Cliff Lee Screws The Yankees In Ways Red Sox Fans Can Only Dream About

Jen's dad sent an email early this morning with two words: "Merry Cliffmas."

I wasn't sure what he was talking about at first and assumed maybe that just meant that free agent pitcher Cliff Lee was staying with the Texas Rangers — which would have been funny enough for Yankees Non-Partisans (technical term: "dayenu") — but when I went to the sports section, the news was even better:

The Philadelphia Phillies agreed to terms late Monday night with Lee, the prized left-hander who pitched for them in the 2009 World Series, according to a baseball official told of the deal. The official, who said he believed the deal was for at least five years and $100 million, was granted anonymity so he could speak freely about a contract that was not finalized.

The Yankees had bid seven years and about $150 million for Lee, who also had a strong offer from the Rangers. But in the end, Lee's agent, Darek Braunecker, informed the Yankees that Lee was headed to Philadelphia, where he never wanted to leave after a dominant postseason run for the Phillies.

. . .

In returning to Philadelphia, Lee will join a staggering rotation that could rival some of the greatest in history. Lee, a former Cy Young Award winner, will join the two-time winner Roy Halladay, along with Roy Oswalt and Cole Hamels.

I responded to Jen's dad with a similarly terse two-word missive: "Holy shit!"

Late last week, the ESPN people kept saying that the Red Sox signing Carl Crawford made Cliff Lee's left-hand dominance that much more important for the Yankees' rotation. And now Lee going to the Phillies makes the Yankees' rotation that much shakier. But as The Times puts it, "There are always lower-tier free agents, like Freddy Garcia and Kevin Millwood, Bruce Chen and Jeremy Bonderman, David Bush and Rodrigo Lopez."

Rodrigo Lopez? I almost think Tyler Kepner is being facetious here. I don't know how many Yankee fans got to watch Rodrigo Lopez pitch last season. I did, but that's only because I got to see Arizona Diamondbacks games on MLB Extra Innings. Just so you understand, 35-year-old Rodrigo Lopez was like the Diamondbacks' third or fourth starter, 7-16 with a 5.00 ERA last year, a sort of low-risk placeholder until someone else came up or along.

So I ask you: Rodrigo Lopez?

By accepting a smaller contract and fewer years, Cliff Lee has stuck it to the Yankees in ways that Red Sox fans could only dream about. The only thing cooler would be if the Phillies dealt the now-unnecessary Joe Blanton to the Sox. Oh wait.

Lee's "nonchalant" catch* of a Johnny Damon popup in the bottom of the sixth inning of Game 1 of the 2009 World Series was a nice "fuck you." Signing with the Phillies for a shorter contract and less money is an even bigger "fuck you." Few players, much less fans, get to screw the Yankees this way. And Lee not only did it on the field but in free agency as well. He's a Yankee Non-Partisan hero.

As for the Phillies, expectations are now into the stratosphere. That said, while they may have a "staggering" rotation, they still don't have a lot of solid relief pitching. But I'm not sure they even need it: Roy Halladay had nine complete games last year, Roy Oswalt and Cole Hamels had three between them and Cliff Lee had seven. That's 19 complete games. And something tells me that with relievers like Antonio Bastardo and Chad Durbin backing them up, this rotation will be that much more focused.

Maybe the decision was easy for Lee. Maybe his wife's gut reaction about the city had some bearing on the decision. But it's healthy for New York City to know that it is not the best place in the entire universe. Cliff Lee is now this idea. He's his own Miami. He's Woody Allen's Match Point. He's Northampton, MA. Except that he's better than all of those, because apparently New York wasn't even really in the hunt in the first place.

Which means that he really does own the city.

*It's too bad that there aren't any embeddable videos of this catch — at one time there were but it seems that MLB has cracked down on all that; this link is a never-ending MLB playlist of videos related in some way to Cliff Lee, but as it goes on (and on and on) it gets less pertinent — there are Giants-Phillies highlights from this year playing now; I wonder what will happen if I let it run all day.

Posted: December 14th, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: The Thrill Of Victory And The Agony Of Defeat! | Tags: , , , , , , , ,

As Articulate As They Wanna Be

Later in the day I usually turn on ESPN and have it on in the background while I'm working. Yesterday's Jim Rome take involved Los Angeles Laker Ron Artest's comments on Los Angeles Clippers rookie forward Blake Griffin's rapidly expanding highlight reel, which is about all you'll be able to catch of Griffin, since the Clippers have been horrible for years and are never shown on national television.

