Posts tagged DerekJeter at FanHouse - AOL Sports Blog

This is the best and the worst time of year for Dugouts. The trade deadline looms and we'll get a chance to cover a lot of teams we don't normally cover. At the same time, the newsmakers of baseball start making news, and most of the time that involves a steady stream of unbelievable stories from the Yankees and the Red Sox. I want to do more Pirates Dugouts, but nobody in Pittsburgh just had their marriage broken up by a random assemblance of pop musicians. Nobody from the Pirates ran up a wall and high-fived a guy.

We've been sitting on this for a few days, waiting for the logical "oh THIS is what really happened" to come along. It just... isn't coming along. So today we attempt to handle this from an educated, even-handed perspective.

Today's Dugout, which should've just been about the Royals again, is after the jump.

The third-place Yankees are in no position to deal with yet another distraction (Hank said what?! A-Rod is sleeping with who?!), but it's possible that Andy Pettitte, the team's best and most reliable pitcher this year, may be called in to testify in the defamation suit brought against Brian McNamee by Roger Clemens.

According to the New York Daily News, one of the claims Clemens is making against McNamee is that McNamee defamed Clemens by telling Pettitte Clemens used PEDs. McNamee's lawyer, Richard Emery, wants the judge to determine if the statute of limitations on that claim has passed, and doing so may require a hearing in which Pettitte will be forced to leave the Yankees and testify.

Sounds bad for the Yankees, right? It could get even worse. Emery has also requested that the defamation suit be moved from Houston to New York, which would allow Emery to subpeona a long list of witnesses, which includes Derek Jeter, Jason Giambi, Mariano Rivera, as well as team trainers and doctors.

All of a sudden, dealing with paparrazi on the A-Rod/Madonna beat doesn't seem too bad.

Last summer we were still making the transition to Fanhouse from our own site, and one of the last great stories of our G1 continuity was when the Brewers checked into a hotel in Pittsburgh and crossed paths with a furry convention. We covered the story on WordUpThome but like Barry Bonds in a Paula Abdul wig, what can you say?

Well, things got better.

This year Anthrocon 2008 proceeded as planned in Pittsburgh and, again, a visiting team happened to cross paths with them at the hotel. And (oh man) according to The LoHud Yankees Blog (oh man), A YANKEES BLOG BY JOURNAL NEWS BEAT WRITER PETER ABRAHAM (oh man), the furries crossed paths with the New York Yankees. Furries and baseball was funny enough already and it didn't involve the protagonist of our project.

Today's Dugout, thanks to the great Dugout bat signal, is after the jump (oh man).

Derek Jeter is the subject of a big article in the New York Daily News this morning. The focus is on his lacking offensive performance halfway through the season and, naturally, begins by saying that if there was one year you could call Jeter overrated it would be this one.

And, also naturally, because we're talking about Jeter in New York, it's considered a non-issue that he will start producing at a high level sometime very soon.

"There's a hot streak right around the corner," hitting coach Kevin Long said. "Sooner or later, it's coming. He's a model of consistency. Keep putting his name in the lineup and, in the end, the numbers will be there. He'll make something out of this season."

Perhaps Jeter, who turns 34 on Thursday, has simply started to slow down. Not collapse, mind you, just slow down. When the season is over, I doubt he'll have an OPS+ of 93 or a slugging percentage below .400 but I also doubt that he'll have a season on par with 1999 or even 2006.

This has nothing to do with his being overrated just with him being human. He's simply a player like most others, nagging injuries and advancing age are making things a little harder than they were before. The thing that I find so hard to believe is the incredulousness that follows any assertion that Jeter may not be the player that he once was.

Derek Jeter is a good offensive player trumped up by a fawning media and fan base into a transcendent superstar who gets more credit than he earns. Derek Jeter is a born winner whose value to a ball club can't be expressed by any statistic other than championships. So go two sides of an argument that seem to have been raging ever since his rookie season.

The debate has even worked its way into the pages of Sports Illustrated. As part of this week's issue they polled 495 MLB players and asked who the most overrated player in baseball was. The winner, with 10% of the vote, is Jeter. This comes a week after they polled the same number of players and asked what player they'd pick to build a team around. Jeter came in second in that poll, garnering 12% of the total.

