Video: The Ballad of Brian Hoyer
September 18, 2014Tribe top ‘Stros, celebrate in style
September 19, 2014I’ve been a hater before. It’s true. I was in a lonely chorus of folks who decided not to be all that impressed by Cal Ripken on his retirement tour. I hated all the self-important pomp and circumstance surrounding the end of his “iron man” streak of games. I’m not an overly sentimental person, so it’s not surprising that this kind of stuff would be lost on me completely, but it’s not just that. That was back in the early 2000’s and I’ve really calmed down a lot. I don’t let things completely out of my control bother me as much as I used to. That being said, the hate rears its ugly head at time and a great many things about the Derek Jeter on-the-road retirement rear-kissing are making me angry and spiteful.
I discussed it briefly with Chad Zumock on the podcast this week and then with Indians Baseball Insider’s John Grimm on Twitter yesterday, but John put it better than I did or probably could.
https://twitter.com/JHGrimm/status/512626849822679040
https://twitter.com/JHGrimm/status/512628021216280576
Of course none of this should besmirch Derek Jeter individually. He’s done nothing except play the really wonderful hand he’s been dealt. Nearly any baseball player who could have Jeter’s career would certainly choose it. It’s the lack of self-awareness of the world around the Yankees and Derek Jeter that drives me crazy.
See Nike…
Also see Gatorade…
In the end, while Derek Jeter has been a great player, like Ripken’s record that saw him get overrated, Jeter’s association with the Yankees overrates him. I can hear the thick New York accents that I used to argue baseball with on the East Coast attacking me in disbelief. “Overrated? Derek Jeter? Are you crazy?! But he won rings, man. What about the rings?” Derek Jeter was a major part of five teams that won it all over his long career. It’s true. There’s no denying it.
Especially in baseball, what does that mean? It’s like a reverse-Marino. Dan Marino of course gets slammed for never having won Super Bowls, as if he could do it on his own even at the game’s most powerful position. It’s silly to slam Dan Marino and it’s just as silly to crown Jeter for rings and because he played his entire career with one team, especially the Yankees.
It’s a story that’s almost entirely unique to the Yankees because they were able to take a guy like Jeter and pay him an average of nearly $14 million over the course of 19 seasons. The team paid him right around $20 million per season for seven straight years. Was he worth it? Probably, and it’s a great story for Derek Jeter and the legions of Yankees fans out there. I just don’t know why this set of facts, which should be largely unremarkable to non-Yankees fans, has him traveling the country on a throne collecting retirement gifts in each town along the way.
I find it nauseating and a celebration of one of the issues I struggle with most as an Indians fan, let alone a baseball fan. As an Indians fan, all I ever wanted was to keep my favorite stars like Manny Ramirez and Victor Martinez. And what team on earth wouldn’t have wanted to keep both of those guys for the entirety of their careers? Fact is, it’s only possible in one or two baseball cities in America.
You’re free to go Derek Jeter. You’ve been a great player with a Hall of Fame career and the overblown coverage of you isn’t your fault. I can’t be certain exactly who to blame, but let’s just say I’m not unhappy that you’re taking Bud Selig with you out the exits.
Josh Gordon finds out he’s in a Happy Meal?
I’m amazed by the apparent turnaround that Josh Gordon has been exhibiting. I mean, I can only make judgments based on what his public profile is, and we all have friends who give sickening sweet appearances on Facebook and Twitter that don’t match up with the awful people we know them to be in real life. Still, it appears that maybe Josh Gordon has been humbled a bit by his most recent rash of behavior and consequences.
