Let's take a moment and pretend you are an alien from a distance planet, whose spaceship just landed today on Earth. Upon your arrival, the first person you meet, who is not scared off by your two heads and four arms, is the self-proclaimed biggest baseball fan of the planet. You take him at his word, and intrigued by the Earthling's enthusiasm for this sport, you resolve to learn as much as possible about baseball. Blessed with a superior intellect, by the end of the hour, you have absorbed the entirety of the baseball realm, including knowledge of advanced baseball statistics and the history of baseball from the beginning of time to the present day.
After the hour is passed and you are even more a baseball expert than the person who introduced the sport to you, you are left with a couple of lingering questions. The first is just why so many people devote so much time and energy into a sport that revolves around a ball and a stick. Surely, you think, there have to be better ways of passing the time on Earth. Realizing there is probably no satisfactory answer to your first query, you quickly move on to the second issue that is so troubling you.
Knowing what you know about baseball, and that it is a sport where even the best hitters on the team are given limited opportunities to help the team, you wonder why on Earth New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez is receiving so much criticism for the Yankees' hitting woes in the playoffs when he is only one-ninth of any hitting lineup. For one hitter to inspire so much vitriol and enmity, perhaps it is true that Rodriguez was the only problem with the Yankees' hitting in the playoffs and without him, the team would be in the World Series now.
In order to test this theory, you remove Alex Rodriguez's hitting statistics from the Yankees' team hitting statistics to see what the rest of the Yankees hit without Rodriguez holding them back from scoring 50 runs per game; you received the statistical data from the box score archives of Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs.com.
After you removed Rodriguez's hitting statistics, you found that the rest of the Yankees only posted a hitting line of .193 BA/.260 OBP/.319 SLG with a .252 wOBA, which, if they had hit that way for the entire season, would have made them the worst offense in the major leagues; it was also a steep departure from how the Yankees hit during the regular season when they posted a league-leading .342 team wOBA.
Wait a minute, you say. No, that can't be right. With all the negative attention Rodriguez has faced during the Yankees' nine-game playoff run, there is no way the rest of the Yankees were that mediocre without him. If that were the case, then the entire team would have been criticized instead of just one player whose impact on the game was so minimal. So you double check the numbers, but they stay the same.
Therefore, you are only left with one conclusion. For some reason, the sports world and media seem to enjoy pointing out everything Rodriguez does not do even to the exclusion of actual facts. Not wanting to spend any more time on a planet that can spend so much time on and seemingly take so much joy in unfairly criticizing one person, who has never done anything to anyone, for such a meaningless sport, you leave immediately.
