Simply That Great

It is a record that, if it were set by someone of lesser stature, would not be taken nearly as seriously. When Trevor Hoffman broke Lee Smith's all-time saves record with his 479th career save in 2006, there wasn't half the acclaim or fanfare as there was this time. Why? Because Mariano was lurking. He was always lurking. He lurked upon the all-time saves mark in the same way that he has lurked upon opponents down by a few runs and running out of outs. When Mo polished off a 1-2-3 ninth inning against the Twins on Sept. 19 for his 602nd career save, there was a sense that the record had finally arrived where it belonged, where the world had expected it to end up for the better part of a decade.

And despite what the talking heads on ESPN will tell you, he hasn't "done it all with one pitch the whole time." In the early days, Mariano didn't even have the famed cut fastball; what he had was a four-seam fastball that he could pump up to 97 MPH and a two-seamer that dove right off of your bat if you were too geared up for the heat. By the end of the '90s, he had perfected the cutter and was breaking bats at such an alarming pace that you'd have thought he owned stock in Louisville Slugger, even forcing Ryan Klesko back to the dugout 3 times in a single at-bat in the 1999 World Series. But do not let the allure of Mo's cut fastball fool you. The guy is a pitcher, not a thrower, and he works both sides of the plate as well as anyone. Case in point? Look at the final out of the 602nd save again. A major portion of his strikeouts in recent years have come exactly like that one, a lefty caught looking over the outside corner just because he's so primed for the cutter on the inner half.

The save statistic often gets dismissed by baseball fans and media-types as a function of luck and the modern game's ever-increasing dependance on the bullpen. Saves meant more when Goose Gossage was getting 8 and 9 outs at a time in the '70s, they say, when a guy like Goose or Rollie Fingers would enter games at any point from the 5th inning or later when the starter began to tire or run into trouble. The modern closer is more of a vulture, they say, a compiler of a stat that is based more upon the 24 outs the rest of his team got than the 3 that he got himself.

And you know what? They're not totally wrong. There have been dozens of flash-in-the-pan closers in the past 30 years who have put up a season or two of big save totals. The 40-save plateau has been reached 132 times since 1983, and a few of the esteemed men to do so include Jeff Brantley, Joe Borowski, Danys Baez, Bryan Harvey (10 bucks if you can tell me when he played and who he played for, I didn't even know), and Jose Jimenez. Hell, Derek Lowe once put up a 42-save campaign for Boston and hardly anyone remembers him as anything besides a starting pitcher. As trivial as closers can seem in the regular season, it's the exact opposite in the postseason. Ask the 1996 Braves, 1998 Padres, 2006 Mets, or 2009 Angels how they may have ended up had it not been for their respective "superb" closers faltering at crucial moments. On the other hand, ask the 2008 Phillies if their run through October would have been possible had it not been for Brad Lidge not blowing a single save the entire season.

But for all the closers who have come and gone and eventually been booed off the field, there is one Mariano Rivera. He's been stockpiling the saves for the New York Yankees since 1997, when he took over the closer's role for good after a dynamite 1996 season (2.09 ERA, 130 strikeouts in 107.2 innings, 3rd in AL Cy Young voting), in which he was the most lethal component of a bullpen that carried the team into and through the World Series. He has been in the top 5 of AL Cy Young voting five times, unheard of for a relief pitcher. And not only has he done it for 15 years, but he's been at his best in October: 42 saves and a ridiculous 0.71 ERA for his career in the postseason. And of those 42 postseason saves, an astounding 31 have been appearances of 4 outs or more.

However, when painting the picture of Mo's legacy, I tend to point to three crippling postseason moments that would permanently scar the careers of mere mortals. The Yankees were 4 outs away from clinching the 1997 ALDS against Cleveland when Sandy Alomar Jr. went yard off of Rivera, tying the game and eventually sending the series to a Game 5, which the Yankees lost. Then there was the matter of Game 7 of the 2001 World Series, into which I refuse to further delve. And of course, there was the 2004 ALCS Game 4, in which Mo had the chance to finish off a Yankees sweep of the Red Sox, which of course, didn't exactly pan out. (Ill-informed critics will also point out that Mariano also got a blown save in Game 5 of that ALCS, but it came in cleaning up Tom Gordon's 8th inning mess and anyone who watched that game will tell you Rivera did a heck of a job only letting one run score while he was on the mound.)