It isn’t so crazy to think that running out of chances and a stint in rehab wouldn’t have a profound impact on a guy. Gordon went from someone posting party flyers on Instagram and taking photos of his custom cars to one who is engaging fans, greeting people at an auto dealership and showing up for meet and greets. I hope it isn’t just a mirage or a front. It would be better for Josh, the Browns, and all of us fans if he has actually turned it around for real.
https://twitter.com/JOSH_GORDONXII/status/512684259841441792
One of the greatest musical weekends of my life…
If you remember, last week I was totally geeked for the Mineral concert at the Grog Shop last Friday. Well, I need to report back that it was everything I ever wanted it to be. I’ve been dreaming of seeing that band since the late 90’s and they lived up to every dream I’ve had since I’ve been playing those songs and singing at full volume in my car. I couldn’t find good YouTube footage of the show I went to, but they opened with these first two songs when I saw them and if that had been all I had seen, I would have been fine with it. As they finished Love Letter Typewriter it’s a really good thing I didn’t have to speak. I had a lump in my throat and goose bumps.
On a less emotional but equally important musical note, I followed up the Mineral show with a trip to Youngstown for Saturday night. My favorite “local band” of all time was getting together to play for the first time in three years at a small outdoor festival called “Pabstolutely.” The band is called Coinmonster and I’ve seen that band play more times than I’ve seen any other band play live. We used to see them at least once a month in 1996-1998 and then I used to drive home from Boston every year on Halloween for their show that night. I know that was 20 hours of driving for a rock show, but it never seemed like a bad option to me. Anyway, I love Coinmonster and think everyone should look them up for their ultra-talented form of hard rock, but the band, as good as they were, were not the enduring image of that night.
No, that belongs to the tall gentleman that I encountered at Pabstolutely. He was embracing the sponsor to the fullest. He brought his own duct tape with him and every time he finished a can of PBR, he would take that can and put it on a tower and tape it into a monument denoting his drinking prowess. I personally saw him add six or seven cans to this tower as if he was a gloating PBR version of Joey Chestnut. A friend of mine (Hi Candace!) at the fest took this picture and I thought I should share that with you. Youngstown knows how to drink, folks.
That’s it for me this week. Thanks so much for reading everything we did this week. Please check out the podcasts and tell a friend.
I will leave you with a moment of Soccer zen…
133 Comments
NO!
http://24.media.tumblr.com/52b1a7ed521b89fea2fb7bae2dbb8e5a/tumblr_moh0gb5DUq1qfr6udo1_500.gif
yeah, and for $10 it will probably taste the same coming back up!
impeccable timing
I’m not on the JV team.
you know how we know? When Joe Torre says that without Jeter they wouldn’t have won anything. That’s how we know. Or when every other player talks about what a great leader he was.
Said Torre: “It’s an intangible that you can really feel, and there’s something special about him and what he adds.”
But since that wasn’t a number or a metric I’m sure you will tell everyone how Joe Torre – excuse me – HALL OF FAMER, Joe Torre is wrong. Leadership matters, and Derek Jeter was the best at it.
http://web.yesnetwork.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20140908&content_id=93686358&oid=36019
agree on the first part. leadership does matter and it is tough to measure, but when someone demonstrates it for long enough and it is consistently said about them by teammates and opponents, then you know he has it.
on the bat though, the answer is ANYONE. Jeter is having the worst year by far of any Yankee regular starter. that includes Brian Roberts. but, it doesn’t matter. this is Jeter’s last year, the Yankees probably weren’t making the playoffs anyway, so let #2 have the 2nd spot and be done with it.
http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/yuengling-sucks-1635714534
The game under the cap would be worth it no matter what!
and do the returns from ANYONE’s bat outweigh the deficit created by having a team see their leader demoted? It sends the wrong message to everyone else. I know the conventional thinking is, “if it can happen to Jeter, it can happen to anyone,” but this is pro ball, where that kind of stuff doesn’t fly.
Guys certainly want to win, but they’d rather lose with Jeter at the helm in his #2 spot than go to war with him as one of the rank and file.
i think it started when he actually got traded and wondered aloud if Jeter was going to play 3B. Fans here welcomed his (deteriorating, artificial, fake, drug-powered) skills but never the man himself. He was like a newborn fawn with wobbly legs – he was awkward to look at, and you kinda hoped he’d just sit down because it made you uncomfortable to watch.
it was a figure of speech (the answer is “California Penal.”) but i do thank you for the explanation. Welcome Len!
I meant Lou.
