Tuesday, May 21, 2013
Washington Post: Tom Boswell: Yankees Are Monuments To Baseball Success
(www.washingtonpost.com)
posted 10 hours ago by The Yankee Clapper to aging, great baseball players, injuries, pennant race, veteran leadership, yankees
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9 comment(s)
Boz pays homage to the gritty, gutsy, scrappy, first place 2013 underdog Yankees:
Read More...Perhaps for the first time in their history, the Yankees now epitomize exactly the kind of team that always used to try to beat them: a group of inspired-by-adversity, too-old-or-too-young, one-last-chance players who band together to prove that baseball is a team game, not just an aggregation of talent and fat contracts.
Put a few all-star seasons, such as Cano’s 31 RBI, Kiroda’s 1.99 ERA and Rivera’s 16 ...
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1 2 >that tells me everything I need to know
Yes. Parsed, it means "I'm an idiot, & nothing I have to say could conceivably be worthwhile."
PS -- Just heard a quick blurb on the (non-sports) radio. They said Jeter has discomfort in his surgically-repaired ankle and has to stay off it for another 2 weeks. Anyone else hear this? If true, it's getting almost as dangerous to be a Yankee as it is/was to be a Grateful Dead keyboardist...
This is what ESPN employs.
Yup. Not so much the specifics about staying off it but Nick Cafardo said there was a setback of sorts and that Opening Day was in doubt.
-- MWE
The last, and only time I can think of, Cano not putting in full effort was at the end of his lost 2008, when he got benched for not running something out. The guy has been a model player, and a great player, ever since, and he's one of the most entertaining in the game to watch. The only way someone calls him lazy is if they simply aren't watching him play.
I dunno. Bill Simmons said "If you don't like First Take, don't watch it", and got suspended for it.
It's different if the sound at the end of the word is "'a". not "er". Are you sure you were listening correctly?
Ah, sports talk, the lowest common denominator of dummies...
I'm not sure which half I'm in.
I'm not sure why it was brought up, but Jim Kaat mentioned on a play by Cano that he appears lazy because he's graceful in the field. I'm not sure if that was brought up by a) other people alleging Cano is lazy or appears lazy; or b) Kaat's belief that Cano looked lazy in the field during that game.
My cats are both.
When he's out on a routine groundout, he's out by anywhere from 5 to 20 feet. When Jeter is out on the same routine groundout, he's out by a micro step. And sometimes Jeter even beats the throw.
None of this will show up by studying advanced metrics.
Cano often does appear as if he's not really trying. Now I'm not Proffessor X so I can't say that he is actually lazy, but no one who watches Yankee games would confuse Cano with Pete Rose.
P.S. Yes, I am aware that Cano is well on his way to 3000 hits and a HOF career.
I agree with that but I will say that I've also never seen Cano fail to take a base he could take. For example, last night Hanley Ramirez was rightly chastised by Jim Kaat for loafing on a base hit that should have been a double, I don't remember ever seeing Cano do that.
The other thing in your example is that Cano is just slower than Jeter. He's not a burner so even if he's flying down the line he's going to be out by more than Jeter on an identical play.
Andruw Jones syndrome. Andruw was another guy who did nothing but show up everyday and produce and was rewarded with the 'lazy' tag. People simply suck.
When & where? I haven't checked lately, but Finebaum's been off the air for contract-related reasons (i.e. he refused to reup with WJOX, I think it was, in Birmingham) for a couple of months now & AFAIK has another month to go till his noncompete (or the equivalent therof) is up.
This has probably been mentioned a million times before, but Cowherd and most other radio hosts I've heard just say the same thing over and over again in (sometimes) different ways. Just listen to Cowherd one morning. He has like three total topics, maybe 18 total points to be made, and it takes him 3 hours to do it.
I wonder if there's a correlation between having a pudgy face and being judged lazy (like a fat, spoiled child). In my humble opinion, Jones and Ramirez both have pudgy faces. I don't think I could say the same about Cano.
I have no opinion whether any of the above, or any other player, is actually lazy.
You could be worse. You could be someone who calls into Paul Finebaum.
Seconded. I was glad when Kaat mentioned that, and that's not the kind of thing Cano's ever been guilty of that I've seen. He probably doesn't run up the line as hard as he can on every ball in play, but that's just smart if it lets him play full seasons.
He also talks football constantly, even in the off season, which I don't want to hear.
You'll be happy to know all he says about Vick now is endless harping on his poor decision making and inability to read defense. ie: hes dumb.
Both seem appropriate.
In fairness, the end for Andruw in Atlanta wasn't entirely on the fans. He may have gotten tagged lazy by some before, but most people where willing to live with it. Then he started falling apart. Atlanta fans saw it, nobody was really that sad to see him go. He'd strike down falling to his knees four times in a game, and smile on the way back to the dugout each time. When asked if he considered taking a more balanced swing he'd respond, "I'm a pull hitter, its what I do and what I've always done." Which was obviously untrue.
Andruw's demise could only have been one of a couple of things. 1) He ate himself out of playing shape, 2) He refused to believe his critics when his play started deteriorating, 3) He didn't care that he was getting worse, 4) He was 2-4 years older when he broke in, (putting his collapse after 30 and giving his career arc an entire new perspective)
Also young Andruw got yanked rather infamously mid-game by Cox for dogging it on a play. That did seem to get the point across and I don't know that you could say he ever dogged it after that, but obviously Cox felt the point needed making.
I'd hazard a guess that at some point before the next WBC USA players will come out in some way/shape or form and at least indirectly criticize the "I don't care about the WBC" type MLB fans.
On Cano, yeah the lazy tag is stupid reflection of how easy he makes most plays look (and that he's a pretty bad runner for a middle infielder) . but it's not entirely untrue that Cano cared at least as much for the WBC as the World Series, which would obviously mean he'll look like he's playing harder than the vast majority of times in the regular season too.
Let's flip this the other way around, would anyone in their right minds say "Cano obviously care more about the playoffs than the regular seasons" as a criticism?
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