It’s alive! Aliiiiive!
I’ve just started this new web site devoted to all the terrible games and game-like and game-related things I make. Check it out if you’re in to that sort of thing! If you’re not, well, eff off. Oh yeah. That just happened.
Hahahahahaha no.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking "what my team needs is a 41-year-old hitter who can’t play defense, hasn’t hit for a damn since his second failed steroid test, and hasn’t even played in the majors in two years," right? Well, this yahoo has the airtight case!
It’s Time for Manny to Be Manny for the Texas Rangers
If you’re missing the backstory, the Rangers signed Manny Ramirez to a minor-league deal the other day. I doubt the Rangers are stupid enough to think anything will come of this, but it’s almost zero risk, and they’re utterly deadlocked with Oakland, so: why not?
That’s not what this guy thinks.
The Rangers signed outfielder Manny Ramirez to a minor league contract to possibly add some right-handed pop to the lineup. Ramirez was last seen playing in Taiwan earlier this season but walked away from that a couple of weeks ago.
Much like what he did to the last MLB team to give him a chance. This is not a point in his favour.
On the surface, this looks like a bad move. Ramirez is notoriously temperamental and has 2 PED-related suspensions on his ledger. He is an easy guy to dislike if you’re a baseball fan.
What? No, that’s super wrong. Manny is one of the easiest players for baseball fans to like, because he’s super super funny. He does the dumbest, most completely over-the-top things. Do you not remember this? It was 100% amazing. No, Manny is easy for fans to like. He is, however, super, super hard for team owners, managers, and general managers to like. I mean, even when he’s not beating them up.
Examine a little deeper and it looks like a coup for Rangers GM Jon Daniels. For the major league minimum, JD acquired arguably the greatest right-handed hitter of the last 20 years.
Albert Pujols, Frank Thomas, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Miguel Cabrera on lines 1 – 5 for you, Brian.
With all the accolades he’s received in his long career, Ramirez has nothing left to accomplish on the field.
He’s never been MVP. Not that he has a shot in France at that this season, mind you, but it’s a thing he never accomplished on the field. He’s never won a triple crown. He’s never even been borderline acceptable on defense. These are all things Manny Ramirez never accomplished.
Oh, also: he never demonstrated that he can hit shit when he’s not on the juice. There’s that too.
I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt that he took a job for the minimum salary and agreed to go to the minor leagues and prove himself all over again because he wants to play the game and he wants to help the Rangers win a pennant.
Yeah, that’s probably right. Cynical sportswriters like to pretend everything’s just about the money, but, honestly, these dudes really really love baseball. I have zero trouble believing that Manny took this deal because he just really wants to play in the Majors one more time.
Ramirez is 41 years old and not the player he once was, but even if he’s 50 percent of what he was in his prime, he’s better than what the Rangers are throwing out there now in the outfield (by that, I mean David Murphy).
Let’s take this literally, because that’ll be hilarious. I say we define Manny Ramirez’s "prime" arbitrarily to be from 1999 through 2008 — from his first season with an OPS over 1 through his last. Let’s see what Manny Ramirez would be good for in a full 162 games at half that level:
.160 / .210 / .305 with 22 HR (hard to do with .305 SLG, but there you are) and 49 BB (hard to do with .210 OBP, but: see above)
Sure, that’s a big damn cheat. Cutting his rates in half is pretty pessimistic. But you’re the dude what said 50%. And so far this season, Murphy’s posted .224 / .282 / .383 with 9 HR and 22 BB — not anything good, but better than 50% Manny. And also better than I’d be willing to bet the Rangers would get out of whatever Manny still is. He’s also been worth 6 Defensive Runs Saved, and Manny’s absolute best mark in his whole career was -5. And that was over a full season, not just a half like Murphy’s had.
And at DH, for that matter, where Lance Berkman has been a bit of a disappointment as far as power numbers.
Oh, are you not done? Berk Man: .263 / .360 / .390, 6 HR, 36 BB. Sure, not exactly driving the ball, but he’s getting on base. Half-a-Manny wouldn’t accomplish that.
