Sunday, April 12, 2009

CC Sabathia and Jolly Old St. Nick (Swisher) lead Yanks to victory

Happy Easter, and Happy Passover, everyone. Hope everybody is doing as well as the Yankees are at this moment.

Right after Nick Swisher hit his homer last night, I ran to the radio to see if I could catch John Sterling's home run call. He debuted his "Jolly Old St. Nick" call. Hilarious.

While I was originally disappointed that the broadcaster didn't include a Swisher Sweet reference, I think Jolly Old St. Nick works perfect for Nick Swisher. After all, look at the player's latest Twitter message:
great team win! CC was awesome! i had so much fun out there!
Now that's jolly. Guess he wasn't kidding when he told Kim Jones he drank three Red Bulls during the game.

Like many other Yankee fans, I'm really liking Swisher so far. It's not just his hitting - it's his infectious personality. He makes Johnny Damon look like a wallflower.

I've been rewatching The Bronx Is Burning on MSG - click here for the website - and it reminded me about how the Bronx Zoo Yankees had so many great personalities. So yeah, I'm digging Swisher showing some real emotion on the field. Don't know why "The Yankee Way" in recent years has come to mean "no personality."

And I guess the media can no longer say that CC Sabathia is "money for nothing." Last night, he had 7.2 innings, no runs, six hits, zero walks, and six strikeouts, and the Yankees won their third game in a row.

It makes all the over-the-top Opening Day stories and Game 2 articles look even more ludicrous. I guess CC dug himself out of that hole Joel Sherman wrote about after his first start.

I have a theory on the New York media. Not all of them, but too many writers have had a hysterical tone for years. But it's generally been directed at only two things:

* Alex Rodriguez - his every action, whether good or bad, gets overblown and replayed like it's the Zapruder film, and

* George Steinbrenner - even though it was clear for a good five years that The Boss wasn't the same (the fact that nobody lost their jobs after 2004 should have been a huge tipoff) , the media still acts as if Steinbrenner is just about to swoop in and fire somebody. Joe Torre used the specter of The Big Bad Boss to great effect.

But now that A-Rod is absent, this hysteria is all centered around this myth that one game will cause heads to roll, which is why we saw such over-the-top coverage for the first two games. The media acts like it's still 1982, and Joe Girardi is one loss away from losing his job. Ridiculous.

At least the media coverage today of Mark Teixeira's sore wrist was measured. Thank goodness for small favors.

What do you think? Leave us a comment!

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