Why I Find the "Overrated Baseball Players" List Amusing

There was a whole to-do yesterday over four Yankees being named to Sports Illustrated's poll of the Most Overrated MLB players, with Alex Rodriguez, Joba Chamberlain, and Derek Jeter taking the top three spots, and Nick Swisher tying Jayson Werth and Jonathan Papelbon for fourth place.

And for once, A-Rod, the "winner" of the contest voted on by his peers, outdid Derek Jeter, No. 3 on the list, when it came to handling negative attention with a smile and a laugh. For that matter, Joba Chamberlain, who came in second, said all the right things, too. Jeter, not so much.

Here's the scoop. Erik Boland of Newsday describes the scene in the clubhouse yesterday, with Joba, who "won" the title last year, teasing A-Rod about it:

"I lost," Chamberlain proclaimed for the rest of the clubhouse to hear. "I got beat out. No. 2, though...I guess I passed the torch on to Alex."


Upon seeing Rodriguez enter the clubhouse, Chamberlain, surrounded by reporters, yelled at the third baseman.


"You’re next Al, you’re next!"

Here's how A-Rod reacted:

Rodriguez smiled for almost the entirety of the time he spent talking about the anonymous poll.


"I’ve been on this list before," A-Rod said before pausing and taking note of 3/5 of the list comprising Yankees. "So it’s three Yankees? So I’ll see you guys next summer again."


Rodriguez also poked fun at his past reasons for making headlines.


Players vote?


"I’m sure I’ll be on it next summer so I’ll try to come up with some better material for you guys," he said.   "But, I will say this. If this is the only thing we’re talking about, fellas, we’re doing good."

 Here was Jeter's reaction, which wasn't quite so jovial:

Jeter was not close to being amused.


"We're doing this again?" he said. "I have no comment on anonymous polls. I've never understood those anonymous polls."


He added: "It's the same thing they do every year, right? I'm focused on more positive things. How about that? There's your quote."


Discussing his chase of 3,000 hits later on, Jeter amended that.


"Consistency is underrated," he said, putting emphasis on "underrated." "That's the quote."

Jeter usually has the right thing to say, as in saying nothing while saying something, but I thought he came off as really cranky here. This poll, voted on by 185 MLB players, is the quintessential example of the "you're just jealous" sentiment. Yankees win every year (Jeter was just as perturbed when he "won" the honor a few years back), because players are jealous of the attention and money they get.

Jayson Werth is on the list this year because he's making a ton of money with the Washington Nationals, and others are envious of his money. Nick Swisher is on the list because of his fame, endorsements, and probably jealousy about his TV-star wife. I would like to think that Jonathan Papelbon is on the list for being annoying, but his inclusion is most likely about jealousy, too. Any player who is on this list ought to consider it a badge of honor, quite frankly. A-Rod and Chamberlain took it in that spirit, while Jeter was peeved.

At any rate, Jeter's talk of his "consistency" is no longer applicable to his career, unless you consider consistently hitting .257 over the past year, with just seven homers, as a good thing. From the start of his career, until May 31, 2010, he put up the following stats:

.317 BA .387 OBP .458 Slug .845 OPS

Here are his stats from June 1, 2010 through yesterday:

.257 BA .333 OBP .336 Slug .670 OPS

Yikes!

Tom Verducci plays around with facts and figures in Derek Jeter article

Sports Illustrated's Tom Verducci wrote a full-throated defense of Derek Jeter for the Yankees to show Derek Jeter the money. Verducci's piece is similar to his Joe Torre defense: He's an icon! He's got a lot of rings! How dare the Yankees demand he take a pay cut! The Yankees made him look bad by saying how much he thinks he's worth!

Which isn't surprising. After all, Jeter was one of Torre's and Verducci's key sources in "The Yankee Years." And don't forget, that book is where we heard about A-Rod being called "Single White Female," and how we heard all sorts of sordid details about that supposedly one-sided jealousy/obsession he had with Jeter.

But in this latest piece, Verducci doesn't just bash the Yankee front office and lionize Jeter as an icon. He doesn't just write this article like it's a press release from Casey Close. Verducci also twists around a lot of facts in the case, and I'm not letting him get away with it.