He appears to have calmed down quite a bit from the bad boy image he projected in Boston and Los Angeles.
Yeah, probably this goes hand-in-hand with how he’s begging for a job now, rather than daring dudes to fire him.
Rangers manager Ron Washington is not exactly a strict disciplinarian out there, so Ramirez would probably for the most part police himself.
Right. I’m sure that will end well for everybody involved.
After this, he switches gears and describes it as a low-risk move with really long odds of paying dividends. Which is what it is. But holy shit is 41-year-old, presumably-no-longer-juicing Manny Ramirez not a good bet to be better than pretty much anybody. And your idea of putting him in the field is just downright silly.
I am a terrible human being
There’s this outfit called the Mat-su Valley Frontiersman, and it’s a small local paper around here that writes small, local articles about small, local things. So that’s fine. This week there’s an article in the Frontiersman called "Coming Home," and it’s about a local boy who done made it good, and how awesome an achievement this is. But then right underneath the title is the line
Grit and guts paying off for Valley pitcher in ABL
And I just know I’m going to Hell. Because I am about to ridicule — on the internet, no less — an article in the local paper about a local boy and how heartwarming and awesome he is.
Local boy makes good is always a great story. What if the local boy isn’t the biggest, most physically gifted kid? What if he’s more like Daniel "Rudy" Ruettiger?
That is the first line of the article! That is the first line of the article. I cannot tell you how excited I am. You know in cartoons when a character’s eyes get really big and like dollar signs appear in them? My eyes literally just did that, only instead of dollar signs they were little tiny Baseball-Reference player pages. No, that’s true.
Known as a grooming ground for top college players and Major League Baseball draft picks, the Alaska Baseball League is loaded with skilled baseball players — big, physical and full of talent. Rarely does a local Alaska player catch on in the ABL, and more rare that he has much success. The odds are long, and fitting in with the players from the nation’s top colleges and programs can be intimidating at best for small-town ballplayers.
Fun fact: the state of Alaska contains 731,449 people. The United States of Baseball contains 316,163,000 people. Do you know what fraction of 316,163,000 731,000 is? That’s right: it is 0/14. I submit that the fact that 0% of the talent pool originates in Alaska is more of a factor than "intimidation" in determining how many of them make the ABL.
Except, nothing intimidates Palmer-grown Kyle Bovy.
Well, fuck me. I guess growing up on the mean streets of Palmer made him that much more Ecksteinian.
Many gunslingers of the Wild West weren’t big, either; just fast, smart and confident.
What
At 5-feet-10 and 140 pounds, Bovy matches talent, size and pedigree with his grit, guts and savvy. Like Billy the Kid’s six-gun, Bovy’s unique pitch comes off the hip, low slung, released from his shoe-tops.
I don’t care if this is a small-town local paper: that is the single most amazing thing anyone has ever written about a baseball player. It is so perfect that, if I hadn’t seen the actual physical paper myself, I would guess that some sly fox hacked into frontiersman.com and inserted that into the sports section as a joke. Let us document the many ways this is the best:
- Obviously fake athlete "listed height and weight"
- Grit
- Guts
- Savvy
- 100% nonsensical simile
- Way way way too wordy
And I know I mentioned it in the list, but I’d like to draw more attention to this: I am 5’5″ tall, and I did at one point weigh 140 pounds. I was positively gaunt. The only universe in which this dude weighs 140 pounds is the same one in which André the Giant was 7’4″ and weighed 640 pounds.
They call it the submarine, a rare pitch in baseball and a total departure from the traditional overhand throwing motion. It’s more like a torpedo, screaming at the target under the surface, catching victims unaware. Thrown underhand with a forward rotation, the sinking ball can be very tough for a batter to track.
You know why it’s rare? Because trick pitches can be really tough on amateur and like rookie-league guys, but once you get out of Class A everybody’s seen it before. And then the fact that you can’t throw it any harder than 80 mph is going to murder you.
Although most pitchers usually throw it around 80 mph, Bovy already hits the mid 80s consistently.
Oh, he already throws it 2 – 4 mph harder than "most pitchers?" Well, shit. I’m sure Miguel Cabrera will have a really hard time hitting your 84-mph meatball.
