Burnett: 'Guys don't want to face me' by Jared Carrabis
Rest of the league: 'Yes, we do'


I don't know what the Yankees' AJ Burnett is smoking, but I'll guess that it was grown somewhere in Mexico.

I hope he wasn’t serious when he said this, but Burnett went on the record to say the following:

"I'm a force out there," Burnett said. "Guys don't want to face me. I just felt like guys didn’t care if they faced me (last year). I feel like I gave them that edge… I came here to win. I came here to pitch. I came here to be behind Big Man (CC Sabathia). And I wasn’t last year."

Yeah, you’re a real "force", alright.

Last year, Burnett went 10-15 with a 5.26 ERA, which included a streak of going 4-13 with a 6.48 ERA for the last four months of the season, and 1-7 with a 6.61 ERA from August until season’s end.

Burnett had the third-highest ERA among 92 qualifying pitchers in all of baseball, trailing just the Kansas City Royals’ Kyle Davies (5.34) and the Detroit Tigers’ Jeremy Bonderman (5.53), who is currently without a job.

Andrew Marchand of ESPNNewYork.com went as far as to saying that Burnett's 2010, "may have been the worst season for a starter in Yankees history."

If you're keeping score at home, that’s [bleeping] horrible. The Yankees are no expansion team; they’ve been around for a few years, had some good teams with some good pitchers, had some bad teams with some bad pitchers, but to be a historically bad pitcher on a Yankee team that was two games away from the World Series? "Force" isn’t exactly the word I’d be reaching for.

Last year, Burnett was under .500 both on the road, and at home. He went winless in June and in August. He gave up 26 earned runs in the first inning, and 30 runs in the third inning of a season in which he made 33 starts. He was 0-1 with a 7.63 ERA in three starts against the Red Sox, 1-3 with a 6.27 ERA in four starts against the Tampa Bay Rays, 0-3 with a 9.61 ERA in four starts against his former club, the Toronto Blue Jays, and just 2-2 against the cellar dweller Baltimore Orioles.

His ERA at Fenway Park in 2010? Just 7.63. That’s not even half as bad as what it was at U.S. Cellular (21.60), or the Rogers Centre (14.04). You guys get the point.

Shut up, AJ. Guys laugh at your contract and your statistics enough; they don't need to be laughing at your quotes in the paper, too. I feel like I've been doing one post a day that rips on the Yankees. I don't mean too, but they've just been making it so damn easy lately.

-Jared Carrabis

Published on February 17, 2011

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