Thursday, December 11, 2014

NJ's Rick Porcello Traded To the Red Sox

So it ultimately comes down to this -

The Red Sox traded Jon Lester for Rick Porcello.

Photo courtesy of the Associated Press
I have my own theories about just how badly the Red Sox screwed up the Jon Lester negotiations - did ownership REALLY think that the reported 4-year/$70 million offer to Lester last spring was anything remotely close to what their star left-hander would accept? - but we'll leave that for another time. The bottom line is that Boston sent outfielder Yoenis Cespedes, who was never really in their plans for 2015 to begin with, and two minor leaguers to the Detroit Tigers for right-handed starting pitcher Rick Porcello.

Porcello, still only 25 years old (he turns 26 at the end of December), was a first-round draft pick of the Tigers in 2007 out of Seton Hall Prep in New Jersey. I actually saw Porcello pitch in high school where it was obvious that he had a boatload of talent. He won a career-high 15 games for Detroit in 2014, and has never won fewer than 10 games in each of his six major league seasons.

Cespedes, you'll recall, was acquired by the Red Sox back in July in the trade that sent Lester to the Oakland Athletics.

On the surface, the end result of Jon Lester being in Chicago while Rick Porcello is in Boston isn't even close to being an even swap. You're talking about one of the premiere left-handed pitchers in baseball (especially in the post-season) and comparing him with a kid who, while he's had some success at the major league level, is still very young. But as noted above, Porcello has notched at least 10 wins since coming into the league, and he's good for at least 200 innings a season. I also happen to like pitchers who come from the northeast where the weather can be a determining factor in developing tougher players.

Porcello figures to be either the #2 or #3 pitcher in the Boston rotation.

Saturday, October 4, 2014

The NY Media has found a new target - Derek Jeter

The final week of the regular season played out like a Hollywood script for Derek Jeter. First came the walkoff single against the Orioles in his final game in Yankee Stadium, and then came the three-day lovefest in, of all places, Boston's Fenway Park where the Yankee legend was greeted with the kind of cheers and "DER-EK JEE-TER" chants usually reserved for Yankees home games.

Photo courtesy Getty Images
From the moment back in February when Jeter announced his retirement via a post on his Facebook page - "First of all, everyone said they didn't even know I had a Facebook page" - the tributes came pouring in. The cynics started to wonder if Jeter was being credited with inventing and/or saving the game of baseball.

The final weekend in Boston was positively surreal. Sure, there were Yankees fans everywhere, but there were also a lot of Red Sox fans leading those cheers. Gone were the days of the "Nomar's better" chants...heck, Jeter and the rest of us might have even forgotten about the "Pokey's better" days of 2004.

And then came October 1.

The guy who had been so reserved in his comments to the media - has any player ever use so many words in a post-game interview to really say so little? - was now offering athletes a chance to speak out, albeit in a highly-controlled manner. "I do think fans deserve more than 'no comments' or 'I don’t knows.'" Jeter was "in the process of building a place where athletes have the tools they need to share what they really think and feel. We want to have a way to connect directly with our fans, with no filter."

David Waldstein's article in The New York Times revealed that "The website will have editorial oversight. Gary Hoenig, a former editorial director of ESPN Publishing and an editor of ESPN the Magazine, will be the editorial director. The website will be backed financially, in part, by Thomas Tull, whose production company was behind '42,' a film about Jackie Robinson."

Cue the media backlash. Writers who'd spent the better part of the past two decades singing Jeter's praises suddenly had their opening, and they ran with it.

John Harper from the New York Daily News offered this.

Steve Politi from the Newark Star Ledger was equally miffed.

Politi explained his lack of enthusiasm for Jeter's venture saying, "Here's my problem: After a lifetime spent guarding every detail, big and small, about his life it's a tad hypocritical to ask current athletes to bare their souls on his website. What's next? Joe Girardi encouraging other managers to throw out their research and just 'go with their gut?'"

The crowning touch came from New York Daily News sports columnist Mike Lupica.

Lupica's column contained a couple of not-so-veiled very crude references to female anatomy that were, among other things, completely devoid of the class that Jeter showed throughout his career.

Jeter's been seemingly EVERYWHERE lately. An appearance on the Today Show, The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, and an online twitter chat of all things.

And Jeter Publishing is off to a roaring start.

Derek Jeter came into professional baseball with a plan - play the game the right way, and don't give the media a reason to take something you say and run with it. He's clearly treating the next step in his professional life with another carefully laid-out plan. That Players' Tribune twitter page and website were registered in November 2011; the domain for his Jeter Publishing website was also set up about a year ago. He managed to fly completely under the radar with both until he decided to make it public.

We all know that any content published by athletes via Jeter's site (Russell Wilson is the first to contribute) is going to be heavily edited. Big freaking deal. The media backlash - less than 72 hours after Jeter's career came to a close - is ridiculous and can be summed up in four words.



Saturday, September 27, 2014

A Red Sox fan bids farewell to Derek Jeter

If you've listened to me on the radio for any amount of time, you know I'm not a fan of the New York Yankees. Red Sox executive Larry Luchino dubbed them the "Evil Empire" some years back; I've been known to say things far less complimentary.

Photo courtesy Reuters
Derek Jeter's Hall-of-Fame career will come to an end Sunday afternoon at Fenway Park in what will otherwise be a completely meaningless baseball game for both the Yankees and the Red Sox.

Both teams are out of the playoffs, and the lineups for the two previous games of this series have looked like something you'd see in the late innings of a mid-March spring training game when the starters have long since left the field and showered.

