The wayyyy-too-frequent prior to 2009 "the Yankees made it to the World Series six times in eight years before A-Rod got there. They won one postseason series in total since he's been with the team. IRREFUTABLE CORRELATION!!!!"
Yankee ERA (and opponents' ERA in parentheses) in the various LDSes, since the LDS era began. A * means the Yankees won the series.
1995 5.94 (5.79)
1996 3.46 (3.55) *
1997 4.36 (4.50)
1998 0.33 (3.24) *
1999 0.33 (3.60) *
2000 4.70 (3.48) * uhhh how did we win this? God bless the dynasty Yankees.
2001 2.20 (2.86) *
2002 8.21 (6.17) ---> this is not the series to watch if you want to see amazing pitching.
2003 1.50 (3.86) *
That choker A-Rod arrives.
2004 3.73 (4.65) *
2005 4.40 (3.89)
2006 5.56 (3.60)
2007 5.89 (3.41)
2008 n/a :(
2009 1.55 (4.67) *
Hmmm what do you notice here. Clearly, A-Rod was making Randy Johnson, Mike Mussina, and Jaret Wright suck in 2006, and making Chien-Ming Wang into a complete failure in the 2007 playoffs, plus he released the midges so that Joba couldn't throw strikes. Totes his fault. Don't get me wrong, watching Alex in the playoffs was painful in 2005 and especially 2006, and I guess 2007 to an extent, though he wasn't nearly as bad as most of the rest of the team in that series. He couldn't buy an RBI. But the Yankees losing those series were not his fault. He shouldn't get close to the majority of the blame. (One other thing people whine about is A-Rod not being able to get a guy home from third with less than two outs in Game 4 of the 2004 ALCS. That sucked, but... I hate to say this, but if Mariano Rivera doesn't blow that save/Joe Torre calls for a pitch-out, we're probably never talking about that at-bat again. The most ridiculous part of that whining? We only ever had a lead in that game because of A-Rod's home run!!!!)
Did A-Rod's home run off of Joe Nathan FUCKING RULE? Yup. But if AJ had had a Bad AJ outing, or even a Slightly Worse AJ outing, earlier in the game and the score was 5-1 going into the bottom of the ninth, that home run wouldn't have really mattered.