A few years ago, his coach at the College of Marvin, Conor Bird, wanted to add a submarine pitcher to the rotation.
The College of what, now?
He needed a kid not afraid of a change and a challenge, someone who knew the game inside and out, someone with more heart, hustle and head than physical ability and talent.
He needed somebody expendable, who was going to get goddamn cut unless he picked up a gimmick. Also: your article has now used the words "grit," "guts," "heart," and "hustle." Congratulations: you have written for the cycle.
He turned to the kid he watched growing up around baseball while he was coaching the Mat-Su Miners to great success — Kyle Bovy.
That sentence is a turd. I’m sorry, I know picking on syntax is kind of lame, but, seriously. Your pronouns are all a jumble, and even once I’ve untangled them, there’s no content behind them. You sir should write for ESPN.
And Bovy picked it up quickly, mastered it and has been keeping batters baffled and off balance ever since. Just give him a chance and watch what happens.
The other reason ESPN should hire you is because like every goddamn paragraph you write has some kind of weirdo alliteration in it. Not to mention your switch from preterite indicative to present imperative is really jarring.
Okay, I promise I’ll lay off the syntax for the rest of the article. Maybe.
Watching him warm up in the bullpen, whipping his trademark pitch at Hermon Brothers Field, I listened to a big, confident pitcher with bleach-blond hair and a Division I scholarship loudly exclaim that the submarine pitching style would never get him anywhere.
Now, on the one hand, that’s a super dick move. But on the other hand, this dick pitcher you clearly made up just to set up your ridiculous homily is pretty much right. You know what the best-known trick pitch in baseball is? The knuckleball. You know how many active MLB pitchers throw a knuckler? This guy can tell you.
The kid catching for him tried to stick up for Bovy, bringing up MLB star Tim Lincecum, also a slight-framed overachiever using mechanics over muscle.
I… uh. Here’s the deal, Adam. Tim Lincecum has two Cy Youngs. Do you know what years he won them for? 2008 and 2009. Since then, you know what’s happened? His fastball velocity has dropped. That’s a muscle thing. And he’s now pitching in relief, since he frankly sucks. He’s gone from being worth 7.9 and 7.5 WAR in his Cy young years to 3.7, 4.2, -1.7, and -1.0. He is now a terrible pitcher, and this is almost entirely because he can’t throw hard enough to be successful anymore.
So, the moral of this story is: if you’re going to make up an argument, you can have the dude on your side mention any player you want. And, next time, it would be better if you check your facts and pick a player who doesn’t 100% explode your entire thesis.
The submarine pitch can be effective.
Sure. And you can get people out with an eephus, too. Doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to build your whole career around it.
Ted Abernathy used it for 14 years in the Majors, and Dan Quinsberry rode the submarine style as the best closer in baseball for the Kansas City Royals in the early 1980s.
Ted Abernathy played from 1955 to 1972, making him not the most relevant possible example. Also, perhaps you’re wondering why 1972 minus 1955 utterly fails to equal 14. This is because Ted Abernathy spent big chunks of time in the minors, which is a thing you might want attention drawn away from in your gushing article about a goofball pitch.
Also, Dan Quisenberry — not "Quinsberry," doofus — was indeed the best closer in baseball for the Kansas City Royals in the early 1980s. But you might be suffering from an overabundance of specificity there, and, if we broaden our scope to include non-Royals teams, well, your argument becomes a bit less solid.
According to his mother, Tammy, Bovy’s been hearing this kind of talk from doubters and naysayers his whole life.
"Just put him out there and see what happens," she says. He just keeps proving them all wrong.
Now there’s a neutral observer if ever there was one.
Kyle’s parents tell the story of their son, 5-foot-nothing and 100 pounds soaking wet, trying out for his high school baseball team.
"They said he was too small," Tammy said. "I said, just give him a chance and he’ll show you what he can do."
And they responded "well, we better teach this kid a trick pitch, ’cause he ain’t gonna make it with what he has."
Although local players rarely make an impact in the ABL, this season Kyle is flourishing in his role as a set-up pitcher for the Anchorage Glacier Pilots.