Red Sox principal owner John Henry put Friday night's lineup into perspective with an all-too-appropriate seven-word tweet.



So with all that said, allow me to get the snark out of the way first.

I agree with much of what Keith Olbermann said this past week about Derek Jeter. In case you somehow managed to miss what Olbermann said, go here and here.

Derek Jeter isn't going to go down in baseball history as the "Greatest Yankee of All Time." There are at least five ahead of him you may have actually heard of - Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle, Berra. I'd even go so far as to offer up Don Mattingly as a better-than-Jeter candidate. You may have some others as well to throw into the mix.

Derek Jeter isn't the "Greatest Yankee Shortstop of All Time." That Rizzuto character was pretty good, you know.

And for awhile, you could make the argument that Derek Jeter wasn't even the best shortstop on his own team once that Alex Rodriguez fellow - remember him? - joined the Yankees.


Photo courtesy New York Times
Team leader? It was blatantly obvious that Jeter didn't make Rodriguez's transition to New York any easier. Truth be told, given my own feelings about Rodriguez I probably would have done the same thing, but as I said right from the start, this is the snarky part.

Team player? One could argue that the Captain could have and should have gone to manager Joe Girardi any number of times this year and asked to be moved out of the two-hole in the lineup as it became painfully evident that he wasn't producing well enough to be in the first third of the order.

Photo courtesy Associated Press
And don't even get me started on the whole "Derek Jeter Farewell Tour sponsored by Steiner Sports." My first thought on Thursday night when Jeter's teammates dumped a bucket of Gatorade (with the "2" in place of the usual logo) on him was, "Wonder how much Steiner will be charging for THAT jersey?"

Don't get me wrong - I'm a big fan of capitalism, and I've never once begrudged an athlete his mega-contract. But these last two weeks of the season have been more like a QVC Network production than a final well-deserved victory lap for a player of Jeter's stature. Anyone want to buy a rake?

The "flip" play against Oakland in the playoffs? I don't care how many times Joe Torre makes the claim, but I refuse to believe that the Yankees actually practiced that play. One could make the argument that the Captain was actually out of position. And if Jeremy Giambi had slid.... But I digress.

Photo courtesy Associated Press
That playoff home run against the Orioles in 1996? It would clearly have been overturned under the current replay rules.


Photo courtesy New York Times
The patented jump throw? I'm old enough to remember a guy named Bobby Wine making similar plays for the Phillies back in the mid-60's. But again, I digress.

Mr. November? As a Red Sox fan, I'll always have Jetes' performance in Games 4 through 7 of the 2004 American League Championship Series to look back on.

** SNARK OVER **

Derek Jeter will play the last game of his Hall-of-Fame career Sunday afternoon at Fenway Park. It will cap off what has been a three-day love fest from Red Sox fans. And while details haven't been announced, you just know that Red Sox Executive Vice President Dr. Charles Steinberg and his staff will be pulling out all the stops to honor Jeter. And deservedly so.

Photo courtesy MLB.com
Plain and simple, Derek Jeter is everything I want a baseball player to be. And yes, he played hard...and he stayed cool.

He respected his teammates, his opponents, and more importantly, the Game of Baseball. In the PED era of players routinely putting up video game numbers, Jeter's name was never on the list of the usual suspects, even as some of his own teammates treated the clubhouse like a chemistry lab.

He battled his way through each and every at bat of his career. He may never have put up enough league-leading numbers to satisfy the likes of the Keith Olbermanns of the world, but he certainly had his share of big base hits, and I lost count of how many of those came at the expense of the Red Sox over the years. Derek Jeter could beat you with his bat, his glove, and his legs. And as someone who probably watched or listened to 90% of Jeter's career, I can say with confidence that he never stopped trying to beat the opponent no matter what the score was.

For years, I led the "if he played anywhere other than New York he'd be considered just another very good player" crowd when it came to assessing Captain Intangibles. But as the final weeks of Jeter's career have unfolded, I've started to appreciate Jeter in a whole new way. I've also discovered a sense of melancholy that I wasn't expecting.

Some of that came from knowing that Jeter is going through that phase of his life as described by Jackie Robinson when he said, "Athletes die twice." Derek Jeter's athletic mortality is playing out in front of our eyes. In many ways, I think it's reminding me of my own mortality.

Photo courtesy New York Times
The image of Jeter heading out to shortstop once last time following Thursday night's game and crouching down with his hands covering his face, clearly filled with emotion, is one that will stay for me forever. Jeter said more in that moment about his love for the game he played so eloquently for nearly 20 years than he could have said in a month of post-game press conferences.

My 13-year old son wants to play baseball for a living. It's all he talks about. Like any of the tens of thousands of kids who call themselves Red Sox fans, he wants to call Fenway Park "home" some day, and he absolutely despises the Yankees.

Photo courtesy New York Times
But when Jeter dropped that single into right field in the final home game of his career to drive in the winning run against the Orioles, my son found himself filled with emotions he wasn't expecting for the only Yankees shortstop he's ever seen in his brief lifetime. "This is really the end of an era," he said in one of those moments that may be the first time he's felt a part of his own childhood dying.

So yes, Keith Olbermann and Derek Jeter's naysayers may indeed have a lot of valid points. And I warn you now that we're going to deal with the whole over-the-top Jeter Love Fest again in five years when Cooperstown surely comes calling.

But this Red Sox fan is also hopefully objective enough to acknowledge one of the all-time greats.

#RE2PECT, indeed.