{"id":12890,"date":"2012-03-17T15:55:56","date_gmt":"2012-03-17T15:55:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/?p=12890"},"modified":"2012-03-17T16:05:37","modified_gmt":"2012-03-17T16:05:37","slug":"pettite-joins-scholes-in-the-un-retired-club","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/?p=12890","title":{"rendered":"Pettite joins Scholes in the un-retired club"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Jorge Posada announced his retirement<\/a> at the end of January, New York Yankee fans started coming to terms with the reality that a glorious era in their team\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s history was coming to an end. The fabled \u00e2\u20ac\u02dccore four\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 was now down to two.<\/p>\n

Mariano Rivera\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hints early in Spring Training that 2012 might be his last season appeared to suggest that the figure was about to change again relatively soon.<\/p>\n

The figure has changed much more quickly than anyone would have imagined\u00c2\u00a0 and even more surprisingly it has gone up rather than down.<\/p>\n

The announcement on Friday<\/a> that Andy Pettitte has decided to come out of retirement, after one year on the sidelines, came out of nowhere to those of us on the outside. The Yankees\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 General Manager Brian Cashman disclosed that he had actually offered Pettitte a contract in December, only for the pitcher to hold off on making a decision. That had seemingly ended his chances of a comeback\u00c2\u00a0as Cashman instead turned to Hiroki Kuroda and Michael Pineda to strengthen the Yankees’ starting rotation.<\/p>\n

Pettitte\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s return proves three things:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Even when the Yankees’ budget is set, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s always a bit more money in the bank for them to add to it if the right player comes along.<\/li>\n
  2. Contract discussions can be kept confidential, even when they involve a team from the mass-media market of New York.<\/li>\n
  3. You should never doubt how hard it is for a player to walk away from the game, nor how strong the urge is to give it one more try.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    We witnessed a similar situation earlier this year with Paul Scholes at Manchester United. Like Pettitte, Scholes called time on his career on his own terms, not waiting for his body or his manager to tell him that he couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t compete at the highest level any more.<\/p>\n

    Scholes turned his attention to coaching Man Utd\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s reserve team, thinking that being at the training ground every day would be enough to make the withdrawal symptoms manageable. Instead, it only made him realise how much he missed being involved at the sharp end, just as Pettitte\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s recent stint throwing in batting practice sessions made his desire to play again even stronger.<\/p>\n

    The only barrier in the way of Scholes and Pettitte at that point was the potential embarrassment of coming out of retirement having accepted all of the accolades. Pettitte even said at his retirement press conference that he would be embarrassed to return, but his comments on Friday perfectly summed up how things can change.<\/p>\n

    “I am embarrassed that I’m coming back, but then, I’m like, ‘What can I do?'” Pettitte said. “Things have changed. My desire to do this has changed, and I sure as heck don’t want to look back 10 years ago and say, ‘Man, I wish I would have done that.'”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    Such a return always has some segments of the media writing about the potential to tarnish a legacy.\u00c2\u00a0 We went through all of that when Thierry Henry put an Arsenal shirt on again in a brief loan stint earlier this year.<\/p>\n

    Those sentiments are a load of rubbish.<\/p>\n

    Maybe it could happen if a player came back and ended up being completely hopeless, but that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s extremely unlikely to ever be the case for a player not motivated by a desperate need to earn some more money (which Henry, Scholes and Pettitte certainly are not). The players have too much pride to attempt a comeback unless they genuinely believe they could do themselves justice. The people around them, friends and family, would be honest with them and the teams involved wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t take them back unless they felt they could contribute.<\/p>\n

    If Pettitte\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s return to the mound doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have a fairy tale ending and he has a below-par year, that will be a shame but far from a tragedy.\u00c2\u00a0 No true baseball fan would view his career in a different light because of it.\u00c2\u00a0 More likely the results of the year will be easily overlooked and what we will remember is the motivation behind his decision; what Pettitte refers to at the end of the above quote.<\/p>\n

    He\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s making a comeback because he thinks he can still play, appreciates more than ever what a privilege it is play the game he loves, and is prepared to accept the possibility that it might not go the way he hopes because he wants to make sure he ends his playing career with no regrets.<\/p>\n

    His return might not work out perfectly, but the reasoning behind his decision shows that he has made the right choice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Just like Man Utd’s Paul Scholes, Andy Petttitte has found that nothing can compare with playing your chosen sport<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[503,505,553,98],"class_list":["post-12890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mlb-2","tag-featured","tag-man-utd","tag-mlb-2","tag-new-york-yankees"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12890"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12890\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12893,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12890\/revisions\/12893"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}