Verducci says:

The Yankees, who reportedly offered Jeter a three-year, $45 million deal, want to cut Jeter's pay by 21 percent, to pay him less money than they committed for Kei Igawa, to pay him less money annually than they do A.J. Burnett, and, including this deal, to pay him less money over his entire Yankee career than they will give Alex Rodriguez just for the nine seasons between when he turns 34 and 43. Of course, no one is allowed to mention Rodriguez's 10-year, $275 million contract in the negotiating room.

1. To pay him "less money than they committed for Kei Igawa" sounds like an outrage. But what he wrote distorts what really happened. The Yankees actually are paying Igawa a total of $20 million in salary. Igawa has a five-year contract. So he's making $4 million a year, not $15M. The extra figure involves the $26 million posting fee the Yanks had to pay Igawa's Japanese team for the right to negotiate with him. That adds up to $46 million. Granted, it was a huge mistake. But it's a distortion to insinuate that the Yanks are paying the hapless Kei Igawa more than Jeter.

2. Here we go again on the A.J. Burnett comparison. Let's review: Burnett was coming off a great season; he won 18 games and led the AL in strikeouts. The Yankees desperately needed arms. A.J. was the second-best free agent pitcher on the market that year, after CC Sabathia, and the Braves also wanted to sign Burnett. That's called leverage, something Jeter doesn't have these days. Sure, Burnett had an abysmal 2010, but it is completely forgotten that his great performance in Game 2 of the 2009 World Series completely changed the series around. If the Yanks had lost Game 1 and Game 2, they may very well have lost the series. Considering that so much of the Jeter hype is about the rings, why isn't the fact that Burnett was a key component ot the 2009 team ever taken into account?

3. As for A-Rod, it sticks in Verducci's craw -- and Jeter's craw, too -- that Rodriguez makes more money than Jeter. Tough. Newsflash -- Jeter was never as good a player as A-Rod. Rodriguez signed his contract at age 32, after the greatest season he had and the best season a Yankee hitter had had since Mantle and Maris. In Jeter's case, he wants A-Rod money when he's 36, and on the downside of his career. As for Verducci's outrage that "one is allowed to mention Rodriguez's 10-year, $275 million contract in the negotiating room," Verducci also fails to mention that Jeter is the second-highest paid player of all time, making $205 million so far. Boo bleeding hoo. If Jeter wants that kind of deal, the Yanks should offer it -- when he gets close to hitting 660 homers, that is!

Then there's the way Verducci tries to put a happy face on Jeter's awful 2010 season:

In his final 28 games, including the postseason, after some physical and mechanical adjustments, Jeter's batting average (.311) and OBP (.390) were in line with his career averages (.314 and .385).


A few down months by Jeter 16 years into his career have handed the Yankees leverage, and they are wielding it like a ballpeen hammer in public.

Those stats look very impressive, but they distort what really happened. From June 10 to September 10, Jeter hit just .232, with a .311 OBP, and an anemic .631 OPS. That isn't just a slump -- that's falling off the cliff for half the season. At age 30, those numbers are a little troubling. At age 36, they're a huge blinking warning sign.

As for the positive figures Verducci highlighted, I ran a look at Jeter's stats over the last 19 games of the season. Jeter did go .342 over those games, with a .436 OBP. But it should be noted that, by the time Jeter finally got into a groove, the Yankees were already assured of a postseason spot. Then he went in to the playoffs, the time he was supposed to shine, and hit just .250, with a .286 OBP, and 10 strikeouts. That's a very different picture than what Verducci paints.

What do you think? Tell us about it!

Beantown Brouhaha: A-Rod disses Dan Shaughnessy

If there is any Boston writer that Red Sox fans (and reportedly even some Red Sox players!) despise, it's Dan Shaughnessy. The Boston Globe writer is the guy who basically invented the whole "Curse of the Bambino" thing. He's also known for taking himself a little too seriously, as he does in a recent Sports Illustrated column, where he chastises Alex Rodriguez for changing the TV channel when Shaughnessy was blathering on against the Yankees.

Here's the story. I saw this item mentioned in the LoHud Yankee Blog, and nowhere else, on Friday. Chad Jennings writes:

The television in the Yankees clubhouse was tuned to ESPN pregame. The group of players sitting around the television in charge of the remote were all rookies, young guys recently called up. They kept watching as one of the talking heads began ripping the Yankees rotation beyond CC Sabathia.


That’s when Alex Rodriguez walked over, called for the remote and changed the channel.