He's overrated but we'd like to build our team around him? Sounds like there are 495 applicants for the general manager job in Seattle.

That's pretty much the Jeter debate in a nutshell. He's never been as good or as bad as either side would have you believe. And if he didn't play in New York no one would care half as much. That's certainly part of it, A-Rod finished in the top three of each poll as well. No player of this generation has gotten Jeter's face time which leads to visceral reactions. Over time it's almost impossible to see the forest for the trees.

Over the last few days, Fanhouse has been buzzing with story after story about Pop Diva Mariah Carey's devastating gyroball and the effect it may have on the way the game is played in the States. Not since Roger Clemens did steroids and one-two'd it by cornholing the New Nashville Sound have the world of sports and music come together so hilariously. If you haven't watched the video, please do so.

And look at that picture over there. Mariah can't even go to a BASEBALL GAME without looking like that.

Today's Dugout is the spiritual successor to the Mariah Carey Gets Married iVoice we did for the Village Voice. In that strip, Mariah returns home from vacation married to young rap star Hip Hop Harry. After the jump, Mariah switches from bears to... well, what's the opposite of a bear?

Is Derek Jeter dating that one girl you probably don't watch on TV? In that one show you never hear about until its about to get cancelled? On that one network that has 30 Rock and The Office and Hulu and Brian Williams and nothing else? Why, maybe he is!

WAS the mystery guy spotted slinking around the Empire Hotel with smoldering starlet Minka Kelly Yankee star Derek Jeter? Though Kelly's publicist put the kibosh on our query about a male suitor at the Empire (the rep told Page Six Kelly's dad was the only guy with her in the hotel), OK! magazine reports the "Friday Night Lights" actress was wined and dined at Kobe Club by Jeter on Monday. "She's still playing the field," one source told us.

Who to believe? One one hand, you have Page Six, bastion of credible celebrity news and information. One the other hand, you have OK! magazine, which may be one of the few publications in the world less trustworthy than Page Six. If my left foot was on fire, and OK! told me it was on fire, I would immediately believe my left foot was not on fire. So this is a tough one.

At any rate, Derek Jeter's calm, Yankee eyes have slayed yet another impressionable female. When will the carnage stop?

The Major League Baseball draft is only two weeks away, and, as Josh Alper reported earlier this month, the league is holding a ceremonial, voluntary draft of Negro League players before the actual draft begins. The idea is to honor the accomplishments of the guys we still have and throw a little money their way, and while that's nice enough, Jon expressed via (real live copy and pasted) Dugout our general malaise and disappointment. You shouldn't honor the Negro Leagues like this. You should honor the Negro Leagues by buying a big jacket with all of the teams' logos on it. All of them at once. I don't like any specific team, I just like the Negro Leagues!

Well, the official chatroom of Major League Baseball (that's us) couldn't let baseball have a fantasy draft without doing one of their own, and presented today post-jump is part 1 of the completely legitimate shoot conversations that went on during said draft.

Not featured: Joe Torre drafting Satchel Paige and then cutting him for being too flamboyant.

Featured: everything via this link

On Deck is FanHouse's look at the day's most intriguing baseball matchups

Boston Red Sox (29-19) vs. Kansas City Royals (21-24) - 7:05PM Est.

Let's take a look at how the first two games of this series have gone for the Kansas City Royals. On Monday they were no-hit by Jon Lester, and on Tuesday they were beaten by rookie Justin Masterson as he picked up the first win of his Major League career.

Today things get no better as the Royals are preparing to uncomfortably bend over an examining table, and get their colon's checked by the Round Mound of...um...Pounds? That's right! Bartolo Colon is back, and he's ready to make his very first start as a member of Red Sox Nation.

Will he be responsible for the Royals leaving Boston walking uncomfortably, or will the Royals come out of their check-up with flying colors and salvage a game in Beantown?

The most docile photo I could find of Farnsworth and I still had to crop out a middle finger.

Big thanks to Will at Deadspin for the preemptive hat tip this afternoon. He knows how big of fans we are of Kyle and his antics, so when it was made public that he enjoys baking we, of course, obliged. This may not be as Dugoutly poetic as, say, pounding Paul Wilson's face into hamburger mush, but damn it's pretty close.

Here's to you, big guy. We love you.