Hello friends, it’s been awhile, but the sportswriting “market,” no less than that for every other type of journalism these days, especially locally, has been failing so badly on a certain Cleveland sports issue of towering historical significance that we’ve got to fire up the old blogging engines for posterity:
While this week’s sweep by the Yankees at Progressive Field was no fun (but congrats again to the 300 million-dollar roster of baseball players for beating the 70 million-dollar roster), enough hasn’t been said about what Jose Ramirez did at Yankee Stadium *last* week, where our Guardians took two out of three from the Yankees—not just in going 7 for 13 with a home run, 3 doubles, 5 runs scored, and 3 RBI—but in becoming the all-time batting leader among all visiting players at Yankee Stadium in MLB history, passing Ty Cobb with a now-.409 batting average.
While the headline to the Paul Hoynes piece pictured above proposes the question of why Jose is so “absolutely unstoppable” at Yankee Stadium, his column doesn’t get to the best part of the answer: Which is that any other superstar player who comes into New York is not unreasonably viewed by the home crowd as a future Yankee, who will eventually become priced out of his contract with his current team and sign with New York, or at least, if he’s good enough, be subject to a bidding war that the Yankees can win with the tiny handful of other franchises that keep taking the roof off of MLB player contracts.
Jose Ramirez, by contrast, walks in and out of Yankee Stadium as an unbought and unbuyable man to a degree that’s completely unprecedented in modern MLB history and probably also in the entire era of the multi-hundred-million dollar pro athlete. He’s certainly the only modern baseball superstar who, as Yankee fans and all MLB fans know, will never become a Yankee, because he’s the only one in history who’s ever said, loudly and proudly, that a few hundred-million American dollars is plenty for him, without having to stack a few more hundred-million on top of it, to be a bona fide Hometown Hero to millions of American baseball fans in a particular region by playing for his entire career there. Nevermind, of course, that we’re talking about the Greater Cleveland area, the best location in the nation.
The aura this gives Jose when he walks into Yankee Stadium, as much as any other ball park, is of course unimaginably powerful, including because it serves as a chilling reminder to Yankee fans and players alike (among others) that man-made scoreboards can only measure so much about what makes a person truly great.
Congrats, Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani, that you can make big plays in big games surrounded by a bunch of other 300 or 400 million dollar guys in your lineup. But you are simply not Jose Ramirez, the G.O.A.T. where it counts the most. This man really cannot be appreciated enough, especially by Cleveland baseball fans.
Thanks as always for reading Cleveland Frowns and go Guards! We do have something else cooking on another Cleveland sports issue of towering historical significance so you’ll want to check back here around September.
