A - ROD The Worst Clutch Hitter of All Time ???

A-Rod is grounding into double plays and striking out and putting together – no hyperbole – the worst clutch-hitting season in all of Major League Baseball, owner Hank Steinbrenner has cased his verbal paintballs in favor of BBs, with the bazooka at arm’s length, and everyone knows A-Rod can’t go anywhere else because the money is too big and Rodriguez’s career-long struggle with important at-bats is again popping up like a zit.

Every player has his demons; Rodriguez’s happen to come with the magnifying glass tilted toward him. That he fries like an ant is nothing new. With a few exceptions, such as last season, Rodriguez’s losing battle in clutch situations has stained what is otherwise a career of marvelous achievement, no-doubt first-ballot Hall-of-Fame induction and likely the all-time home run record.
from Yahoo Sports

Never has it been as bad for Rodriguez as this season. Numbers back up the cries of Yankees fans, whose complaints about Rodriguez look, on the surface, like those of a scorned lover, what with his .306 batting average, 29 home runs, 81 RBIs and .968 OPS. They say he never hits when it counts – home run No. 29, a solo shot Sunday when the Yankees were down 4-0, is a prime example – and a deeper look, with a metric that analyzes clutch hitting, shows they are onto something.

Win Probability Added (WPA), as tracked by fangraphs.com, assigns a different value to every situation. For example, a run-scoring single to tie a game in the seventh inning is worth significantly more than a bases-empty single in the first inning. Over the entire season, it adds up the positives, subtracts the negatives and produces a number that shows how many wins a player contributed to his team – and, ostensibly, an indicator of how well a player fared in clutch situations.

This year, Rodriguez’s WPA ranks 93rd of 158 eligible players.

When analyzing how “clutch” a player truly is, sabermetricians turn to a statistic called WPA, or Win Probability Added, that calculates how many wins a player added to his team by giving more credit to important situations. Fangraphs.com comes up with a “clutch” score by comparing WPA with WPA/LI – Win Probability Added with the Leverage Index removed, i.e. making all at-bats equal, regardless of the situation.

Except for a couple of seasons, Alex Rodriguez has been anything but clutch. And this season, his Clutch score is the lowest in baseball and 20th-worst since 1974.

Year WPA Rank WPA/LI Rank Clutch Rank
2008 0.27 93rd 2.91 18th -2.67 158th of 158
2007 6.85 1st 5.82 2nd 1.00 17th of 162
2006 1.09 76th 2.41 39th -1.37 150th of 160
2005 5.52 3rd 6.27 3rd -0.65 109th of 148
2004 3.08 26th 2.96 29th 0.24 57th of 161
2003 4.15 11th 4.82 6th -0.12 82nd of 165
2002 3.75 26th 4.98 11th -1.27 133rd of 151
2001 5.23 12th 5.96 8th -0.69 125th of 156
2000 5.27 8th 5.62 7th 0.09 64th of 162
1999 1.19 69th 3.22 34th -2.02 151st of 157
1998 4.51 13th 4.00 20th 0.63 33rd of 159
1997 1.97 49th 2.32 37th -0.38 96th of 144
1996 3.79 18th 4.20 13th -0.55 106th of 147

A-ROD LOOKING AT 500 MILLION OVER 10 YEARS ?

TAKEN FROM FASTCOMPANY.COM

Well, that didn't take long. When the New York Yankees were eliminated from the playoffs Monday night, the baseball season, for all intents and purposes, ended.

Forget the battle between Arizona and Colorado, in an NLCS that promises to draw about twelve viewers east of the Rockies. Not to mention those upstart Indians -- who took down the Yanks -- or a Red Sox team that seems the clear favorite to win its second World Series in four seasons.

No, the story in baseball is now all about one man. One agent, to be exact, who seems to believe he is the first in history to represent a deity.

Scott Boras, the high-powered agent for several stars including Yankees third-baseman Alex Rodriguez, is already pushing up his asking price should A-Rod decide to opt out of his contract.

As CNBC's Darren Rovell reported yesterday on his sports business blog, Boras believes A-Rod is worth at least $500 million over the next 10 years. That's almost double his current $252 million deal, which was signed after the 2000 season and remains the most expensive in baseball history.

My initial reaction was that Boras must be out of his mind. But Rovell got him on the phone later in the day and came away impressed by his logic. Basically, he says, team-owned regional sports networks have changed baseball's economic landscape:

Before A-Rod, the YES Network never did better than a 3.2 rating. Since A-Rod came to the team, the network has seen its ratings rise to a record 4.7 this season. Since no significant position player has been acquired since Rodriguez joined the Yankees in 2004, Boras says he can contribute the ratings rise -- as well as the turnstile rise, by the way -- to his client being on the team…

…YES, which was given an initial value of $850 million upon launch in 2001 is now said to be worth about $3 billion.

While I remain dubious that A-Rod is the sole reason for the network's growth -- afterall, YES had only existed for two seasons when A-Rod arrived in New York -- Boras makes a compelling argument. If one marquee player can have a dramatic impact on an RSN's ratings, then isn't he worth whatever the ratings boost brings in advertising revenues? From a purely economic perspective, I can't say that he's not.

That said, I don't like the implications of Boras' logic. Team-owned regional sports networks should generate revenue to help support a winning team, not the other way around. And despite the potential to grow an RSN, signing A-Rod to an earth-shattering deal isn't the best way to put a successful product on the field.

Just look at the Yankees. They lost because they couldn't pitch; their go-to guy, Chien-Ming Wang, lasted exactly one inning in Monday's season-ending loss. Now consider that the four teams still alive in the playoffs have five pitchers between them who won at least 17 games this season, and that those five guys made a total of $21,054,167 in 2007 -- even less than A-Rod ($27 million) in his current deal. As far as wins and losses go, especially come playoff time, there are clearly better ways for a team to spend its money.

In the end, Scott Boras has always valued the biggest deal over championships. But A-Rod already has the biggest deal in history. If he really wants a ring to cement his place as the Greatest Of All-Time, he should be careful about how high he lets his agent go.

A - ROD'S STRIPPER FRIEND STRIPPED ! ! !

A-ROD'S STRIPPER FRIEND SANS CLOTHING