Griffin looks awesome, at least in the highlights they show on ESPN, and Artest was asked about it:

I hope he dunks on me. His highlights is stupid.

That's "stupid" as in Black Eyed Peas' definition of "stupid". It's a hilarious quote. You can watch him saying "His highlights is stupid" here at 9:35 (start at 9:08 to get the full gist):

Artest goes on to say that if Griffin dunked on him he would buy that poster and ask the rookie to sign it. Like I said, hilarious — and when you watch the full interview you see how Artest is holding court for the sports writers and they're all laughing along with him.

I was telling Jen about the "highlights is stupid" quote and I noticed an above-the-fold story about Griffin on the front page of The New York Times sports section. Sure enough, they brought up the Artest quote in the fourth paragraph, but look at how lamely they cleaned it up:

"His highlights are sick," said Lakers forward Ron Artest, repeating the declaration as if speaking in capital letters. "I wish he dunks on me. I'm not going to lie. I hope he dunks on me, puts his shoulders on my face and like, 'Aaaaah!' Just crazy. Lights it up. His highlights are stupid."

I suppose it's OK to clean up Artest's vernacular but why? It's such an awesome quote — sort of like "Why Can't Us?" or "The Bears are who we thought they were!"

If you watch the full interview it's clear that Artest is being purposely folksy. Maybe an overeager copy editor even changed the quote. A friend once told me that an overeager copy editor changed his "through a glass darkly" to "darkly through a glass." He was pissed. Regardless, the Times should give Artest his quote back.

At the same time, maybe Jim Rome could have contextualized Artest's comments a little more — maybe by showing the Los Angeles Times' YouTube of the interview (incidentally, how cool is that that they put up all eleven-plus minutes of it online?). Rome's staff is having some fun with Artest's vernacular at Artest's expense — fair enough but a tiny bit cheap if you listen to the whole clip on the YouTube. And if you watch the full video you can hear more about his charity championship ring raffle to raise money for mental health issues, which seems extra cool on the part of Artest.

Posted: December 11th, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: The Thrill Of Victory And The Agony Of Defeat! | Tags: , , , ,

If LeBron Did Not Exist, Wieden+Kennedy Would Invent Him

In the ongoing list of things the internet does reasonably well — including but obviously not limited to song lyrics, footage of early punk rock shows, the shared experience of watching playoff baseball via an "open thread" on a sports blog and computer help* — here's one more: Coordinating chants at Cleveland Cavaliers games. To be fair, there was a clear and present matter at hand for Cavaliers fans — expressing their displeasure at LeBron James for leaving the team through free agency in a flashy narcissistic way — but the coordinated effort got a lot of press:

We ask for all of you who have been a part of this movement to continue to push in these final 24 hours. It wouldn't be possible without you, and won't succeed unless we make sure the "fourth quarter" of our efforts is as strong as the first three. Get the word out, send the sheet to co workers and friends, print out extras if you're going downtown, hand them out at bars, do whatever you have to. Get Cleveland chanting!

The sheet (.pdf) had instructions for what to chant when, e.g., in the second half of the first quarter "Whenever LeBron has the ball or is at the free throw line the chant is: Ak-Ron Hates-You (Clap, Clap, ClapClapClap)." It went on from there, and was to have culminated with a penultimate "De-Lon-Te" chant early in the fourth quarter, until the Heat stretched out its lead to thirty and LeBron was pulled from the game.

I had to look up the Delonte story because I missed it. Here's what that particular chant was about:

The 'Delonte' chant will be in reference to the reported affair that occurred last season between James' mother Gloria, and his teammate Delonte West. West is now a member of the Boston Celtics, but shortly after the end of the playoffs last season, in which West's and James' Cavaliers were eliminated by Boston, speculation ran rampant that James learned of West's affair with his mother during the playoffs and it caused his distracted and seemingly disinterested play.

No matter, the Cavs_Chants Twitter feed directed the Delonte chant to be moved up.

Meanwhile, everything else seemed to work as planned:

Despite being an otherwise meaningless early season game, Thursday night's 118-90 Miami Heat victory was the most anticipated regular-season game in the history of pro basketball. As the national media kept reporting all week, Cavs fans had been waiting more than four months to vent their spleens. And vent they did.

When James first took the court in his No. 6 Miami Heat jersey 17 minutes before the opening tip, he was greeted with a cosmic jeer, soon followed by a raucous chant of "a—hole, a—hole."

Midway through the first quarter, his ears were pummeled by a thundering chant of "Akron hates you, Akron hates you."

