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Monday, October 29, 2007
A-Rod to Boston wouldn’t work
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Denver — It’s customary for day-after stories to begin, “The champagne wasn’t even dry before so-and-so allowed himself to look forward to next season.” On Sunday night, the champagne hadn’t even been uncorked before speculation took wing.
A-Rod to the Bosox.
On its face, the notion has traction. Alex Rodriguez and his mouthpiece Scott Boras will want upwards of $30 million for one season’s work. The Red Sox, who paid $51 million just to negotiate with Daisuke Matsuzaka, are one of the few clubs that could consider such an outlay. Mike Lowell, the incumbent third baseman and the World Series MVP, is about to be a free agent himself.
Perfect fit, right?
Wrong. There’s no perfect fit for A-Rod.
He’s not surly like Barry Bonds, but somehow the totality of player and person hasn’t approached the sum of his stats. If A-Rod were to take up residence in the Sox clubhouse, the Sox would change, and not for the better. What stat geeks never grasp is that a major part of big-league baseball defies quantification. When grown men spend eight months together, the climate of a clubhouse absolutely matters.
In the closed circle of baseball, A-Rod is considered a phony. Yes, he has a nice smile, but so does Isiah Thomas, who’s the phony’s phony. Rodriguez puts up his numbers and collects his awards, but somehow a team never seems saddened when he leaves. So long as he’s around, the team cannot belong to the collective — it’s the property of A-Rod. (Indeed, Boras has floated the idea of Rodriguez becoming player-owner of the Cubs.)
A tiny example: Two summers ago, Jason Giambi hoisted two home runs off the Braves’ Tim Hudson in Yankee Stadium. After the first, a guy in the press box noticed that A-Rod, who was on deck, didn’t shake Giambi’s hand at home plate. He strode up the third-base line instead, his head down. So, when Giambi hit another, the guy made it a point to watch Rodriguez, who did the exact same thing. Is he a teammate or an independent contractor?
The Red Sox have absorbed the outsized personality of Pedro Martinez and the blathering of Curt Schilling and the ongoing saga of Manny being Manny, and they’ve won the World Series twice in four years. But A-Rod is insoluble. Put him among guys used to winning championships — Rodriguez, as we know, has never reached the Series and has been tepid in the playoffs — and the happy crew risks regressing to the old dysfunctional dynamic. (Famous line from the days of Carl Yastrzemski: “The Red Sox — 25 players, 25 cabs.”)
The belief here is that the Sox became champs in large measure because they didn’t get A-Rod before the 2004 season. The hated Yankees got him, and he became the flashpoint of the epic ALCS fold when he slapped the ball from Bronson Arroyo’s glove in Game 6. Boston famously overrode a 3-0 deficit to beat the Yankees, and a week later the Sox were champs for the first time since 1918.
It was fitting that Rodriguez didn’t show up here Sunday to receive the Hank Aaron Award. (He sent word of an unspecified previous commitment.) But then, as the Sox were closing out Colorado, A-Rod grabbed attention in absentia. During the game, the helpful Boras announced his client had opted out of his Yankees contract.
Immediately those who follow the sport began to imagine how much better the Sox might be with the game’s chief collector of statistics in their infield. Only they wouldn’t be better. They’d be worse. They’d go back to being one of those star-spangled aggregations that tripped over itself.
After 86 years of getting it wrong, the Red Sox are finally getting it right. The only way they can mess up is if they get greedy. And the astute Boston fans who had made the trek to Coors Field understood exactly what should be done, and what shouldn’t.
A half-hour after Game 4, they stood behind the third-base dugout and chanted, “Re-sign Lowell!”
And then this: “Don’t sign A-Rod!”
Permalink | Comments (42) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Mark Bradley
When losing, talk not cheap
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Flowery Branch — This is slightly confusing. Despite feelings to the contrary in some quarters of the Falcons locker room, coach Bobby Petrino suggested on Monday after practice that he doesn’t walk around his players wearing invisible ear plugs. “Yeah, I have an open-door policy, which I made very clear to all of them,” said Petrino, sounding more than convincing.
Here’s what I know: If you ask the guy a question, he’ll always give you an answer. No wavering, direct eye contact, nothing left to the imagination.
Sounds like a slew of Falcons players don’t see the same thing, or Petrino isn’t communicating his willingness for dialogue to the masses, or something else is happening here.
Whatever it is, it isn’t healthy for a team tumbling at 1-6 with no bottom in sight. Not only that, a rising number of Falcons players are fearful about giving their opinion about “whatever it is.” Petrino may have an open door, but he also isn’t terribly amused when his players have an open mouth. For instance: To the dismay of the new regime, defensive lineman Rod Coleman revealed earlier this month that he had surgery to repair his broken knee cap. He hasn’t spoken to the media in the aftermath. Instead, he has told approaching reporters, “Y’all are going to get me in trouble.”
Even the normally loquacious DeAngelo Hall made the earth spin backward Monday by telling reporters that he’ll have nothing to say in the foreseeable future until after games.
Then again, Hall’s pocket already is $100,000 lighter after he shouted his viewpoint into Petrino’s face on the sideline.
