Determined To Be The Best

One of my favorite all-time baseball players is Joe DiMaggio. In the history of baseball, there have been other players who were better, but there have been few, if any, who so excelled in every facet of the game.

DiMaggio put up impressive numbers. He was a three-time MVP. He led the league in home runs and batting average twice. In 1941, he got a hit in 56 consecutive games—widely considered the most unbreakable record in professional sports.

And he was a winner. In his 13 seasons with the Yankees, they won 10 Pennants and 9 World Series.

When it came to baseball, Joe DiMaggio was it. He was the peak; the pinnacle; as good as it got. And he knew it.

Pride and vanity can certainly be negative traits, and they were traits that DiMaggio possessed in abundance, but in his case, they spurred him to greatness. He liked the legend he had created for himself, and he was absolutely determined to live up to it.

He did so by playing incredibly hard, while still making it look like everything he did on the field was effortless. The graceful way he played earned him the nickname, “The Yankee Clipper.”

DiMaggio always battled injuries, and late in his career, it got harder and harder for him to stay in the lineup and put up the impressive numbers that everyone was used to.

Finally, in 1951 at a relatively young 36 years of age, DiMaggio walked away from the game, not content to just be an average player. As teammate Lefty Gomez put it, he retired because “he couldn’t be Joe DiMaggio anymore.”

There’s a lot to be said for setting high expectations for yourself and not settling for anything less, and in a time when our heroes seem to let us down all too often, it’s comforting to think about a guy like Joltin’ Joe, the hero who never did.

Once, late in a season when the Yankees had already clinched the American League Pennant and were just finishing out the rest of the season, one of Joe’s teammates asked him, “Why do you play so hard in a game that means nothing for your team?”

He replied, “Because there’s at least one person in the stands that has never seen Joe DiMaggio play before.”

I love that quote, and the idea it represents.

The Apple of ESPN’s Eye, or The Yankees/Red Sox Rivalry

Although it probably shouldn’t be this way, I’ve pretty much decided that all forms of media are biased in some way.

The Fox News Channel is conservative, while virtually every other news channel is slanted to the left. Around here in Northwest Arkansas, some media outlets rabidly support Arkansas football coach Houston Nutt, while others are decidedly against him.

Bias is a part of media; I guess I shouldn’t expect ESPN to be any different.

Yesterday, the Atlanta Braves and the New York Mets battled each other in a classic game. Future Hall of Famers and former teammates John Smoltz and Tom Glavine pitched gems through five innings.

Atlanta got to Glavine in the 6th to take a 3-1 lead, but the Mets responded in the bottom half of the inning. New York touched Smoltz for five runs, highlighted by a José Reyes bases clearing triple and Braves manager Bobby Cox being thrown out of the game for arguing balls and strikes.

Down 6-3 and facing the Mets’ formidable bullpen, Atlanta tied it up in the 7th with an Edgar Renteria three-run home run, and then surged ahead in the 8th with another three-run shot, this one by Kelly Johnson.

The Mets threatened in the 8th and 9th but failed to score, and Atlanta held on for the victory, which gave them a half-game lead over the Mets for the NL East lead and put the rest of the league on notice that the Braves are back.

It was quite a game, but apparently, only warranted about 60 seconds of the 90 minute ESPN Sportscenter broadcast that night. Certainly, there were a lot of sports to cover yesterday with the opening of the NBA playoffs, but ESPN may have had more time to recap the Braves/Mets game if they hadn’t spent 10 minutes going over the highlights the Yankees/Red Sox game.

The New York/Boston game was significant; the Red Sox win gave Boston its first sweep of the Yankees at Fenway since the early 1990s, the BoSox hit four consecutive home runs in the game for the first time in team history (the last time any AL team did that was in 1964) and Dice-K was pitching.

It was a good game, but it didn’t merit 10 times the coverage of the Braves/Mets game.

But if you watch much ESPN, this shouldn’t be surprising. The network that is infamous for portraying the Duke Blue Devils as a contender for the NCAA basketball championship in a season when they are barely treading water in ACC play always blows the New York/Boston rivalry way out of proportion.

The Yankees and Red Sox have been playing each other for a long time, since 1903 actually, which is part of the rivalry, and New York and Boston are geographically close to each other (only 214 miles separate the two cities, almost exactly the distance between Fayetteville and Searcy), which adds to it as well.

But actually, throughout most of baseball history, the New York/Boston rivalry really hasn’t been much of a rivalry at all, especially to the Yankees, who have basically been dominating their chowder-eating counterparts for 85+ years now—since 1920, New York has won 39 pennants and 26 World Series Championships while Boston has won 5 pennants and 1 World Series Crown during that same span.

Sure, there have been a few moments of intrigue and points of contention over the years—the Babe Ruth trade and resulting “Curse,” the personal rivalry of Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams in the 1940s, the Bucky Dent home run to send the Yankees to the playoffs in 1978 and Boston’s dramatic come-from-behind ALCS victory over New York in 2004—but any two teams who had played in the same division for 100+ years would have similar episodes.

Is there a rivalry between these two teams? Absolutely, and it is one that has intensified over the last decade with the re-emergence of both teams as perennial contenders.

But it still remains the most overplayed and trumped-up rivalry in all of professional sports, more the product of myopic, overzealous northeastern sportswriters than of history.

And seriously, the rest of us are getting tired of it.

A Disgrace to Fans Everywhere

As a rabid Braves fan, I am someone who hated the Yankees for quite a while. In recent years, I haven't hated them as much (probably because they haven't won a World Series in a while), though I do get really tired of hearing about them and the Red Sox all the time on ESPN.

I was watching the Yankees play the Braves the other day though, and realized that, while I no longer hate the Yankees as a team, I sure do hate their fans. Ever since he started playing for them a few years ago, Yankee fans have booed and maligned Alex Rodriguez, saying that he just doesn't "fit" in a Yankee uniform or just doesn't "seem" like a "true Yankee", despite the fact that he has been the AL MVP while in New York (the fact that NY hasn't won the World Series since he's been there is probably a large part of this).

The other day against the Braves, A-Rod got booed all game long: when he would come up to bat, when he would get out, and especially later in the game when he made an error. And all this to a guy who is easily one of the top five players in the game, a player any other team would love to have.

Then, in the bottom of the 10th, A-Rod comes up and hits a walk-off home run to win the game. Of course, the stands erupted, cheering on Rodriguez as if he was Ruth, DiMaggio, Mantle, and Jeter all rolled into one.

A-Rod circled the bases like a "true Yankee": all business-like, then waving to the crowd at the end. Personally, I would've been tempted to take more of a non-"true Yankee", Ted Williams approach and spit on all the fickle jerks who had hated me seconds before.