A-Rod or Plaxico -- who is the bigger idiot?

I was just looking to stir the pot this morning.

SHOOTING YOURSELF does take the cake!!!! Though I too, still voted for A-rod

If one is to define an idiot, then Plax’s actions this year would be the definition. ARod just needs to shut his trap and he’d be alright. He feels the need to tell too much.

While Plaxico grinded out the 2007 season with an injured knee no one reported how many fines he had for lateness that year. No one talked about how he was “disrespecting authority” when he was killing Al Harris.

Everyone forgets that Ernie Accorsi wrote in his book about how much of a great teammate Plaxico Burress is and how shocked he was that he was so different from the media reports. Now that Burress has committed the stupidest act in the history of athletics, we have to remember that it was just that. A stupid act. It wasn’t tragic like Ray Lewis being involved with the murder of a human being.

As Giants fans we are mad that he cost us an opportunity to repeat but the fact is that while Burress is an idiot, the Giants didn’t win without him and wouldn’t have won without him in 2007.

God allows things like this to happen to let people realize that you are one mistake away from your life being flipped. One day you could be described as an “aggressive go-getter” and the next moment you could be “an overbearing know-it-all” and get sent to the unemployment line.

Plax should be grateful he ended up being called an idiot for his actions because it could be much worse. For 2009 I hope he’s called a football player and not a convict.

Overall: PA 9076, .306/.389/.578, OPS .967
High Leverage: PA 1626, .305/.393/.582, OPS .975 (+.08)
RISP: PA 2602, .303/.404/.553, OPS .957 (-.10)
Close & Late: PA 1207, .279/.375/.530, OPS .905 (-.62)
Postseason: PA 166, .279/.361/.483, OPS .844 (-.123)

Just by comparison, Captain Clutch:
Overall: PA 9093, .316/.387/.458, OPS .845
High Leverage: PA 1462, .327/.408/.448, OPS .856 (.11)
RISP: PA .311/.405/.434, OPS .838 (-.07)
Close & Late: PA .289/.387/.420, OPS .806 (-.39)
Postseason: PA 554, .309/.377/.469, OPS .846 (.1)

Both are slightly better in high leverage situations, both are slightly worse with Runners in Scoring Position, both are a fair amount worse late in close games but are still pretty good. The difference is that Jeter is almost exactly the same player in the postseason as he is in the regular season, while ARod is significantly worse in the postseason than he is in the regular – though it should be noted that “significantly worse” for ARod turns him into…Derek Jeter. Of course, ARod has a much smaller postseason sample size than Jeter does – he was absolutely brilliant in his first 3 postseasons. Not including his 2 ABs in ‘95 as a September call-up, he was a career .337/.402/.594 (OPS .996) postseason hitter, going through the end of the ’04 ALCS against Boston. His next 2 postseasons were dreadful and his most recent one was simply bad, but does that completely rule him out as a “clutch” player? If you look through Jeter’s postseason career, he’s had way more than 3 poor series, I count at least 8 “un-clutch” performances. The difference is he’s had much more opportunity to hide those in his career than ARod has.

Sorry, this has nothing to do with the ARod vs. Plaxico debate, but I get annoyed when people call ARod “unclutch” – and I’m not even an ARod or a Yankees fan.

Agreed on that point. They both hurt their teams, but only one of them had the potential to hurt others in the process of their stupidity … that’s Plaxico. The gun could have gone off at anyone. Imagine if the bullet had hit Pierce instead?

A-Rod is not a bad guy. He just doesn’t seem to understand dealing w/people very well.

kendynamo – for being a HATER! lol