Maybe “whatever it is” is that Petrino does have an open door, but he also has a dictatorship, and citizens are allowed to approach the leader at their own peril. Even before the Falcons’ free fall, there was private grumbling among players about the supposedly standoffish nature of their first-year boss from the college ranks. The grumbling leaped from the shadows after the Falcons’ loss at Tennessee when tight end Alge Crumpler said the new regime was phasing out the veterans. Then Hall fumed last week after popular and productive defensive lineman Grady Jackson was axed out of nowhere by the coaching staff.
As for the Crumpler explosion, Petrino said, “I’ve had a number of guys walk into my office since Alge early in the year, and I’ve had good discussions with them.”
As for the Hall explosion, punctuated by the defensive back saying that neither he nor his teammates knew about the Jackson move beyond media inquiries, Petrino said, “Well, you know, we did contact a number of the players to tell them. DeAngelo actually happened to get a new phone.”
Petrino smiled. In contrast, he was straight faced when discussing his personnel decisions in general. “I’m never going to tell the press why we released somebody, and I’m not going to stand up in front of the team and tell them why we released somebody,” Petrino said. “I don’t think that’s fair to the person that you release.”
What’s fair is, Petrino having that philosophy. Or any philosophy. Just as long as he communicates it, and that’s historically been the problem with college coaches trying to make the transition to the pros.
“The players have a transition to make in dealing with a guy who comes from college, and the coach has a transition of how to deal with guys at this level — guys in their 30s, late 20s who are grown, which means you don’t have to baby-sit them,” said Chris Crocker, the veteran safety. Then he echoed the thoughts of John Abraham, Michael Boley and other teammates surveyed Monday, saying, “I haven’t had a problem with Coach Petrino where I’ve had to schedule an appointment or stuff like that. I think losing sets the mood. It doesn’t feel good. Just winning, man. If we can just start a little streak here, a lot of these issues would go away.”
Yep.
Permalink | Comments (70) | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Terence Moore
Red Sox built to win for years
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Denver — When the Red Sox won in 2004, dour New Englanders shed tears of deliverance and raised toasts to absent friends who hadn’t lived to see the day. There was none of that hearts-and-flowers stuff this time. That championship was a catharsis 86 years in arriving; this was simply the cold-blooded triumph of baseball’s new colossus.
What the Yankees once were, what the Braves were once achingly close to being, the Sox are. They’re not just the best team in baseball but the best organization. They can spend whatever it takes, and what they can’t buy they draft. The Sox aren’t cuddly strivers, the American League version of the Chicago Cubs, anymore. They’re the gold standard. They’ll have a great chance to win it all next year and in 2011 as well.
Consider: Center fielder Jacoby Ellsbury, who had six hits in Games 3 and 4, wasn’t yet a professional in 2004. Second baseman Dustin Pedroia, who led off the Series with a home run, is likewise a rookie. Jon Lester, who won Game 4 Sunday night, and Jonathan Papelbon, who saved the final three games, are 23 and 26, respectively. Josh Beckett, who didn’t lose in October, and Daisuke Matsuzaka, who won Game 7 of the ALCS and Game 3 of the Series, are 27. And Clay Buchholz, the 23-year-old who worked a no-hitter in his second big-league start, didn’t even make the playoff roster.
About Lester: He was diagnosed with a form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma 14 months ago and underwent four rounds of chemotherapy. It took him until July to work his way back to the big leagues. In one of those stories that seems preordained, he won the Series clincher in his first postseason start. Perhaps you were surprised. The Sox were not.
They’d seen him coming. They’d considered Lester the equal of Papelbon as a minor-leaguer. (The scarifying closer was a starter until he reached the majors.) Each held up his end in Game 4. Lester got the first 17 outs, Papelbon the last five. “I thought it was very appropriate [Lester] got the win,” said manager Terry Francona.
Some old-school baseball types — and most baseball types are old-school — don’t much care for the Red Sox operation, which is based on Bill James and his statistical tea leaves. (Indeed, the Sox employ the geeky James as a “senior baseball operations adviser.”) The famous Billy Beane operates on similar principles, with this difference: Boston can spend $143 million on its roster, while Oakland must make do with $100 million less.
Theo Epstein, the 33-year-old Boston GM, carries himself like a rock star, but he has already won as many world championships as John Schuerholz. And the Red Sox, unlike the Yankees, don’t buy everything they covet. Boston was thought to have been outsmarted in its pursuit of Alex Rodriguez in 2004, but the Yankees didn’t win a pennant with A-Rod, and the third baseman the Sox landed 21 months later — a ride-along in the trade with Florida for Beckett — was just named Series MVP.
Mike Lowell isn’t a superstar, but he fits the new Red Sox Way: He puts the ball in play and catches it when it’s hit. He’s a gamer who also overcome cancer. His contract is up this winter — Sox fans at Coors Field chanted “Re-sign Lowell!” as he accepted his Chevy — and Curt Schilling could also leave. But the Sox lost Pedro Martinez and Johnny Damon and Derek Lowe off their championship team of 2004, and they’ve since built something even better.
“When our organization added pitching, the Curse [of the Bambino] went away,” Francona said, and now it’s gone forever. It took 86 excruciating years for the Sox to reach the top but only three more to get back there. And we haven’t seen the last of them. They could win two or three more of these things in, if you’ll pardon the ex- pression, a New York minute.
Permalink | Comments (22) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Mark Bradley
