Tuesday, April 10, 2007

A-Rod Bias Alert
On Saturday night, Alex Rodriguez hit a walk-off grand slam against the Orioles - his second homer of the game - to lift the Yankees to a dramatic, 10-7 comeback victory and avoid a three-game losing streak. Rather than just go ahead and compliment the guy, though, espn.com made sure to reach back two days to diminish the accomplishment. Check out this graphic:

Remember When:

What a difference two days make. On Thursday, A-Rod popped out with the bases loaded to end the 8th inning in a 7-6 loss to the Devil Rays.

Would ESPN have brought this up for any other player? For some sadistic reason, they felt compelled to remind everyone that awful, clutchless A-Rod had the nerve to fucking MAKE AN OUT in the 8th inning of a game two days ago.

Not only do they incorrectly note that the bases were loaded (there were runners on second and third, but let's just toss a ghost runner on first to make A-Rod look chokier), but they fail to mention that two players, including what had to be some clutchless imposter wearing Derek Jeter's uniform, grounded out before A-Rod even came up. Jeter also made two errors in the game and was caught stealing, but if Jeter had hit the walk-off homer in Saturday's Oriole game, would ESPN have felt the need to tell everyone "wait a minute! Don't get too excited! This guy had a bad game two days ago!"

I am aware that pointing out the media's biases towards A-Rod and Jeter is about as difficult as finding the slant in FOX News, and equally pointless and dead-horse-beating, but I just can't help myself. Maybe tomorrow I'll write a lengthy, groundbreaking post explaining why the media likes Juan Pierre more than Manny Ramirez.

1 comment:

Rajiv Patnam said...

What I don't get is that the media talks about how A-Rod gets an unfair rap from the media, but is rightfully booed by the fans becuase he tries to hard to be liked and he's so robotic.

Then they talk about how steriods, and off the field problems are hurting sports so much now, but then we choose to focus incredible negative energy at a guy who is better than everyone else, and all he wants is to be appreciated and loved?

I won't even bring up the steroids guys, but how is this worse than Manny being Manny (listening to music while in the outfield) Sheffield refusing to play if he's not paid, Soriano refusing to move to another position(when he was terrible at both, and ARod was HOF at one and average at the 2nd) etc....

The media just likes to find someone they can pick on, who instead of fighting back with them, Hello Randy Moss, keeps pathetically trying to defend himself.