A big portion of the Yankee Stadium crowd at Sunday’s Yankees-Royals game stayed through a two-and-a-half hour rain delay just to see Alex Rodriguez get the chance to hit his 600th home run. They also stayed through a virtual monsoon Friday night, and brutally hot weather all weekend long, just to watch A-Rod. But, but, I thought none of the fans cared about this quest? I thought everybody hated A-Rod? At least that’s what all too many people in the media have tried to tell about us over the past week.
ESPN New York’s Johnette Howard was one of the many writers who insisted insisted that A-Rod’s “countdown to 600 home runs is barely registering in the public’s imagination, even here in the Big Apple.” Associated Press sportswriter Tim Dahlberg called it “joyless occasion.” Those are just two of the many, many articles written in the past week about how nobody cares about 600. Interestingly, for an event the media also professes to have no interest in about, they write about it an awful lot, don’t they?
There’s a real disconnect between 1) the media telling us fans how we just don’t feel anything about A-Rod going for 600, and 2) the fact that nearly 150,000 fans showed up this weekend to see these games. The Friday, Saturday, and Sunday games were some of the top-attended games of the season; the only games this year that drew more people were the Red Sox and Mets series and Opening Day.
Yet even despite all that, we still hear the same old story about how none of us care. The otherwise sensible Scott Miller, CBS Sports columnist, wrote Sunday that “as A-Rod takes aim, one of the remarkable things about it is how little buzz has surrounded his chase at 600. Sunday, it was completely eclipsed by a Hall of Fame class that included umpire Doug Harvey, legendary manager Whitey Herzog, and Dawson.”
Oh, really? Then why is Miller’s story about the Hall of Fame induction mostly about, um, A-Rod? Some eclipse!
Maybe it’s reporters’ solipsism; they think because they don’t like A-Rod, nobody does. Maybe it’s their groupthink mentality. But it’s amazing how many of them are fixated on the notion that all Yankee fans hate A-Rod and have no interest in watching him reach 600 homers, even when there’s tons of evidence to the contrary, like people sitting through interminable rain delays just to see him hit. Good grief.
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