Why do I choose to point out Mariano's lowest moments? Because it speaks to the rest of his résumé that he can have experienced such monumental failures yet still be considered hands-down the best closer of all time. It takes a serious body of work in order to overcome such things, and Mo has almost rendered them back-burner fodder. He has 5 rings and has been on the mound for the final out of the World Series four times, all while pitching under the New York fans' lofty expectations and media microscope that has chewed up and spit out countless individuals. He is an ace up the sleeve, a game-changing factor long before he steps onto the field. Opposing managers, especially when there is more on the line, are faced with shortened games when #42 is sitting in the bullpen, often forcing their late-game decision making into the earlier innings.

Mo is larger than life, even if drawing attention to himself or away from the team's successes is the last thing he'd really want. His entrance to "Enter Sandman" has made him as synonymous with the song as Metallica himself, even though Rivera himself is indifferent to the song. His methodical, evenly-paced jog from the bullpen to the mound is as intimidating as the drums that would precede an approaching 17th century British infantry unit. It's like walking the Green Mile in reverse, in fact it's the Green Mile is jogging toward you. His entrance, his delivery, his mannerisms, his performance - they've all been so consistent and brilliant over the years that one really may believe that he's a robot. Come to think of it, the word "inhuman" may actually be the best way to describe Mariano Rivera if you are only given one word. I remember seeing him for the first time on the mound at the Kingdome in the 1995 ALCS against Seattle, getting crucial outs late in Game 5. Back then there was definitely the premonition that the Yankees had something with this guy, but not a soul could have predicted or expected the next 16 years. We have witnessed, and are lucky enough to still be witnessing, the best ever. Mariano is simple, Mariano is great. Mariano Rivera is simply that great.

Captain Crunch

I come to you this evening with what I hope upon hope is the last that we'll hear about Derek Jeter skipping this week's All-Star Game and festivities in Arizona. Of course that's too much to ask, but let the record show just how blown out of proportion this whole pseudo-controversy has already been to this point. 24 hours from the time this post freshly hits NAGAYT it will hopefully be old news. But since that day has not yet come, and the only thing on TV tonight is the ESPY Awards (no thanks), here I am - and hopefully, here you are.

If you've paid attention to the "there's nothing else to talk about so let's make something out of nothing" sports media and blogosphere in the past four days, you'd think that Derek Jeter lit an elementary school on fire while calling the First Lady a ho and slapping five with Casey Anthony's lawyers. But I guess that's what happens when you give a forum to people who like to regurgitate conventional wisdom without facts or perspective. So allow me to provide a brief rundown of the whole situation:

Yes, the fans voted him into the All-Star Game to start at shortstop for the American League. And no, his production over the first half of the season (.270 AVG/3 HR/24 RBI, with a .683 OPS that is the lowest of any regular on his team) did not warrant such a selection. Yes, he had just come off a 3-week DL stint due to a calf strain and was clearly not moving like he was 100%. But no, he had not missed any of his team's six games played since his return. Yes, he simply could have opted not to play the All-Star Game and still shown up and hung out for it. And yes, above all, he was coming off a 5-for-5 day on July 9 in which he did something rather historic (for the view that Kevin and I were fortunate enough to have in person for #3,000, take a look here).

