PHILADELPHIA — Derek Jeter remembers how different it all felt, even to him, even as a rookie, even as early in the game as it was for him in 1996. Jeter already had lived through four hard-fought division series games, and he had survived a five-game grudge match with the Orioles in the ALCS, back when the Orioles were every bit the blood-feud rivals the Red Sox soon became.
But then came the Braves, and the World Series, and suddenly everything was different.
“Everything was bigger,” Jeter said. “Everything seemed louder, and brighter, and there were so many more people everywhere. It was just the World Series, I guess. Everything else was just preliminary. The World Series is just different. It takes some getting used to.”
That doesn’t explain everything, as far as Alex Rodriguez is concerned. That doesn’t explain the 0-for-8 collar he took through the first two games, or the fact that with six strikeouts, he already is halfway to Willie Wilson’s dubious record of 12 set in the 1980 World Series for the Royals (who were facing, drumroll please . . . yes, the Phillies).
“I think they’re being careful with me, but it’s only eight at-bats. I’m not concerned at all,” Rodriguez said after Game 2, a 3-1 Yankees win that squared the Series at 1-1. “The fact that I’m ‘oh-for’ in the Series and we’re 1-1 and the guys in front of me and behind me picked me up today, makes me feel really good about going into Game 3.”
It with that quote, and with the way he walked around and through the Yankees clubhouse yesterday, that you should understand that we really might be dealing with an entirely different Rodriguez than we have been accustomed to seeing in Octobers past. And that’s a good thing. Sometimes, 0-for-8 and six strikeouts is just 0-for-8 with six strikeouts. Sometimes it’s just a cold spell, the inevitable chaser to a hot streak.
“It’s good pitching,” manager Joe Girardi said. “I mean, you can’t expect guys to hit a home run every day and to get two hits every day. I mean, you make your pitches, in most cases you’ve got a pretty good chance to get guys out.”
Or, as Jeter the World Series sage said: “You don’t really think pitchers are going to lay it in there and see how far you can hit it, do you?”
The problem is this is A-Rod, and this is the World Series. And no matter how many people line up on the side of reasonableness — that he no longer has to make his October bones, that his performances against the Twins and the Angels should be enough to quell those firestorms — it always will not be enough. Perhaps, on a karmic level, that is just — A-Rod did hijack a clinching World Series game two years ago thanks to his ill-timed opt-out, after all.
But on a less ethereal, more real level, there are certain things you have to believe. For one, this really has been a different A-Rod this October, and judging by his quotes and his clubhouse decorum, that remains so. For another: Citizens Bank Ballpark is a place in which he might have hit 80 home runs if he got to play 81 games here. The left-field porch all but scrapes a right-handed bat as it sweeps through the hitting zone. The ball carries here like a dream.
“I’m not concerned,” A-Rod said. “I’m really not.”
Ryan Howard, the Phillies’ version of A-Rod, is off to his own wretched start, five strikeouts in his collection, and he looked lost Thursday in Game 2. But Howard has the two advantages over A-Rod. First, he already has a ring on his finger. Second, and most telling: his surname is Howard, and not Rodriguez. There always will be 40 percent more attention paid to A-Rod’s successes and his failures because of that: because of who he is.
Should that make a difference? Of course not.
Will it?
You tell me.
Here’s an old rule of dumb
Everyone is fired up about the umpires this year, that is the issue that boils the blood as much as anything. In past years, it has been the weather, or the late start of games, or the fact that every postseason game seems to last longer than the entire run of “Gunsmoke.”
Nobody seems to care about what I still think is the dumbest World Series quirk of all: the fact that they play the damned thing under two sets of rules.
Think about a Super Bowl in which two-point conversions were allowed in one half and not the other. Think about an NBA Finals in which 3-pointers were permitted in the Eastern Conference arena but not in the Western Conference site. It would seem amateurish and dumb, right?
Well what do you call a World Series that allows a DH in four games and makes the pitcher hit in three? And yet for 24 World Series now, that’s been law and it’s been accepted . . . and it always has been stupid.
It also is bad policy, and a bad rule, and it seems we have gotten so used to it that no one wants to say it too loud. But it should be. Because dumb rules need to be changed.
Hangin’ Chad
1. IT’S starting to feel like we’ll see Nick Swisher pitch again before we’ll see Chad Gaudin.
2. Alex Rodriguez used his favorite metaphor again yesterday, speaking of “passing the baton” in the Yankees batting order. His issue lately hasn’t been passing it, but dropping it.
3. Charlie Manuel and Cliff Lee know what suits Lee’s arm best. But what suited the Phillies’ Series chances best was throwing Lee in Game 4.