Ah I got it sorry I was off my game face palming myself after reading more excuses from Indians apologists. I’ve moved on I’m ready for the Cavaliers to start.
Len Lou same difference.
When presented with Great Lakes, there is no other choice.
I honestly think my journey to the darkside came about because of Great Lakes. I moved out of the state and found better, more expensive beer lacking when compared to what I’d get from GLBC. Why pay top dollar for an inferior product when you can pay bottom dollar for what’s almost the same thing?
Jon can also tell you how little the actual lineup variations mean towards overall run scored.
Team leaders get benched ALL THE TIME in professional sports. Every season. Guessing nearly every week in football. You aren’t cutting it? Sorry, there’s the bench. It’s a results oriented enterprise. Players know that.
haha. well, my landlord did offer me to buy my place. for $2 million. So there’s always that alternative.
I read your last line: players wants to lose. Really?
was just saying they’d rather go down swinging. Jeter has built up enough respect to go out on his own terms. at least according to those guys in the dugout.
how much of a punk would Jeter look like if he agreed to move? That would have been the end for him. Nobody would have had respect if he did that. Jeter had to know about A-Rod’s drug troubles, and how bad he would look if he vacated his position for the guy. That’s my own hypothesis.
I thought the A-Rod is a jerk started when he signed the 1st $250mil contract with Texas as he left Seattle.
I’m finding a lot of Torre quotes on Jeter, and I agree with Torre that he is a special player, but you’ll have to pardon me as I ask for some kind of cite on that not winning anything bit.
Legitimately laughing out loud that you would link to a YES network puff piece as evidence of anything. Maybe I’ll go dig up some SportsTime Ohio pieces on the bright future for Jeremy Sowers.
I’m not saying leadership doesn’t matter. I said that we have a pretty good idea of how good the rest of the Yankees roster was. What we don’t have any idea of is how much Jeter’s leadership won games. I’m not saying Torre is wrong, thanks for putting words in my mouth though, or that Jeter’s leadership didn’t help. But I’m also not the one that is adamant about it’s place in the equation. I don’t think it’s much to ask of someone clamoring about how much Jeter’s leadership is worth to make some kind of demonstration to his point.
The Yankees are losing for a lot of reasons. One of them is easily controllable by Jeter allegedly leadership. He can’t fix Pineda’s shoulder or Tanaka’s elbow, but a guy who is more interested in helping his team win than moving up another spot on the all time hit list might be inclined to go to his manager and say ‘hey, my .259 second half OBP isn’t cutting it’. But hey, this is the guy who refused to move off short for a better player, so it shouldn’t be too unexpected.
He runs a perfect PR machine, but I’m not sure how thanking Adams helps the Yankees win more games.
All things being equal, I have to believe most of those guys in that dugout would rather be leading the AL East and going to the playoffs without Jeter than playing meaningless September ball with him. I respect the man and all, but I think this is the sort of hyperbole that fuels the haters.
Oh how does history get re-written by the winners.
From just before the Rodriguez to NY deal:
http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=1735039
No one, not even the more talented player, could question where “YEAH JEETS” got to line himself up in the field.
that is fair. merely one anecdote, but I do think that a brash young player on the Yankees is more likely to listen to advice from Jeter than many other players. and, I think that does help the Yankees win more games.
He would have looked like the selfless leader that he is credited as. Putting the better fielder at the tougher position is a pretty easy plan for the “right path”.
Do it!
Sure, I think that it’s an example that endears himself to those around the game. That I completely get. But I’m a lot more skeptical that it’s going to make any young players (and scanning the Yankees roster, it’s tough to find one) suddenly decide they actually do need to put another hour in at the cage because Jeter prompted them
it doesn’t matter who writes the stories as long as the quotes are cited accurately. I’ll look for the Torre quotes – i have seen it on Yankee Entertainment Station’s Yankeeogrpahy.
I’m a simple man. I don’t ask for much. All I want is for GLBC to start distributing to Florida. It breaks my heart and saddens my taste buds to get the good stuff when I visit home, only to be denied it down here.