Buzz Bissinger recently wrote a book with LeBron James, and wrote an op-ed in The New York Times back in May about how he thought LeBron should handle his pending free agency. His opening paragraph seems like typical Bissinger — we read his A Prayer For The City for book club, about Ed Rendell's first term as mayor of Philadelphia and his tone is sometimes self-effacing to the point of obsequiousness (Bissinger's depiction of Chief of Staff David Cohen in the book is kind of the definition of "beat sweetener"). His LeBron op-ed follows that format:

When I first met LeBron James in 2008, I was in awe. He was 23 at the time and I was 53, yet it seemed as if the ages were reversed. He had been a basketball legend for years. As we embarked on a book project together, he had an affable poise that contrasted with my own babbling efforts to build rapport. I ascribed to him a worldly wisdom.

Then of course he goes on to sound every part the 53 year-old — hollow advice to leave and never look back, et cetera, et cetera and then something about "personal growth." Somehow he decided that James should have gone to the Knicks, which in retrospect looks absurd.

James followed Bissinger's advice to leave and do soul searching or whatever Bissinger's writerly heart wanted James the nonfiction star to do like not at all, which makes the Bissingerian plot line seem that much more hollow:

LeBron James's relationship to his community is profound: he built a palatial house in the Akron area and just finished his seventh season with the Cavaliers. But I believe those roots have become golden shackles. He is too loved, and therefore too coddled and too easily forgiven.

His play in the fifth game of the N.B.A. playoff series this month against the Boston Celtics, a 120-88 trouncing, was bizarre and inexplicable. In missing 11 of the 14 shots he took, he simply looked as if he had given up, astounding not only for James but for any professional athlete competing at the level of the playoffs. It was inexcusable, whatever the circumstance.

In a place like New York, the tabloids would have screamed "LeBomb James!" In Cleveland, there were a few boos, but they amounted to nothing compared to the desperation of the fans to keep him for next season and beyond. In such an atmosphere, human nature inevitably takes over: you stop constantly pushing yourself because there is no real incentive, particularly when you have so many good nights on the basketball court and keep your fans satiated.

. . .

LeBron, take the chance. Just go and never look back. In the greatest city in the world, you will never regret it. It is time to leave home.

You get the sense that Bissinger wanted LeBron to leave the Midwest via a large Greyhound with a duffel bag over his shoulder, the coach bus kicking up dust as it stopped to pick him up on a rural stretch of U.S. 224. I don't know what Bissinger thought about the ESPN special.

(Speaking of which, J.A. Adande seems to posit that it's Soledad O'Brien's fault that the story veered off into some giant debate over race in America . . . maybe Jon Stewart has a point about cable news? Three of us briefly debated this aspect last night while we were watching the Heat-Cavaliers game and in retrospect it seems silly to have done so. At any rate, not worth bringing up again.)

All told, Cleveland's fans were the most interesting part of the game last night (with the exception of this, which is kind of awesome). Some cities are like that. Philadelphia is one place. So is New Orleans, I recently learned — it seems that the entire city jumps up and starts waving handkerchiefs whenever K. Gates' "Black & Gold (Who Dat!!!) Superbowl Edition ft. Ying Yang Twins" is played. Seriously, it's weird — it looks like those scenes in Season 2 of True Blood when the Maryann Forrester character puts the entire town of Bon Temps into bacchanalia trances.

You get the sense that Cleveland fans wouldn't need a "Fan Up" campaign to remind their fans to arrive to games on time and stay until the end. You'd think that players would like that aspect of playing in a city, but that's clearly not the case. In that sense it reminds me of something someone reminded me once about art museums: Museum-goers are under the impression that museums are primarily about seeing art but there's a case to be made that's not the real reason museums exist — rather, museums are about maintaining collections of art, and viewing the art is only a secondary purpose. Some collections are better than others in this respect, but most only show a small percentage of what they hold.

In the same way, maybe the Miami Heat are less a root-worthy team than they are a collection of museum pieces — like a Platonic ideal of "Starting Lineup" (minus the point guard). And instead of winning championships or giving a city something to cheer for, the team simply exists to make overwrought Nike ads.

Of course, without those overwrought Nike ads, we wouldn't have the spoofs:

In the commercials LeBron says "What should I do?" over and over. But for the rest of us taking it all in, it's more like "So what do you do?" — because there's not much else interesting about the story line now except to want to see the Platonic ideal fail.

*See this, this, this and this, respectively.

Posted: December 3rd, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: The Thrill Of Victory And The Agony Of Defeat! | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,