[新聞] How to Appeal to Baseball Fans? Advice: Don't Try

看板A-Rod作者PerryRod (Partridge)時間18年前 (2007/03/12 14:29)推噓1(1推 0噓 1→)

留言2則, 1人參與討論串1/1

一篇好像還停留在去年討論的文章... From: http://tinyurl.com/2unbmw How to Appeal to Baseball Fans? Advice: Don’t Try By TYLER KEPNER Published: March 11, 2007 TAMPA, Fla., March 10 — With the wisdom of his 57 years, the greatest third baseman in baseball history can reflect on his career as a cautionary tale for the greatest third baseman of today. Mike Schmidt won multiple Most Valuable Player awards, home run titles and Gold Gloves in his career, just as Alex Rodriguez has done in his. Each had an unquestioned work ethic and a spotless off-the-field reputation. Yet they struggled to win over their home fans. “I wish I would have been less sensitive to my environment,” Schmidt said last Sunday at the Philadelphia Phillies’ complex in Clearwater, where he is a spring training instructor for his old team. “I wish I would have been less sensitive to trying to please everybody, less sensitive to trying to be everything to everybody. I wish, when I look back, that I would not think I can change the world and have everyone march to my drummer. “I wish I could have been the highest-paid player in the game and at the same time still been in the inner circle of the team, to be kind of a normal guy. I’ve always wanted to be a normal guy. But, I don’t know — there’s that class system in life where people look at certain people and put them on a pedestal and expect more from them.” It is easy to picture Rodriguez, 31, saying those exact words someday in 2033. His failure to connect with many Yankee fans is puzzling, on its face, considering his aggregate performance over three regular seasons in New York: a .299 average, with 119 homers and 357 runs batted in and an M.V.P. award. Boos have come for many reasons, including his failure in the postseason and his perceived lack of clutch hits. Schmidt battled the same labels from similarly demanding fans. Many Yankee fans adore Rodriguez, the way many Philadelphians idolized Schmidt. But the lack of widespread appeal seems rooted mainly in personality. Rodriguez understands that, but he cannot explain it. “I’ve always been a pretty decent guy,” he said. “If you’re a jerk, people know you’re a jerk. This is a funny town. You say one thing and everyone thinks you mean another one, or you’re so clever, and the media is so competitive. “I said the same things in Seattle, I said the same things in Texas, I said the same things in New York. For some reason in New York, you’ve just got to kind of alter the way you talk. There’s more ears, there’s more fans, there ’s more knowledge. “In a place like Seattle, they say you’re humble and nice; in a place like New York, it’s phony and disingenuous. Same guy, nothing’s changed.” Rodriguez was incredulous when told that fans sometimes booed Schmidt the way they booed him. “Booing Mike Schmidt?” he said. “That’s really weird. How can they boo Mike Schmidt? O.K., here’s the question that I have for you: Is it the kind of booing where we want you out of here and we want somebody better than you? Or is it, we want you, but we want you to do better? It’s a fine line between those two.” Many players might dismiss booing with a simple cliche: The fans boo because they want to cheer. But Rodriguez, like Schmidt, can be introspective to a fault. Schmidt said that he knew Rodriguez only in passing, but that he seemed to be intelligent and sensitive, looking at things more deeply than most players. In other words, just like Schmidt. “The biggest thing a guy like myself or Alex Rodriguez can do is keep yourself out of the news, and not always try to explain everything,” Schmidt said. “You give the reporters too much and the fans too much to read and discuss about you. You get yourself in trouble, because that tends to keep the focus on you. It’s so much easier if you can figure out how to operate under the radar.” Then again, Rodriguez is not the only player who faces cameras and notebooks every day. Schmidt says he sees other stars of Rodriguez’s caliber — he named Albert Pujols and Ryan Howard — who have found a way to keep things simple. Schmidt also cited Derek Jeter as someone who seemed to have more fun on the field than Rodriguez. Schmidt is an expert on that, since he said he regretted not having more fun when he played. The Yankees’ infield coach, Larry Bowa, who played shortstop next to Schmidt for years, said it was hard for Rodriguez to enjoy the game. “He hates failure, and when you’re that great, you don’t have many times that you fail,” Bowa said. “I just think that he tries sometimes to play the perfect game, go 3 for 3 and make three plays. This game’s hard, and as great as he is — future Hall of Famer and all that — I agree that he needs to enjoy it. Can he look back and say: ‘I really had fun in 2002? I really had fun in 1999?’ He puts so much pressure on himself, I don’t think he has time to have fun.” Rodriguez has admitted that he did not have fun in 2006. The season stung him, he said, and though some of his statistics were strong, he finished behind more than 50 players in extra-base hits and tied his career high with 24 errors. Yet when the season was over, after Rodriguez went 1 for 14 in the division series against the Tigers, he was proud for having persevered. For all the booing, he hit 41 points higher at home than on the road (.311 to .270), with more home runs. “When that game was over in Detroit,” Rodriguez said, “it was probably the most proud I’ve ever been of any moment in my career.” Rodriguez is leaner this season — the way he looked in his early years with Seattle, when he was a lithe shortstop — and Bowa helped correct his footwork in the field last season while switching him to a smaller glove. But Rodriguez’s outlook may be the most significant difference. A year ago, Rodriguez said, he still cared about getting the fans on his side. After last season, he decided to give that up as a goal. “It’s about pleasing yourself, that’s it,” he said. “It’s about doing the best you can every day, it’s about not cheating the game. And if you start trying to chase that — and I’ve done it for many years — it doesn’t work. You’ve got to go play and do your thing. Some people are going to like you, some people are not going to like you, and some people are going to be in the middle. I think they’re just kind of waiting to see where you go.” Rodriguez has said he wants to be a Yankee for the rest of his career, notwithstanding a clause in his contract that allows him to become a free agent at the end of this season. The longer he stays in New York and shows he can withstand tough treatment from fans, the more likely it is his popularity will rise. Winning a championship will go a long way toward that, of course. After repeated failures in October, Schmidt won the World Series M.V.P. award for the Phillies in 1980. The good will did not last forever — Schmidt went 1 for 20 in the 1983 World Series — but by the end of his career, as he passed storied names on the home run list and refined his overall game, he was rarely booed. “I think all this will probably turn in Alex’s case, as he gets older and closer to the end,” Schmidt said. “He’ll get out of the chute in one of these playoff series with a couple of knocks or a game-winning hit or home run early. It will all come around for him.” Bowa says that, deep down, Rodriguez really does care about his image with the fans. If Rodriguez stays with the Yankees — if he is indeed standing at third when the new Yankee Stadium opens in 2009, as he says he wants to do — the fans will come around, just as they did for Schmidt. “Toward the end, Mike was great with the fans,” Bowa said. “They finally realized what they had. It’ll probably be the same thing here. You stay with one team, and in the end, they’ll probably realize they have a treasure here. ” Cautionary tales, it would seem, can still have a happy ending. -- ※ 發信站: 批踢踢實業坊(ptt.cc) ◆ From: 203.69.75.117