So impactful he’s pitching in middle relief.
Late in a game, after dozens of pitches thrown in a traditional overhand fashion, batters often struggle with a ball suddenly coming from a completely different point with unorthodox movement, speed and placement. Often coming in for just one inning, he keeps opposing batters off-balance and gets them out of rhythm before turning the game over for a closing pitcher to finish out.
The "closing pitcher" — I’m with you; Bill James probably invented the made-up term "closer" the same time he was inventing imaginary fairy concepts like OBP and WHIP — doesn’t face any dudes his setup man faced unless one of them sucks. So: what?
Though he pitches few innings, Kyle’s 0.00 ERA in ABL play so far this year is still impressive, a testament to his baseball background, ability and continually overcoming the odds.
Also a testament to how very, very few innings he’s pitched. Ah, yeah; 4.2 IP. And look at that: he’s up to a 1.92 ERA, since he stank yesterday.
Adam W. Mokelke is principal at Burchell High School and an avid local baseball fan.
Well, now I feel like an asshole. Thanks for that.
State of the Wood
There’s an old Pigs in Space that starts with the crew of the Swine Trek staring straight into the camera, until finally Captain Hogthrob breaks the silence by opining "oh, the endless sameness of eternal space." That’s just how I am about E3. At least most years we get Nintendo playing the part of the Swedish Chef and running in seemingly at random to spout a whole lot of nonsense; this year Nintendo decided, wisely for them but sadly for those of us who wanted something mildly amusing to happen, that they weren’t interested in going through the motions anymore, and we were left staring blankly at the dilapidated voodoo skeleton of what used to be E3, hoping uselessly for anything fun to happen.
You gotta figure Sony is hurting bad these days. They’ve been the uncontested market leader for as long as anybody can remember, but after Microsoft’s strong showing at this year’s expo, Sony may find themselves a distant runner-up in the field of hilarious press disasters. Is there one person anywhere in the world who doesn’t think the Xbox One is horribad? The timing was so perfect that I have to wonder if Snowden’s real target wasn’t Microsoft’s console division; it was like, what, a week between the announcement that the Xbone will have always-on cameras and microphones in your living room and a constant internet connection and the big reveal that MS has been deep in bed with the NSA helping them spy on us? Yeah, thanks but no thanks, Microsoft; I’ll pass on the option to pay $500 so you can install your telescreen in my house.
But what about the games? There were lots of new games on show at E3. Were any of those fun? Well, there were brand new entries in the Assassin’s Creed, Call of Duty, Arkham Asylzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Huh? Whoa, sorry about that. Long day, I guess. What was I talking about? Oh, right: I was just going to mention that Saints Row 4 showed at E3 this year, and it looked prezzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Hmm? Yeah, sorry. Seriously, there was absolutely nothing fun at E3. Lots of eight-hour movie games that are exactly the same as the eight-hour movie games you paid $60 for last year. Woo-eee. If I were forced to pick a "game of show," I’d have a really hard time not picking Ducktales Remastered, because we’re at the point in the evolution of gaming where a graphical revamp of a 25-year-old NES game based on a Disney cartoon looks way more fun than any of the pablum Ubi and EA are churning out. I mean, Watch Dogs? You guys really think that looks fun? Holy shit. It’s exactly the same as everything you’ve been playing since 2007, but 14% browner and with even longer movies. Oh boy oh boy oh boy yum yum yum yum!
The one thing I actually wanted to see at E3 this year — Monolith’s mysterious upcoming Xenowhatsit — was a complete bust. All they showed was a new trailer that’s even worse than the last trailer. Where the last one had some gameplay footage, this one is mostly footage of a cutscene involving a dude walking really slowly through a warehouse while what I can only assume passes for rap in Japan drones on in the background. I linked to it up there, but, really, don’t bother. It’s like forty seconds long and it sucks.
