Wednesday, January 19, 2005
No, Pudge! Run! Run while you still can!
I had the Duke/Miami college basketball game on as background noise just now, and ESPN kept showing shots of A-Rod in the crowd, talking on his cell phone (yes, in the middle of the game... and no, he didn't go to either one of the schools, but he lives in Miami, so.) and I remembered this photo, which was from some pro game back in December.
What a study in comparisons and contrasts, though, huh? We've got the huge-contract, huge-name player who comes to a team for huge money and is everything that everyone hoped he would be: a leader and stabilizing force in the clubhouse, a great defender, and a deliveryman on offense. Then we've got the huge-contract, huge-name player who comes to a team for huge money and is almost nothing that everyone hoped he would be: a bitchy liability in the postseason who doesn't quite deliver as expected on the field. And hey, both named Rodriguez. The former would be Pudge and the latter Alex, in case you couldn't tell.
When I first saw that shot my immediate thought was, "Noooo! Pudge! Someone remove him from the presence of evil before he's tainted!" Then I calmed down and realized that A-Rod isn't actually evil-- he's just a whiner who can't deliver when his teams need him to and who has some sort of weird vendetta thing going with Bronson Arroyo*.
Bronson, by the by, was signed to Boston for a one year deal the other day, along with Mark Bellhorn. Sweet. That means that my Who Died and Made You Mark Bellhorn? tshirt will be valid for another year.
My cousin Sam's bar mitzvah is this weekend, so I shall be picked up by the family tomorrow night (after 11 hours of classes... the joy... is... killing me...), and I'm not sure if I'll have internet access. I wouldn't count on it. So I'm not dead, I'm letting you know ahead of time.
And I am very sorry that things (i.e. the RantBlog) are being pushed back like this. I actually have almost the entire shape of it down, but I keep waiting for this semester to slow down so I can seriously polish it up to my own low standards. Hasn't happened yet. Hopefully it will soon.
*Arroyo is the pitcher who hit A-Rod and set off the by-now quite famous A-Rod/Varitek brawl. Let the record state that, due to the kind of pitch he favors and his relative youth, Arroyo ranks quite highly in the league when it comes to hit batters. Hitting A-Rod may or may not have been intentional, but there was no reason for A-Rod to flip out about it quite as much as he did.
Arroyo is also the pitcher who had the baseball slapped out of his glove by girly-running A-Rod, which was famously discussed by the umpires in the 2004 ALCS, and ended up with A-Rod getting out and the run that he would have hit in being taken off the board.
11:33 PM
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