The rest of the story, I'm sure you know. The Captain was a no-show in Phoenix, prompting the backlash from seemingly every corner of the baseball world. Such is life when you're the most visible athlete playing for the most high-profile team in the only major professional sport that is in season right now. People, even fellow All-Stars, saying "oh, I'd never skip the game, it's my obligation" haven't spent the past month in Derek Jeter's shoes. And this idea that "oh, this was the chance for so many fans across baseball who ordinarily don't get to see Jeter to cheer him at the All-Star Game and congratulate him on his 3,000th hit" is complete garbage. The majority of baseball fans, especially the less-sophisticated majority, are tired of hearing about Derek Jeter. Take it from me, a guy who has watched or listened to 85-90% of Yankees regular season games over the past decade - Derek Jeter gets booed nearly every time he steps to the plate on the road. And while it's not quite at A-Rod level, the booing is pretty intense. People in National League cities boo him especially hard during interleague play. So now all of a sudden I'm supposed to believe that the assortment of fans in Chase Field were ready to gush all over Derek Jeter when he got announced? Uh-huh. And if so, would it have been just because of the 3,000th hit? I bet that if he went to the All-Star Game stuck on 2,999 he'd have gotten the hell booed out of him - which, for the record, is what happened to all the other Yankees in attendance, save for Home Run Derby champion Robinson Cano.

Did Derek Jeter owe it to baseball to be present at the All-Star Game? No. His job is to help the New York Yankees win as many games as possible in the 2011 regular season and then to win 11 more games in the postseason. That's it. And it's important to not overlook the role played by A-Rod's recent knee surgery and expected 4-6 week recovery time. Had Jeter played in Phoenix and tweaked his calf injury, the Yankees would be faced with a left side of the infield consisting of Eduardo Nunez and Ramiro Pena day-in and day-out for the next month or so. Jeter's reason for not playing was basically the same as that of Mariano Rivera, who had pitched only once in the week leading up to the All-Star break due to a triceps issue, but I haven't heard one ounce of criticism sent in Mo's direction. To me, it's the same issue for both of them - they weren't going to play in the game, and being able to take the invaluable three-day break from baseball is pivotal for an aging player on a team with lofty expectations that is going to rely heavily upon him from here on out.

Now I know there's a lot of venom headed Jeter's way simply because of who he is and who he plays for. People were all over Facebook and Twitter during the All-Star Game, eager to point out that 3 out of the 4 All-Stars not present (regardless of whether they were going to play) were Yankees. And no, #2's plight wasn't necessarily helped by his being spotted hanging in Miami with Minka Kelly during the All-Star break. But you know what? This is a guy who, for 16 years, has busted it down to first base on every ground ball that he's hit. He's basically never had a public slip-up despite dating celebrity after celebrity, doing big-time endorsement after big-time endorsement, and consistently being one of the most recognizable athletes in sports. He has always put the team first and sought to minimize his own accomplishments and moments. His Turn 2 Foundation has, since 1996, been making a difference in steering countless young lives onto the right track.

Yet people have come to hate him over the years for supposedly being made of Teflon. Too perfect, too polished, too prepared, too clean. So they try to manufacture some selfish corner of his personality and point at the 2011 All-Star Game as evidence for it. I ask you, however, if he truly were selfish, wouldn't he have jumped at the chance to absorb all the attention that was supposedly to be bestowed upon him down in Phoenix? Wouldn't he have wanted all of Major League Baseball to convene to worship at the Shrine of Jeter, for all of his peers from across both leagues to come up to him and personally congratulate him on his milestone? Instead, he took a step (ok, half a step) back from the spotlight in an effort to gather himself for a grueling stretch of 25 games in 25 days between now and August 8th, a stretch of games that will do a good deal in shaping up the AL East race. And what happened? The spotlight found him anyway, as it always tends to do. But come 7:05pm on Thursday night in Toronto, sports fans everywhere would be wise to take this "issue" out of the spotlight - and off of their minds. Because you know there is only one thing that will be on Jeter's mind by that point, and that's finding a way to beat the Blue Jays.

I Like A Da YouTubes, Volume IV

This is what you do when you're outside shoveling snow and your iPod battery dies and you have no choice but to come back inside and charge it. Hope you enjoy.

I caught wind of this one a few weeks ago. Men and women alike will find this funny as hell.


Many of you have seen this before and may even remember it making Sportscenter back in 1994 when it happened. It's an unbelievable comeback in a Texas high school state championship game, only to be followed by...well, you'll find out.