So all of these articles are required to end with a ridiculous "who won E3" bit where the author gives an imaginary internet award to the company that gave him the most freebies at the show. Did you go to E3? If not, then, congratulations, I say you won. You did something better with your time than attend this absurd sameness festival, even if it was just sitting around and jerking off to the truly bizarre quantity of hentai featuring Mega Man, the Animal Crossing Villager, and the Wii Fit Trainer that was somehow magically produced within 24 hours of the Smash Bros videos actually going live. If anything is faster than the speed of porn, I don’t know what it is.
Enter the Dragon
So Dragon’s Lair just came out on Steam. Nice try, boys, but you’re just a hair too late; now that I own a PS3, I don’t need to buy Dragon’s Lair, since goddamn 40% of all PS3 games are Dragon’s Lair with a fresh coat of paint.
Aside: where the hell is Dave? I bought a goddamn Playstation 3, and he is nowhere to be seen when I really need somebody to make fun of me. SOS DAVE PLEASE SEND SARCASM
I promise I’ll have a proper comedy bit about Ni no Kuni up soon. And, yes, the title is on my list of things to roast. Trouble is: my brilliant plan is entirely too brilliant, and I need to level up so I have enough INT to write it. By which I mean you better believe I already preordered the whole entire set of these
Important Borderlands 2 correction!
I lied when I said I haven’t laughed at any of the jokes yet. Actually, there was one I chuckled at. Claptrap (of all things) has a gossip text that says "check out my new dubstep song!" And then he just goes "wub wub wub" for about twenty seconds. It’s not the best joke ever, but, come on, it’s kind of cute. I chuckled.
So that’s it, then. One chuckle. But it’s not nothing!
Things that bug me about Borderlands 2
I know the game ain’t precisely brand new, but I’ve had a busy year. So I’m only just now really getting down to it. Long and short is: it’s Borderlands. If you liked the first one, you’ll like the second one. If you didn’t like the first one, don’t waste your time here, because there’s nothing that will change your mind.
Unless of course what you didn’t like about the original Borderlands was the fall damage, because, hey, guess what? It’s gone. Borderlands 2 continues one of my very favourite trends in game design and gets rid of fall damage altogether! Fall damage has never ever been fun, so I’m a huge supporter of this change. On the down side, you now have to pay the respawn fee if you die by falling off the world, which wasn’t the case in the first game. Who wants to bet they added that just to stick it to sly foxes who exploited that little loophole against the first game’s final boss?
Borderlands 2 is way way talkier than the first game, too. People are always calling you on the space phone to make self-consciously wacky Borderlands jokes. They aren’t any funnier than they were in the first game, but there are a whole shitload more of them. Now, don’t get me wrong; the voice acting itself is fine. It’s the dialogue that needs to be fed through a digital mulcher. So far, I don’t think I’ve laughed at a single joke, though I suppose there was one dramatic moment that was fairly effective.
You remember Patricia Tannis, the world’s most least funny NPC, right? Well, she’s back, and she hasn’t gotten less annoying. She’ll seem less annoying once you meet Tiny Tina, though; I honestly don’t even know how to describe this character. Her schtick is that she’s a little girl, but most of her dialogue is Dave Chappelle and Tracy Morgan routines from ten years ago. I’m not even making that up. You have to experience this to appreciate it, but I promise you it’s not worth it.
The game has a lot of defense objectives, which I do not appreciate at all. You’ll find yourself lumped in the middle of an arena, and you have to prevent the mobs from destroying some widget or other. This is pretty annoying, since the core mechanics of moving from cover to cover to outflank your opponents are suddenly unplayable; your only choice, really, is to stand right out in the open and just try to straight-up out-gun everything, since, if you take cover, the mobs will destroy the widget.
Also there are boss battles. They range from “sort of fun” to “is this working right?” The last boss fight I did was against a mob that was as much like a Mass Effect thresher maw as to make no difference, but, for the sake of originality, Gearbox called it… oh, a thresher. Good work, clowns. This fight I’m not completely sure was working properly, as sometimes the boss would simply stand still for a while and not do anything at all while I shot it, and other times it appeared to be able to attack directly through any hard cover I was hiding behind. Then, right as I was about to kill it, a huge shipping crate appeared out of absolutely nowhere and just floated in the air in front of the thing and blocked all my shots. I shit you not. Also: why does a giant moon worm have shields? That makes no sense.
