All hail Helen!!

All hail Helen!!
Helen Carmona and your humble blogger

Sunday, April 6, 2008

There's no panic in baseball

MEMO TO YANKEE FANS: There are 157 games left in the 2008 season.

Because of the miracle of the Internet, I can live in Taiwan and listen to talk radio from New York. Usually, I'm not one of those who derides the lunacy of talk radio. People need a place to vent and sound unintelligent, and unless your Orson Welles scaring people into suicide, what harm's been done?

But listening to the string of calls to WFAN early Sunday morning (New York time), I had to laugh. Half a dozen callers in a row opened their remarks with some variation of 'Help! The SS Yankee clipper is going down!"

If it wasn't the relief pitching it was the bat of Robbie Cano (who's due to have an MVP season, mark my words). If it wasn't Cano, it was Matsui, or Damon, or Girardi, or.... you name it, Yankee fans found a way to use it as a 400-lb noose around our necks.

People, ease up on the accelerator and take your fingers off the panic button. Drop the despair and let the paranoia go! It's April 6, for crying out loud. If we're still a game under .500 on August 6, then we've got something to worry about. But it's not August, it's April, so lighten up.

This is a team that has battled itself out of huge holes in the recent past. This season's roster is not all that different from the one that nearly stole the AL East flag just last year, and last year's team had shaky relief pitching, April-May offensive slumps that would kill Joe DiMaggio (if he weren't already dead), and starting pitchers named Mike Mussina, Andy Pettitte, and Chien-Ming Wang. If any of those things sound familiar, they should. This season's team has exactly the same ingredients.

Will things play out the same? Who knows? I sure don't. But it is too early to pull our collective hair out and start calling for players' heads. The April schedule is murderous. Barring rainouts, the Yankees will be fortunate to get to May 1 at 16-13. And if that record were reversed, it still wouldn't be a tragedy.

That baseball is a marathon, not a sprint, is a cliche, but it's a cliche for a reason: because it's true. If the Yankees are floundering come August, we can start burning up the phone lines and calling for blood in the streets from the rolling heads of Yankee decision makers. But it's April. The clouds will clear. The flowers will bloom. And the Yankees will win.

And anyway..... we could be Tigers fans.

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