OK, I like Ben Shpigel’s Yankees coverage for the New York Times, but this is getting absurd. From today’s write up of the Yanks’ win over Seattle last night:

Rodriguez is no longer just climbing the career home run list. He is scaling it at a feverish pace, crushing two mammoth blasts to the nether regions of Oakland Coliseum.

Fair enough! But here’s Shpigel way way back on… June 23:

Theories abound regarding Rodriguez’s meager power output, and he and the Yankees have dismissed any suggestions that his hip problem has affected his power. Still, Rodriguez has already had homerless streaks of 61, 49 and 41 at-bats. Heading into Tuesday, he had homered every 30.8 at-bats. His career rate is once every 14.5 at-bats.

Look, I’m a reporter and occasionally — I hope very rarely — I give undue emphasis to stuff I’m writing about because I get wrapped up in a story. And Lord knows I’m prone to hyperbole. But there are a lot of at-bats in a season. There are going to a lot of unrepresentative samples when looking at a slice of those at-bats. Not everything is the big trend that Shpigel’s Yankees coverage has described so far this season.

On the other hand! Yankee fans deserve hyperbolic coverage. We’re the sort of people who thrive on projecting our hopes and fears onto meaningless blips of statistical noise. The season can be doomed in April and a World Series ring secured in June if you listen to us. So hold your head, Shpigel. As far as I’m concerned the tone of your writing is a wry journalistic experiment in exploring the emotional tumult of Yankee fandom.