Just a quick note
Pointing out that, once upon a time, I made fun of Steve Henson for posting a list of contracts so bad that they couldn’t possibly be traded. By "once upon a time," I really mean "last season." And how did Steve-o do? Well, of the eleven players he named as completely untradeable albatrosses, two of them (Carl Crawford and #1 pick Vernon Wells) were successfully traded, one (Alfonso Soriano) would have been except that he invoked his no-trade clause to block it, and one of them (Jason Bay) was released and then picked up off of waivers. So good job identifying players who couldn’t possibly be moved, Steve!
State of the Wood
When I was new to the workforce lo these many years since, I was given to significant reliability problems. By which I mean I used to call out of work a lot. Pretty much whenever I didn’t feel like going to work, in fact. Which was all the damn time. I never bothered making convincing excuses, either; I’d do that bit we all learned from Ferris Bueller where you make your voice all feeble and shaky, and I’d tell my boss I have a dire case of Monkey Pox and I’m far too sick to fold boxes on the assembly line, but I’m sure it’ll be better tomorrow so don’t bother finding coverage. Then I’d go back to playing Dragon Warrior 7 like I’d been doing all day.
This changed for two reasons. Reason one is that I finally learned that work is not school. See, I got a job right out of college, and I’d never had a job before except bullshit campus jobs where I worked like three hours a week and nobody cared what I did. So I was thinking of this whole "work" thing like it was the New Game+ mode of school. I never went to school if I had a pressing appointment with the Nintendo, so why go to work? It was a few years before I finally got to grips with the fact that, although skipping school is 100% upside, skipping work carries the nontrivial disadvantage of they don’t pay you. And if they don’t pay you, not only can you not buy any new video games, but you cannot in fact even pay the rent. And if you don’t pay the rent, you’ll quickly find yourself devoid of any place to plug the N64 in. So eventually I realised that, while I could spend more time playing Mischief Makers today, eventually I’d find myself on the street selling pencils out of a cup to raise money for my Game Boy battery fund. The other reason is because I finished Dragon Warrior 7 and sometimes I can’t tell if anything worth playing has come out since then.
By which I mean Bioshock Infinite’s out. You played that? I haven’t. The original Bioshock was way too infinite for me as it was. The world’s most rudimentary shooter mechanics stretched around a completely meatwitted plot. Also there is Pipe Dream. But don’t worry: I hear Bioshock Infinite is about racism! I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to come up with a theoretical reality in which that ends well. As for me, hey, if I wanted to play an utterly derivative, repetitive game with a cutesy visual style while simultaneously being lectured about what out-of-touch game developers consider deep social issues, I still have a copy of Braid.
Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon is out too. It might be fun. I don’t really know, though; I played about ten minutes of it, after which my wife seized the 3DS and ran off with it. As I write this, she’s huddled up in the corner chanting about it in weird languages. So either she likes it or else the preorder bonus was an actual real ghost. I’ll update this post either way when I figure out this encounter’s gimmick.
Is it that time already?
Time for ol’ reliable Les Carpenter to write a moody A-Rod article, I mean.
For his first public moment in a Yankees uniform since the playoff disaster, Alex Rodriguez was told to stand in a doorway on Monday morning. He stepped from the Yankees clubhouse less than 1½ hours before his team’s first game and walked not toward the blue backdrop with the team logo attached to the wall for the purpose of impromptu news conferences, but instead to a spot pointed out to him near the clubhouse door.
In all seriousness: is this the first time you’ve seen this? Because it’s not very uncommon.
Perhaps the Yankees were saving him the inglorious symbolism of being pressed against a wall as he was grilled about his bad hip, his disappearance over these past few months while recovering from surgery or why his name showed up on the records of a Miami lab in possible violation of baseball’s rules on performance-enhancing drugs.
Or perhaps they were following the same procedure they always follow when they want an interview to seem "informal."
Or maybe the Yankees wanted to keep him away from anything that identified him as a part of the team, aside from the cap he wore on his head.
Well, sure, aside from that little detail, there’d be nothing to connect him to the team at all! Les Carpenter, you mad idiot genius, you’ve solved all of baseball forever.