I came across the last video for this installment about a month or so ago. Some of my favorite finds on YouTube are great moments in sporting events filmed from a person's seat. They're fairly prevalent now with the rise in phone-camera quality, but back in 2001 that wasn't the case. We've all seen the famous Derek Jeter flip play in Oakland a million times, but starting around the 1:00 mark, here's a look at the play from seats right behind the action.

C'Mon Man!

Every now and then you have to give ESPN its due, and I'll gladly say the "C'Mon Man!" segments during Monday Night Countdown are pretty funny. For those who did not watch the video I linked to, "C'mon Man!" is something of a blooper reel from the previous day's NFL games, in which each studio guy points out someone who did something stupid, goofy, annoying, or all of the above. Every time I see the segment, I feel obligated to relate it to recent people and happenings from my life and all of our lives. So, here goes:

-The Princeton Junction NJ Transit station, for giving me a $60 parking ticket for parking in the farthest stretch of their lot, in off-peak hours while all the permit holders already had a spot and there were about 100 empty spots left over. C'mon man!
-Jason Garrett and his "I went to Princeton and I want to remind you guys every chance I get how smart I am" approach to playcalling. C'mon man!
-Whoever the decision-makers are behind 75% of this year's especially terrible political commercials leading up to Election Day. C'mon man!
-Roger Goodell and the NFL's higher-ups, who in one breath tell you the game has gotten too dangerous, and in the next breath tell you the regular season should be 18 games long. C'mon man!
-Anyone I've been stuck behind on a golf course in the past 5 months. C'mon man!
-The guy who eats tuna from the can at work and stinks up the whole floor. C'mon man!
-The AL and NL Central, whose champions each got swept out of the Division Series (even though I wasn't rooting for either of them). C'mon man!
-Dudes who do curls while standing in a squat rack. C'mon man!
-Javier Vazquez, AJ Burnett, and pretty much every Yankee pitcher not named Andy, CC, Phil, Kerry, or Mariano. C'mon man!
-Dallas area sports fans and Cowboys season ticket holders, for allowing the Cowboys-Bears game in Week 2 to be played in front of 35-40% Bears fans. C'mon man!
-Anyone who plays softball and yells "left foot!" when a left handed batter comes to the plate. What the hell is "left foot?" That's the stupidest goddamn thing I've heard in my life. C'mon man!
-People who change lanes in a tight spot without signaling. C'mon man!
-Vinny from Jersey Shore acting like a total sucker for that Ramona girl in Miami. She had a body like a 10 but a face like a Yogi Berra 1953 game-used catcher's mitt. C'mon man!
-Anyone who buys jewelry from a store such as Jared, Kay, or anywhere else that makes those putrid commercials that will be consistently polluting my TV for the next 8 weeks. Buying jewelry is fine. Buying from one of those stores? Not fine. You are not only indirectly supporting those commercials, but you are also potentially contributing to more of this utter garbage down the road. C'mon man!
-Those who have lived in the Northeast their whole lives yet still react as if the next Ice Age is imminent once November hits and we see highs of less than 60. Not only does this happen every year, but two months from now you'll be killing for this kind of weather. C'mon man!

The Trite Utterances of Subpar Sports "Fans," Volume Three

You're allowed to hate the Yankees. It's a free country. Go ahead. But just have some legit reasons for it. If you want to hate them because of A-Rod or Roger Clemens or the Steinbrenners, that's fine. If you say you hate them because you got real tired of seeing Paul O'Neill throw fits after third strikes back in the day, or because you don't like how Derek Jeter has more hot female celebrities' numbers in his phone than Ari Gold, I won't jump all over you for it. If you even want to say you hate them because of how they treated Joe Torre at the end of his run, I may even agree with you on that. But do the sports-watching world a favor and cease with the "They buy their championships!" shit. I know it's going to hurt for a minute to draw some fact-based conclusions and not just regurgitate everything you hear on ESPN or Comcast Sportsnet or Philadelphia talk radio, but bear with me. Take Advil for any headaches, Midol for any cramps.

