Home Sweet Home – I just got home from a trip to eastern Europe (Estonia – where new Cincinnati Bengal Margus Hunt is from – to be exact) for a wedding and I guess I missed a whole bunch of things in the sports world. I had limited access to the Internet during my time in The Land of Long Summer Days (sunrise at 4:15am and sunset at 10:15pm) and drunken nights.
I saw that MLB dropped the hammer on a number of cheaters. The big fish that got filleted by the league is everyone’s favorite scumbag Alex Rodriguez.
A-Roid got hit with a suspension that will keep him out for all of next season, which I’m sure makes the Yankees and their fans, and everyone in the league except for Buck Showalter, extremely happy. Rodriguez is appealing his suspension even though he hasn’t denied any of the allegations. The appeals process could take a few months so we may not know how long we’ll be A-Rod free until November.
The appeal is just an attempt to minimize the hit to the wallet that A-Roid will take during the suspension. Everyone knows he’s guilty and deserves a suspension. Maybe the arbiter will shorten the suspension and save Rodriguez a few bucks in the process. Or maybe the arbiter will say that MLB is being too lenient on A-Rod and order him banished from the game, hung, drawn, quartered and fed to mutant piranha-alligator hybrids. In the meantime, A-R0d plays, and gets jeered, and gets plunked – which i think should happen at least once per game. If not twice.
So far A-rod has not been the lightning rod Joe Girardi had hoped for. He’s gotten a couple of hits so far, but he is clearly a distraction for a team that isn’t very good to begin with. Rodriguez won’t care about that, though. As long as he’s playing, he’s collecting on the $100M+ the Yankees still owe him. He has to know his legacy is completely shot to sh*t. It’s all just a money grab at this point. He will keep playing just to get paid. Its a sad state of affairs for sure.
More sad news for Yankee fans is another return to the infirmary for Derek Jeter, who just can’t get right this season. He has had a number of false starts and I’m starting to think his days of playing competitive baseball may be over. Its sad that the Yanks had to put Jeter on the DL in order to make room for A-Rod, who they don’t really want on the team. Its kind of funny in a f*cked up sort of way. It seems to be a sad end to a great career for Jeter. And a sad end to a great, but controversial career for Rodriguez.
Any way you look at it, the Yankees’ season is over. They have one reliable starting pitcher in Hiroki Kuroda, who they can’t score runs for. Pettitte needs to get back on steroids to be effective. I thought the return of Twinkies would spark a bit of a revival with CC Sabathia, but so far, the big man hasn’t been able to translate his twinkie power into pitching prowess. It all spells bad ball in the Bronx. Wait till next year. Hopefully we’ll have a healthy Jeter, a suspended A-Rod, and a fat CC by then.
Preacher Collins tomorrow.