I briefly wondered who the anti-Yankee ESPN windbag was that annoyed Rodriguez so, but given how many people bash the Bombers on that network, that would have been a futile effort to figure that out (I'd have to sift through a cast of thousands!)

Anyhow, I didn't think about the incident again (it just wasn't that big of a story) until I read CHB's Sports Illustrated column about the incident. Somehow, Shaughnessy got wind that Rodriguez did not want to listen to his dulcet tones (most likely, he heard some snickering in the press box over it from one of his colleagues!) and he demanded an explanation from the player:

I spent last week in Los Angeles as a panelist on ESPN's Jim Rome Is Burning. On Friday afternoon, while the Yanks were in Boston in the cramped visitors' clubhouse (New York had 56 players on its roster for the final weekend), I was on TV expressing my thoughts about the Yankees' apparent disinterest in winning the AL East. I warned that it could be tough on the Bronx Bombers if they went to Minnesota for Game 1 and lost the first game with CC Sabathia on the hill.

Let me just point out that the 56 players on the Yankee roster stat is flat-out wrong. And given that there's a  a 40-player roster limit in MLB, Shaughnessy should know better. In fact, his own Boston Globe noted that it was "56 team personnel (players, coaches, etc.) who needed locker space in the visitors clubhouse."

Back to Shaughnessy's column:

Back in Boston, the Rome show aired live in the visitors' clubhouse. When Alex Rodriguez heard me casting doubt on the Yankee strategy and painting a doomsday scenario against the Twins, he walked over to the clubhouse TV and turned it off.

OMG! A-Rod didn't want to listen to Shaughnessy! How dare he! Can we just ban A-Fraud from baseball now, already? The nerve!

Then, Shaughnessy decides to insert himself into the story by asking why A-Rod turned the TV off:

Sunday morning in Boston, when the Yanks still had a chance to win the division, I sauntered over to A-Rod's locker at Fenway and asked him why he turned me off on the clubhouse TV.

"Too negative,'' said the Yankee slugger. "I didn't want our young players to hear that.''


This is probably just one more example of A-Rod being a faux leader of the champs, but it made me wonder about the Yankees strategy for the postseason.


"Don't you want to win the East and get home-field?'' I asked Rodriguez.


"I always think home-field advantage helps,'' said Rodriguez. "It's always our preference. But we're in a good place. I think we're ready to roll.''

After making those comments, Rodriguez went out and played in an 8-4 loss to the Red Sox, assuring that the Yankees would be a wild card entry in this year's postseason.

A few points:

1. What kind of egomaniac do you have to be to demand that a player tell you why he didn't want to watch you fulminating against his own team? And people think that "faux leader" A-Rod has an ego!

2. Is Shaughnessy aware that even if the Yankees had won Sunday, they still wouldn't have gotten the AL East title, thanks to Tampa Bay also winning? And nice little passive-aggressive blaming of A-Rod for the Yankees' loss!

3. The sportswriter can't even keep a consistent argument going. Earlier in the piece, he argues this about the Yankees not going for home field advantage:

The Yanks came to Fenway Park last Friday with a chance to win the American League East. Early in the weekend it became apparent that winning the division was not their top priority....I am not Joe Girardi or Brian Cashman, but this makes no sense to me....I would have attempted to beat the Red Sox.

The Yankees did not do this. Girardi used 17 pitchers in three games against Boston's Triple-A lineups. The Yankees concentrated on getting ready for the playoffs. And now they will play a superior team, on the road, in Game 1 of the American League Division Series on Wednesday night.

You can argue about some of the decisions Girardi made over the past month, like against the Sox the weekend before. But the fact is that in a 27-hour span over the last three games of the season, Joe started Alex Rodriguez for all three games, including Saturday's doubleheader. He did the same with Brett Gardner, Mark Teixeira, and Robinson Cano. Nick Swisher, Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, and Curtis Granderson played two of the games. Girardi used so many pitchers because the team's pitching has been terrible lately; not because he was trying not to win.

If the Yanks didn't care about winning on Sunday, why would they trot out their regular starting lineup that afternoon against the Sox's Pawtucket-laden squad, just hours after Saturday's grueling late-night, extra-innings doubleheader? You know, the very same Yankee lineup that Shaughnessy touts as being "daunting," with "perhaps the greatest infield in the history of baseball"? The writer never explains that decision. Guess his brain is still jumbled by the news that A-Rod doesn't consider him must-see TV!


What do you think? Tell us about it!