What an exciting game last night! Between CC Sabathia getting Yankee payback by plunking Vicente Padilla (an action Joe Torre frowned upon as not being classy back when he was Yankee manager) and Alex Rodriguez getting some big payback of his own against Joe Torre, it was a great win. We even had Manny Ramirez muffing the ball!
So this morning, when I got online to read about the game, I was annoyed to see the negative tone of some of the stories I saw. A-Rod ruins reunion: that’s the headline I saw this morning when I logged onto the New York Post’s web site. Huh?
George King’s lede was this: “Alex Rodriguez made no effort to find Joe Torre and possibly talk about what is chapping him about his former manager.” Please. This is the third time this week King is playing so dumb about why A-Rod despises St. Joe. The writer even made himself part of the story the other day, confronting Alex about St. Joe after he had already been asked three separate times by reporters about Torre:
Asked by The Post at the indoor batting cage why he answered the questions the way he did, Rodriguez refused to elaborate. Informed that what he didn’t say was bound to cause a stir considering the God-like status Torre has with Yankees fans and the fact that Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada and Andy Pettitte praised Torre, Rodriguez didn’t react other than to turn and take a hack at a ball on the batting “T.’’
King needs to get out more. Unlike in the press box, where he is still worshipped, Torre no longer holds anything close to “God-like status” among most Yankee fans. And whether the four rings guys like Joe is irrelevant here – Torre didn’t bat them eighth and trash them in his book, did he?
Then there’s our old buddy Wally Matthews, who gripes that Friday”was supposed to be about the two managers,” but A-Rod made it all about him by…not being a phony and going to shake Torre’s hand. The ESPN writer sez:
But, A-Rod Being A-Rod, he had already taken steps that not only guaranteed all eyes would be on him Friday night, but throughout the rest of the weekend as well.
He did it by making it clear he would be going out of his way to have no part of his former manager, even as several of his teammates — including the four most important ones — were going out of their way to pay tribute to Torre….
There are a few other ballplayers as talented as Rodriguez on the field, a few of whom are even on his team. And yet, none of them are as talented at grabbing the spotlight even when it is trained on someone else.
So Rodriguez grabs the spotlight by…doing nothing? Bad, bad A-Rod!
I, for one, am glad that he didn’t put on an act of being glad to see Joe. The media may have the memory skills of Dory in “Finding Nemo,” but Rodriguez hasn’t forgotten what Torre did to him. As Tim Brown wrote in a great Yahoo Sports column about the situation:
Rodriguez heard and came to believe Torre referred to him as a “pretty boy,” and that Torre had picked a side in the A-Rod-Jeter chill, and in his book fed the “A-Fraud” drama. But, none of it stung quite as much as when he arrived at Detroit’s Comerica Park for a division series game one Saturday afternoon, the Yankees playing to extend their season, to discover Torre had chosen his scapegoat.
When somebody wrongs somebody else, it is up to the person who did the wrongdoing to make the effort to make amends. Especially if that person is supposed to be the legendary paragon of class, and an elder statesman in baseball. That means that if any handshakes were to be initiated, the person doing so needed to be Torre, and not A-Rod. Funny how I haven’t seen any stories interrogating St. Joe for not approaching Rodriguez. Gee, I wonder why.
Tim Brown’s Yahoo piece concludes with this:
Alex Rodriguez could have gone along, just walked over and extended his hand, pretended everything was OK.
He could have.
But then he would have been everything he’d been accused of. He would have been a fraud.
I agree!
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