FanNation - The Republic of Sport

Watching the first two games of the Yankees Indians playoff series, it is beginning to look like the Yankees are becoming the AL Version of the Atlanta Braves, good strong play during the regular season and nothing but stinkers during the playoffs.  I guess someone has to do it since Atlanta has missed the playoffs the last two seasons.  Sad to say it also looks like the Red Sox have morphed into the Yankees of old, getting strong pitching, clutch hitting and intimidating the opponents into stupid mistakes.  Somewhere Bud Selig is saying prayers of thanks as he continues to hope for the failure of the pinstripes to justify his vision of baseball.

In Bud's world, baseball will be like hockey, bunch of mediocre teams making the playoffs to encourage their fan base to spend more money on playoff tickets and season tickets.  So far this method has worked on the NL teams, but in the AL  seems to be a bit more resistant as all four playoff teams have worked very hard to be better than others in their division.

As much as folks may want to blame ARod, certainly without him the Yankees would definitely be home already, doing whatever professional baseball players do in the offseason when they don't make the playoffs.  It is mindboggling that someone as good and dominant as ARod is during the regular season struggles so much in the playoffs.  Game 1 the Indians neutralized him with walks until the game was out of hand, so his inablity to hit was not much of a factor, but in Game 2 0-4, 3 K's twice leaving a runner at 2B, that was pretty embarassing.  When he struck out late leaving Bobby Abreu at 2nd I begin to wonder if we are seeing his last at bats in pinstripes.  Maybe next year he gets his $30M/year from the Cubs or Angels and finds the playoff mojo that he lacks in NY, maybe he still stays in NY to prove he can do it, though that probably is a reach.

Certainly if George has been ill, watching the last two games cannot be good for his health.  Does he appear in NY on Sunday to encourage his troops, be interesting to see if he makes an appearance or not.  If not, then certainly he must not be doing well at all.  What would he say to Robinson Cano, who continues to jog to first base on his groundball outs rather than run hard to possibly force an error, to Bobby Abreu who left his giddy up in Philly and makes an stupid throw to miss his cutoff man.  Thanks for old Yankee Andy Petite who has the fortitude some of the other pinstripers lack to get out of the mess he was left with on Sizemores hit.  Now we wait until Sunday to see if the $28M Rocket Man has the right stuff to continue this Yankees season.

As much as I hope this will be a repeat of when the Yanks were down by two games to Oakland and came roaring back to win the series, you don't get the same sense from this team that they would be capable of fighting back like that.  Looks like aura and mystique may have moved up the expressway to Fenway.  In fact I think I saw them setting up house in Manny's hair.