And as A-Rod has been for much of his professional baseball life, he tried to smile his way through the questions he didn’t want to answer, speaking in the vague Miss America platitudes that always dodge the more serious subjects at hand.
Can you believe the nerve of this A-Rod asshole? Nobody else does that.
Like when he was asked if he had heard reports the Yankees are looking for ways to void the rest of the $275 million contract he signed in 2007: "I don’t want to focus on that, I want to focus on this glorious opening day."
Asshole. Head-case. Cancer-y clubhouse-cancering cancer man.
Or if he knew what the players’ association was doing on his behalf as the league investigates his linked name in the Miami New Times report about the Biogenesis lab: "Well, I’m not going to comment."
Dammit, Alex! Here are things that do not matter:
- Your privacy
- Union rules
- The fact that anything you say about this — like, literally anything at all — could potentially get you dragged in front of the fucking congress so they can try to gin up some phony excuse to throw you in jail and then fail at it and look like the bunch of useless apes they are
Now sack up and feed the vultures some meat.
Or if he worried that commissioner Bud Selig might suspend him: "No, I’m not going to further discuss this, but at some point it will be all good."
I guess stupid people — such as Les Carpenter — expected A-Rod to start a flame war with the commish on opening goddamn day. A war that wouldn’t do much to improve his chances of not getting suspended.
Also, here’s a funny thing. You know who’s very, very famous for saying absolutely nothing to questions like this? I’ll give you a hint: the first letter of his name is "Derek Jeter." In fact, I have it from a reliable source — this absurd Jeter hagiography — that Jeter’s reaction to the messes A-Rod used to make in the press was "Why can’t you just get this shit right? It’s easy. Don’t say anything. Say what I say, which is nothing." And A-Rod has finally learned this. So take it up with Jeter, Les! He’ll destroy you.
In his 20th season as a major leaguer, Rodriguez is more elusive and more unwanted than ever.
Do you mean "Rodriguez is on the DL?" Since, hey, the Yankees replaced him yesterday with Jayson Nix, who struck out twice in two PA, and then got replaced with Lyle Overbay, who I honestly didn’t know still played baseball, and who flew out twice. That’s the production they got out of the spot A-Rod would be filling, but never mind that. They just don’t want him clogging up the third basepath.
Oh, and the four-run fourth the Red Sox put together? It involved the following things:
- Line drive to weak 3B, Saltalamacchia to third
- Ground ball to weak 3B, Saltalamacchia scores, Gomes to 3B, Bradley to 2B
- Ground ball through SS-3B hole, Bradley scores, Iglesias scores, Ellsbury to 2B
Nobody wants you, A-Rod. Looks like the Yankees are doing just great at 3B! Also, you being hurt forced the Yankees to trade for Vernon Wells, which is goddamn hilarious.
His appearance at the Stadium seemed almost ghostly.
I think we all know which ghost you’re thinking of.
He did not hang out in the clubhouse before batting practice, instead asking a clubhouse attendant to scurry to his locker, pull his uniform off a shelf and take it to him in the trainers room.
Choker. Asshole.
He did not come out to the field while his teammates hit. He did not banter with anybody or make any real show to the fans before the game that he had any connection to a team that seems to be lukewarm, at best, about him.
A-Rod has never, never, never bantered with anybody. The most consistent criticism of A-Rod for his entire career has been that he’s weirdly aloof. Like the one fucking time A-Rod has ever done anything silly or spontaneous was when he photobombed the Derek Jeter interview after the 2009 World Series, and the press gave him zero end of shit for how "disrespectful" that was. The man literally cannot win with you hacks.
When asked if he would be introduced before the game, he snapped: "I don’t need to be introduced to feel a part of this team."
Pressed further, he smiled.
"I’ll tell you what, when I get introduced I want to be on the field [as an active player]," he said.
Well, in all fairness, A-Rod, the Yankees have like six thousand injured players right now, and I’m pretty sure you’re the only one who wasn’t introduced before this game.
He wasn’t the only injured Yankee to not be introduced on Monday. Derek Jeter remains in Tampa as he rehabilitates from surgery on a broken ankle.