My whole thing starts with this. People say the Yankees try to "buy" a championship every year as if they're Montgomery Burns putting together the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant company softball team. Well, doesn't building a contending team entail putting together a roster of good players? And last time I checked, guys that can actually hit the ball squarely on a consistent basis or throw the ball over the plate with regularity don't generally play for the league minimum. Quality players cost money, and you need to spend in order to win. In the 2000s, the only World Series champion with a payroll in the lower half of all major league teams was the 2003 Marlins, an exception that I'll get to in a minute. If you want to blame something, blame Major League Baseball and its lack of a salary cap. Don't blame the teams that spend as much money as they can, because if you ain't buying, you ain't trying.

You can try to catch lightning in a bottle like the Marlins did or the Rays did in 2008, but that will eventually catch up to you. The Marlins won titles in 1997 and 2003 and had to fire-sale after each one because the talent they had stockpiled was due to make a ton of money. Look at the salaries that a few of the 2003 Marlins would eventually make with other teams (scroll down to the bottom of the linked pages for salary figures):

Josh Beckett - $11.167 million with Boston
Brad Penny - $9.25 million with Los Angeles
Derrek Lee - $13.25 million with the Chicago Cubs
Miguel Cabrera - $14.38 million with Detroit
Ivan Rodriguez - $12.38 million with Detroit
Mike Lowell - $12.5 million with Boston
Juan Pierre - $10 million with Los Angeles

And this is leaving out players such as A.J. Burnett (he was injured that whole year), Luis Castillo and Dontrelle Willis (generally accepted as bad contracts), Carl Pavano (because I don't feel like puking), and Ugueth Urbina (because we don't promote guys who attack servants with a machete and threaten to torch them with gasoline). My point is, you can only get away with paying players below their worth for a short period of time. If you are out to be perennial contender, it gets expensive. The 2008 Rays benefited from several years' worth of high draft picks all reaching the majors within a short time of each other (Evan Longoria, B.J. Upton, James Shields) as well as players obtained via astute trading (Scott Kazmir, Dioner Navarro, Matt Garza) to produce a low-cost AL champion. But even now they've already traded one of those players away (Kazmir) for eventual contract purposes and may have to do the same with Carl Crawford, arguably the best player in team history.

I know what you're saying - "wait, isn't this guy disproving his own argument right now?" In a way, yes, because I've reaffirmed the economic imbalances that create something of a caste system in baseball. But what I want to point out off of that is there is a lot more to building a winning team than throwing money at free agents - just take a look at some of the recent Mets and Cubs teams, or the Dodgers and Orioles of the late '90s-early 2000s. What separates the Yankees is that they have been able to retain their homegrown talent even as they became worthy of top-dollar contracts - Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Jorge Posada, Andy Pettitte (excluding his 3-year stay in Houston where he played for less money to be closer to home), and eventually Robinson Cano, Joba Chamberlain, and Phil Hughes. No one can say that the Yankees never develop players and just wait until everyone else's players become free agents. You want numbers? The Yankees had 11 homegrown players in the 2009 World Series, while the Phillies had 8.

Also, I don't see where making trades qualifies as "buying a roster." I'll use the guy with the biggest bull's eye on his back as my example. Commoners forget that the Yankees did not simply sign Alex Rodriguez back in 2004 - they traded Alfonso Soriano (a 28-year-old, five-tool player at the time) to the Rangers to get him. In fact, Texas even paid about $9.5 million of Rodriguez's $25.2 million salary for his first four years in New York because they were that bogged down by the contract. It's certainly not the Yankees' fault that Texas gave A-Rod a bigger contract than it could ultimately handle, is it?

Listen, I know that no other team can afford to spend the way the Yankees do, and that no other team has as much margin for error to whiff on a bad contract, but let's stop acting like they're the only ones spending money out there. I don't recall such a big stink when Boston won two World Series in four years with baseball's second highest payroll, dished out to players like Manny Ramirez ($20 million+ per year free agent deal), Johnny Damon (free agent signed from an Oakland team with zero chance of retaining him), Pedro Martinez (traded to Boston from Montréal when it became evident they wouldn't be able to afford him), and Curt Schilling (traded from Arizona when they could no longer keep both him and Randy Johnson). I guess since they were darling Boston and they had players with long hair and dreadlocks and chin straps that they just had to be a bunch of lovable lugs, right?

