I think(I hope) you realize how silly it is to compare ARod to Mantle when it comes to October success. Mantle made it to 12 WS and was a part of 7 winning tams, ARod has been on immensely talented teams and has yet to play in a WS, the last time the Yankees made a WS was the year before ARod got here.
Hitting a HR up 8-1 in the 9th is adding to fantasy stats, when the Yanks truly need him he is genreally nowhere to be found. 12 posteason games w/o an RBI- how is that possible?
I dunno, ask Jeter that. You want to count postseason games without an RBI i'm sure he has the record. He's played in 119 games and has 48 RBIs. That means he has at least 71 games without 1.
He is the man most repsonsible for the last 2 playoff exits. Every member of the team in the last 2 postseasons has had good moments except for ARod. I don't blame him solely for us not getting back to the WS but he has been the biggest culprit. Jeter has always batted 1st or 2nd, he's not in an RBI slot- he is expected to score runs and he batted .500 in last year's ALDS yet only scored 4 rusn thanks to guys like ARod who couldn't drive him in. 2 of those were 2001 after he was hurt late in the ALDS where he batted .444. Jeter has had an RBI in all but 2 seris in his postseason career- in 24 series just twice he didnt' have an RBI and both series were 3 game sweeps while ARod in 7 full postseason series( I won't count '95 since he barely played) has 2 postseason series w/o an RBI and one series went 5 while the other went 4.
None of that has anything to do with what you said. Oh, and it was pitching that lost the last three playoffs, not one batter.
It was the bats led by ARod. he was brutal against Anaheim where he was awful at the plate, in the field and on the basepaths. last year he was just awful at the bat but we couldn't hit in the series and game 2 we had a chance to go up 2-0 and that would have sapped all confidence from detroit and at worst we would have had a Game 5 in NY. The bats have ben the problem, they go silent in october led by our supposed superstar ARod.
In the games we lost last year, pitching gave up 4, 6 and 8 runs. An argument can be made about the 4 being too many. The year before in the games we lost pitching gave up 5, 11 and 5. The year before against Boston it was 6,5,4 and 10. Again 4 isn't bad but clearly our pitching wasn't of playoff caliber and I still think that's why we lost all 3 of those series. Clearly if you compare those series to the ones we use to win there is no doubt.
We stopped hitting. We didn't have great pitching but we had good enough pitching to win each of the last 3 series but the inability to gte the big hits killed us.
The playoffs are all about pitching. You can't expect to hit against playoff pitchers the way you do in the regular season. The teams are there because of their pitching.
In 2004 we averaged 11 runs a game in our 3 wins and 3 runs/gm in our 4 losses. In games 4,5 & 6 our pitchers gave up 6,5 & 4 runs. Not great but certainly not bad- enough to win. In 2005 only 1 of our losses was b/c of pitching where we gave up 10 in game 3. In the other 2 losses we gave up 5 and 5. Again, not great but enough to win. last year we scored 8 in the first game then 6 total the next 3 games. In game 2 we have Det on the ropes and we easily could have knocked them out but we couldn't score when we had numerous chances then Det took the momentum and they had their confidence and were off and running. Could the pitching have been better? Of course but if we scored a few more runs like we had the ability to then we would have won each series.
And like I said you can't expect to hit the same in the playoffs as you do in the regular season. If you do great but you won't win anything without good pitching.