Whoops missus! I guess tomorrow Les will write an article about how much the Yankees hate Jeter.
But somehow if Jeter were in Yankee Stadium on Monday he would have been introduced.
We’re doing science now, right?
Mostly A-Rod seems to disappear into a crevice that isn’t really the Yankees and isn’t really not.
I gotta level with you, Les: that doesn’t make any fucking sense. I mean I seriously don’t have clue one what that means. In what way are the Yankees a "crevice?" Are you calling them assholes? Derek Jeter will destroy you. Again, I mean.
He spoke optimistically about his recovery, saying he believes he can come back a level that is "very high." He said he was relieved to learn of the tear in his hip after the season because it explained his drop-off in play. And he suggested that maybe he should have had the hip looked at during last season and not after.
"Hindsight is 20-20," he said. "If I would have, we wouldn’t have had the very tough ending to last season. Live and learn."
Head-case. Why won’t you take responsibility??
He was not clear as to who "we" were. Did he mean himself? Did he mean the organization that appears to be holding him at great distance with a pair of tongs, lest his presence further stain an already challenging spring?
Um. Les? "We," in this context, refers to the New York Yankees, a baseball team you may have heard of. He means that they got erased from the ALCS last year after scoring a grand total of six runs, and that his own performance was so poor — which it was — that his crazy insane manager eventually replaced him with the worn-out moldering corpse of dead infielder Eric Chavez, who did nothing good. What he’s saying is that, perhaps if he were healthy, he’d have been useful in that series, the team wouldn’t have resorted to necromantic rites, and then their names would not have been smudged out of the Book of Life. It would be great if you’d learn to understand words and I didn’t have to explain this to you.
Also, if you learned the English language, perhaps you wouldn’t write paragraphs like that. "Lest his presence further stain an already challenging spring?" Holy shit, Les, purple this down about 80%, would you?
"Just his being here is good for us," reliever Mariano Rivera said before the game.
What? How’d that get in here? Dammit. How can I spin this to sound like a stinging condemnation?
If only it seemed the Yankees felt that way.
Aha! Check and mate, Mariano goddamn Rivera. Cut fastball your way out of this trap… if you can!
Rodriguez spoke for just four minutes on Monday before he disappeared behind the double doors of the clubhouse that is his but in a way not.
Hate to be "that guy," Les, but even if you had enough punctuation in that sentence — and you really, really don’t — it would still be garbage. Or, as they say in Germany: das garbage.
It was likely a one-day appearance, a ceremonial visit to hold a place for some undetermined return to an organization that almost seems to wish he’d never come back.
Yeah, because this organisation really really wants to spend $230 million on player payroll for this year and then send out Jayson Nix for 162 games to hit his career averages of .213 / .284 / .370 while playing replacement-level defense. Stay the fuck away, A-Rod! Fun fact: last year was A-Rod’s very very worst season in his career. He played the whole year with a torn labrum, and was only worth 2.3 WAR. Jayson Nix has been worth 2.7 WAR total in his entire career.
Outside on the field, during the pregame ceremonies A-Rod skipped, Lou Pinella, his first manager in the big leagues, threw out the first pitch. It was a reminder of the early days when Rodriguez was young and hitting more than 40 home runs a year in Seattle. He was loved unconditionally there. And it might have been the best home he ever had, until he left it to chase greater riches.
I seem to recall A-Rod won a few MVPs and a World Series in New York. Am I just making that up? Did that not happen? Seems like it hasn’t been all sad-sackery and Mexican hip rot since he came to the Yankees.
Also, I love the part where you say "it might have been the best home he ever had, until he left it to chase greater riches." Read that real close, Les, and tell me what you’ve done wrong.
Eventually, he came here, to the Yankees, to a team that pays him well but also shrugged when he finally returned so say hello on Monday morning.
Proofread, Les. Honestly. Also, this is the last line of the article. What? That’s not an ending, Les, that’s just a stopping. If you’re going to go with that, you should probably add one more line that says "and that’s what I did on my summer vacation, by Les Carpenter, age 8."
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