And given the worrisome comments I've seen from Gang Green fans on the blog over the past week, he might have a point!

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John Mara sez the Giants aren't the Yankees

Between the holidays, the snow, and the lack of much of happening in Yankeeland this days, I haven't had much to squawk about as of late. Until now, that is. (Actually, I did have plenty to squawk about in general, like how Mayor Bloomberg treats the outer boroughs like something stuck at the bottom of his shoe, and how most Staten Island streets were completely impassable at the same time he's telling people to go see Broadway shows. But I digress. It's not really sports-related!)

Anyhow, Squawker Jon's Jets are in the playoffs (although Rex Ryan's wife foot fetish video creeped me out), but the Giants aren't. Despite that, Big Blue co-owner John Mara inexplicably decided to keep coach Tom Coughlin after yet another late-season collapse. And in doing so, Mara kind of dissed the New York Yankees. He told the media this, after the Giants didn't make the playoffs:

"In this society everybody wants to fire the coach all the time," Mara said. "The Yankees get knocked off in the playoffs, everybody wants to fire the manager. We don't do that here. He's going to be our coach."

Puh-lease. The managerial revolving door in Yankeeland ended a long time ago. The Yankees have had all of three managers in 20 years, one of whom wasn't quite the right fit for getting the team the ring, one who got them that ring (and three more) but stayed on three years too long, and another got them a ring, but who should lose his job next year if the Yankees have another disappointing playoff round.

At any rate, in the case of Joe Torre, the Yanks made the mistake of keeping him on too long for precisely the same reason Coughlin gets to keep his job -- because he got the team a championship (four, in Torre's case, as opposed to Coughlin's one.) That's not a good thing.

Wally Matthews had an interesting take on this for ESPN New York, saying that the Giants should be like the Yankees in demanding excellence: 

The Giants are not the Yankees? Well, why not? And since when was being like the Yankees such a bad thing, anyway?


The Giants should be more like the Yankees. So should the Mets, Jets, Knicks and Rangers. Winning should be the focus for all of them, and the pressure to perform should be on everyone on all their payrolls, all the time.

But Tom Coughlin is coming back. As a lifelong Giants fan, I am outraged. And I think you should be, too.

I agree with that in general, although I don't think the Yanks kept to that in Torre's case, until three years of first-round playoff exits forced their hand.

Anyhow, Matthews continued the argument, saying:

But if you took the entire Giants 2010 season from beginning to end, from its shaky 1-2 start to its high point, the 41-7 win over the Seahawks on Nov. 7 that had a lot of people believing the Giants were among the best teams in football, to their shameful collapse over the final month of the season, and changed the name "Giants" to "Yankees," and the name "Coughlin" to "Girardi," how do you think the story would have ended?

That part is true. But I would argue that if you change Girardi's name to Torre's there, the media would still say he deserved to keep his job. That Giants loss to the Eagles a few weeks ago, was as big a regular-season collapse (letting Philadelphia score 28 unanswered points in the final eight minutes of the game) as the 2004 ALCS defeat was in the playoffs. And it wasn't the first time the Giants choked, or looked sloppy, or lost a game they should have won. It begs the question, how long does the coach get a pass because of the ring?

Joe Torre was never able to win a single playoff series after the 2004 collapse. All keeping him on did was prolong the inevitable. As I think keeping Coughlin will. And now there's talk of a contract extension? Good grief. What, Jeff Fisher (another overrated coach) wasn't available?

I mostly agree with Matthews' general take on Coughlin, although I give the coach more credit for the Super Bowl victory than Matthews does. The columnist slammed him the hardest for the way Coughlin screamed at rookie punter Matt Dodge after the Eagles debacle:

Aside from being utterly unprofessional, it was the ultimate CYA move, a gesture designed solely to let everyone in the place know that it wasn't Tom Coughlin's fault, it was the kid punter's.


Can you imagine Joe Girardi doing that on the field to a player who missed a sign or made an error that cost the Yankees a game?

No, but I can imagine a certain untouchable Yankee manager scapegoating his superstar by batting him eighth!

At any rate, the lesson Mara ought to learn is that sometimes -- like in doing what's best for your team -- it's good to be like the Yankees. But make that the Yankees after the 1995 and 2007 seasons, not the Yankees after the 2004 season! Sometimes, stability for the sake of stability will continue to bring you futility.

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Mayor Bloomberg may be jinxing the Yankees with parade talk

New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, a native Bostonian, pretends to be a Yankee fan, but he went way too far Friday in already talking about planning this year's ticker tape parade. Geez, doesn't he have smokers to harass, or unhealthy food items to fulminate against, or something else to do with his time besides being a baseball jinx?

Here's what Bloomberg said on his weekly radio show, according to a report from my friend Ian Begley at ESPN.com:

"I'm sort of trying to figure out where the parade should start," the mayor said Friday on his weekly radio show on WOR-AM. "We have to plan."

Aside from the fact that no baseball fan with any sense would want to jinx his team like that, especially when the Yankees are only two games into the playoffs, Mayor Mike seems to be unaware that they hold ticker tapes at the same flipping location every single time -- from Battery Place, up Broadway, to City Hall. You know, it's that part of Broadway known as the Canyon of Heroes? Where the street has all the plaques talking about previous ticker tape parades? Planning the location isn't exactly brain surgery, dude.

It's not even like it's an election year for him, and Bloomberg has to pretend to be interested in the Yankees, the way he did last season, getting in as many celebration photos at City Hall as Sergio Mitre did in the postseason celebrations!

And no, there is no need to start planning the parade stuff now, unless you just want to be a jinx and make sure there is no need for a parade.

Last year's parade floats were made in Clifton, NJ, the town I went to grade school and high school in. (Some friends of mine got to see the floats in person -- very cool!)

Do you know when the company making the floats started working on them? After Game 5 of the World Series, when the Yankees were just one game away from winning it all. They certainly didn't start making the floats after Game 2 of the ALDS!

Bloomberg ought to worry about real issues, like unemployment and the MTA raising the subway fares, instead of spending time tempting fat by talking about Yankees parades way ahead of time. Thanks for nothing, Mayor Jinx!

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