By the logic that most people use, if the Yankees "bought their championships," then didn't Boston too? And didn't Arizona in 2001? Hell, that D-Backs team went into so much debt by deferring salaries that within 3 years they were a 111-loss shell of their former selves. I get how you can gripe if you're a Kansas City or Pittsburgh fan, but still don't most of the complaints belong at the feet of your own front offices that trade away talent, spend nothing, pocket all the revenue-sharing money, and essentially make their city's interest in baseball dissolve by about June 1 every year? Or, if you insist on churning out the "buying championships" line, then you're going to have to apply it not just to the Yankees, but to everyone who wins with anything other than a team of David Ecksteins.

Towel Off

I have been a Yankee fan since 1993, the first year that I was old enough to follow baseball day-in and day-out. Living in South Jersey, I still go to 4-5 Phillies games a year, and I've gone on the record multiple times to say I have the utmost respect for the Phillies organization and their ballclub. My sister and most of my friends are Phillies fans. I'd only root against them in the case of a series like this one, or even better, this one. But I must take one issue with the Fightins: the rally towels.

I thought the rally towel was a great touch back in 2007 when the team made the playoffs for the first time in 14 years, as well as in 2008 when they won their first World Series since 1980. I was at a game during the last weekend of the '07 regular season when the towels were first handed out at the gates, and I made it to a Phillies playoff game in both '08 and '09 as well - so I can say from experience that a rally-towel waving Citizens Bank Park was a great sight to behold in those days. To appease the pro-Phillies faction that may be cursing me already, enjoy this example of what I'm talking about.

But those days are over with. October is not a novelty to this team anymore, and it should not ask its fans to treat it as a novelty. Rally towels scream "thrilled to be here!" like a married guy who's allowed a night out with his single male friends without his wife. I thought it was especially curious that the rally towels were brought back out for the division-clinching game last year - even though the NL East had been pretty much a formality since the end of August (they won the division by a healthy 6 games).

Here's the deal. The Phillies are far and away the best team in the National League. It's very very hard to imagine them missing the playoffs this coming year as long as they stay healthy. Once you reach the point that they have now reached, the fans' "rooting aides" have to be left out. You don't see rally towels in New York or in Boston. You didn't see them in Cleveland when the Indians were in the playoffs every year in the Thome/Manny era, and that team had sucked for decades prior to that.

You know where you did see them? You saw them in San Diego in 1998, where the Padres were one of the most "just thrilled to be here!" teams in World Series history. You see a stupid Rally Monkey in Anaheim that has to tell fans when it's time to put their iPhones down and slap together their Thunderstix, because they're still largely oblivious to the baseball nuances and have to make noise with inflatable sticks so they can pretend to know what's going on in front of them. And in Tampa in '08, you had cowbells. Cowbells. Let that stew for a minute or so.

And all of that crap is great if you're a team or city that is new to seeing a modicum of success in baseball, or any sport for that matter. But franchises and fan bases should outgrow that phase after a certain amount of time. It's like when you first get your driver's license and you'll volunteer to do every monotonous errand imaginable just because the idea of driving a car by yourself is so new and cool. This is why sports fans in the Northeast have little respect for sports fans on the West Coast - because the West Coast fans never surpassed that "Oh, we need milk? I'll go! I'll run out and get milk! I don't even care that it's 11:30 on a Wednesday night and I just shut my light out to go to bed. I'll go get the milk!" phase.

So, I leave the Phillies and their fans tonight with this. You're already a hard nosed East Coast sports town with some edge. You want Philadelphia to become an honest-to-goodness baseball town? Show us you can make the place rock without the rally towels. Show us all you need on a chilly October evening is your two hands, your voice, 3 or 4 domestics in the parking lot, and your passion. That, and cease with the damn E-A-G-L-E-S chants when you're at a baseball game. But that is a topic for another day.