Twins at Tigers? Pirates at Reds? Royals at White Sox? Cardinals at Diamondbacks? Don’t be stupid. None of the above, of course.
Why would any network broadcast a game relevant to a pennant race when two of 2014’s more irrelevant teams, the Yankees and Red Sox, will be playing a meaningless game at Fenway Park?
Why, indeed.
It’s truly a curse that these two are in the same division. They play one another 18 times a year, giving the networks 18 opportunities to shove them both down our throats. And the networks, all but one based in New York or Bristol, Conn., take full advantage. Yeah, sure, ratings drive much of the networks’ thinking in which games they air, and the Red Sox and Yankees generate ratings, even when they're both really bad, like they both are now.
Then there's the Jeter factor. We get it, TBS. Sunday is Jeter’s last game, and Jeter is Jesus Christ’s kid brother. Still, Yankees-Red Sox is a meaningless game. We could have as many as four games Sunday that might determine division champions, and two more that might determine a wild-card winner. And you're still gonna give us the game's faded plutocrats, the Yankees and Red Sox, in a game that doesn't mean a damned thing? It truly is a new Gilded Age.
Nothing against Derek Jeter. He was a genuinely great player. At the game’s biggest moments and on the game’s biggest stages, he almost always came up huge. He never wet the bed when the game was on the line, and he was responsible for numerous iconic moments. And that all matters. Anyone who’s spent any time around the game understands that too many players get caught up in the magnitude of the moment. Jeter never did and that’s a tribute to him. Saluting a great player, however, does not mean nominating him for sainthood.
Let’s play what-if: What if Derek Jeter had been drafted by the Brewers and played the bulk of his career in Milwaukee and other comparable small-market cities? How would be he perceived today as he retires? The answer is that he’d be Paul Molitor. That’s hardly an insult, but tell that to a Yankees fan and get ready for a fistfight. But it’s true. Take a good look at the career stats for Paul Molitor and Derek Jeter and ask yourself if it’s possible for two players to have careers that were more identical.
The two most obvious differences between them are:
1.) Jeter played his entire career at shortstop, whereas Molitor played multiple positions, with most of his career at second base and third base. Both were average defenders. Both were superstar infielders more because of their bats than their gloves.
2.) Jeter played far more postseason games than Molitor. Of course, that’s not Molitor’s fault, is it? Jeter played his entire career in the division-series era — meaning more postseason games per season — and in the first half of his career Jeter played on Yankees teams that were much greater than any of the teams Molitor played for in Milwaukee and Minnesota. Jeter was a great postseason player — the numbers are eye-popping — but when Molitor did make it to the postseason, he also was great. In fact, the percentage statistics (batting average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, etc.) in Molitor’s limited postseason sample are actually better than those in Jeter’s more substantial ledger. Molitor was a key component on two World Series champions in Toronto, and was World Series MVP in 1993. So both were great in the postseason.
Boil it all down and the fact is that Derek Jeter and Paul Molitor were the same guy. It’s as if Mark Twain’s novel The Prince And The Pauper had been set in Major League Baseball instead of pre-industrial England. One player (Jeter) was born to royalty (the Yankees), the other (Molitor) to poverty (Milwaukee), but they were the exactly same guy. If they'd secretly switched places at any time, no one ever would have noticed.
Again, no disrespect whatsoever to Derek Jeter. If Paul Molitor had gotten the same treatment when he retired as Jeter’s getting now, then this blog post wouldn’t be necessary. But no one even noticed when Molitor hung ’em up. It’s as though he was invisible and in a way he probably was — because of where he played, not because of who he was.
Meanwhile, people are swooning for Jeter’s retirement as if he were Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle all rolled up into one. He was great, but he wasn't that great. That’s not Derek Jeter’s fault, but it says nothing good about how the game is perceived, and especially about the media that shapes those perceptions. TBS's decision to broadcast the Yankees and Red Sox on Sunday instead of a game that actually means something is just the latest such network malfeasance. Unfortunately, it won't be the last.
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