[新聞] Don't mean a thing if he ain't got that Oct. swing

看板A-Rod作者leddy (耿秋)時間19年前 (2006/09/04 16:28)推噓1(1推 0噓 2→)

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Don't mean a thing if he ain't got that Oct. swing September 4, 2006 Newsday by Wallace Mattews The lead in the division in nine games, the magic number is down to 18 and the fans have become downright leisurely, wandering in and out of the action like a U.S. Open crowd prowling the outer courts. The atmosphere around Yankee Stadium is laid-back, almost friendly. It can mean only one thing: Alex Rodriguez is set up to have a monstrous September. He is three days into it, and if the month ended today, he already would have one fewer home run than he managed in the entire month of August. But then, the pennant race is over. The pressure is off. Suddenly, it's A-Rod Time. All of the tension has gone out of the American League East race as the Red Sox, hobbled by injuries and rocked by misfortune, spin hopelessly out of contention. For the first time in many Septembers, all is well in the Bronx. The Yankees are chasing nobody and nobody is chasing them. So yesterday, Mr. September had two home runs against the Twins, one of them a bomb that landed in that area beyond the centerfield fence the players like to refer to, ominously and pretentiously, as The Black. He knocked in five of the Yankees' 10 runs and, under mild prodding, took his third curtain call of the past four days for the largest regularly assembled group of hypocrites in the history of sports. (The second largest holds its meetings across town at Shea Stadium, chanting "MVP!" for Carlos Beltran, last year's punching bag.) And all over town, Yankees fans are breathing sighs of relief. Alex Rodriguez is back to being A-Rod again. Until October. "He can put up numbers like nobody," Joe Torre said after the 10-1 win. "It's great to see him having such relaxed at-bats." And that, friends, sums up the Alex Rodriguez conundrum in two revealing sentences. He can, and does, regularly put up some of the best numbers in the game. And right now, he is as relaxed at the plate as he has ever been in a Yankees uniform. So what? Around here, performance is gauged not by stats but by situations. It's not so much what you do but when you do it, and against whom. All too often, when Rodriguez does it, it doesn't really matter. Like yesterday. The game mattered only to the Minnesota Twins, who are fighting for the wild-card spot. The Yankees are just killing time between now and October, trying out kid pitchers and hoping nobody important gets hurt before the playoffs. Of course Rodriguez is relaxed. Nobody goes into a slump during batting practice. By the end of this relaxed September, Rodriguez will have compiled his customarily impressive numbers. A lot of fans will forget the agonies of the summer, the .213 batting average in June, the 10 strikeouts in 15 at-bats against the Angels in late August, the 22 errors, the appalling failures to come through in truly key situations. Then the calendar will flip to October and he will have to prove himself all over again. Unfair? Maybe. Inevitable? Definitely. But before you begin to feel sorry for Rodriguez, remember this: After the 2000 season, he decided to take his immense talent to Texas, where he would happily play out the bulk of his career in comparative anonymity. He was willing to take his quarter of a billion dollars for 10 years and hide in Arlington, where he could compile his numbers and burnish his reputation while no one looked at him all that closely. Of course, he hadn't figured on the arrival of Buck Showalter, who couldn't stand him, or the fickleness of Tom Hicks, who got tired of paying him, or the persistence of the Red Sox and then the Yankees, who thought there must be more to him than just a lot of flashy numbers. Now, more than halfway through his third season in the Bronx, we still don't know if that is true. No matter how many gaudy statistics Rodriguez hangs up in the next 27 regular-season games, his odometer, like everyone else's, rolls back to zero Oct. 3. That is when we, and Rodriguez, must start all over again. In his office after the game, Torre was asked if Rodriguez is capable of "carrying" his team. "Well, he's doing a pretty good job right now," Torre said. Of course he is. Right now, the burden of carrying the Yankees is light housekeeping. A month from now, it will become heavy lifting, and once again, the burden will be on Rodriguez to prove he is up to the task. -- ※ 發信站: 批踢踢實業坊(ptt.cc) ◆ From: 220.132.198.21