Afternoon prowl: Curtis Granderson says goodbye edition

What, is it prison?

The kind of thing Grandy had here, it can’t be brought back. There’s a thing that happens between a player and fans and a certain team that is rare and wonderful, and until it’s broken it’s hardly even acknowledged. When Giambi left Oakland, it was like that. When Nomar left Boston, it was like that. When Michael Hart left Michigan, or Ben Wallace left the Pistons, or Brett Favre left the Packers, it was like that. Once in awhile, great players come to personify their team. It is so rare that it is pretty much impossible for a player to do it twice, unless he is completely reinvented in his new digs, a la Barry Bonds.

To come back to Detroit 3 or 4 or 5 years later, say as a guy in his mid-‘30s, it would be nice, but the magic wouldn’t be there anymore (see Wallace, Ben).

He’s not going to be an All Star for the Yankees. You can bank that now. You can go play for the Yankees, and you can play well. That pinball machine they call a ballpark in the Bronx can only help our pull-happy line drive hitter, but his Gold Glove range will go to waste in an outfield designed after the one that Bernie Williams could cover. Under the lights of Yankee Stadium and Yankee fandom, his strikeout streaks are not going to as forgiveable. And it’s simply not going to be nearly as fun. He can’t possibly be the guy there — not even Alex Rodriguez could come to New York and take that from Jeter. Grandy will be window-dressing to them.

You can take your game to New York, but you can’t take your soul. That dies on the way.

We’re not just saying goodbye to Granderson here. We’re saying goodbye to the whole Granderson-Detroit-2006 thing. Expecting Austin Jackson to come in and become that guy, well, you’re talking about a guy with half the talent the guy we sent to Florida for Cabrera. Jackson may have been the best prospect in the Yankees farm system, but that’s like being named MAC Player of the Year. Grandersons don’t just come from nowhere, or even from mildly exciting prospects. That’s why they’re special: because they’re so rare. It’s even rarer still for a guy like that to come up in one of the few markets that can support a great player for the entirety of his career — that won’t have to strip and rebuild and sell off assets at some point. Granderson exemplified to us that we wouldn’t be a constantly rebuilding team anymore — that we had a core. That we had a heart to this ballclub.

We did. We don’t. I’m not even going to qualify this with a “if it pans out.” This was a white-flag trade that is bad today and will be bad tomorrow. It is a profound slap in the face to Tiger fans, who will react by not buying as many tickets for the next few years, which will further strain the team’s resources and force more White Flag deals. And furthermore, in the one pro sport where being bad for a couple of years is the least likely to make you better in the long run, we have made ourselves worse at playing baseball.

I had a feeling there was a very good rapport with his team mates, I always had a feeling he was liked by him and vice verse.

He was driving FROM Chicago to Detroit – gas in Illinois is very expensive, so he waited until crossing the border into Indiana to gas up. It has nothing to do with how bad off Michigan is – that doesn’t even make any sense.