I have tried and tried to give Passan a chance, but I just hate his articles. I saw him and Gordon Edes (who’s from Mass.) do an ALCS preview on Yahoo! Sports. I preferred Edes to him, but strangely, Passan was much more likeable in person, and wasn’t dissing the Yankees at all. He’d picked the Yankees and Dodgers, Edes the Yankees and Phillies. Both picked the Yankees in 7 for the WS. But Passan’s articles are a pain to read. He always has some backhanded stabs to make at us. I like Tim Brown, Dan Wetzel, Edes, but I just cannot read anything from Passan without thinking he’s very biased (and a terrible sportswriter).

/rant

I have liked AJ (the pitcher) a lot for quite a while, but I recently saw three post-ALDS interviews on mlb.com: AJ, A-Rod and Tex. I was trying really really hard to like AJ (the person) but I couldn’t make out too much. His answers were smart and focused on the team, but I couldn’t make out anything about AJ. Regardless, I’m a big fan, and I would love nothing more than a lockdown win from him in Game 2. A-Rod was a different case altogether. It may have been the media having hounded him too much, it may just be the way he does interviews, but he was giving generic answers and basically not looking to engage at all. I was cringing when I was watching it, just thinking “smile Alex! You just did a great job, an amazing job, people are praising you for it . . so am I missing something?”. I’m not judging him, because I’m sure he has his reasons for that. (Just for the record, I love A-Rod as much as the next fan)

But man, Tex just blew me away. He’s like CC. He was giving intelligent answers, trying to answer the questions instead of giving canned responses. He’s a natural at this, I guess. I might be reading too much into a few short interviews, maybe. But it was fun to compare them.