stop making sense

part of a joe sheehan BP article on what's wrong with mo week:

Let's not kid ourselves. This is being blown out of proportion in part because Rivera was facing the Red Sox. Had he blown back-to-back saves against the Devil Rays in June--or to the A's and Rangers in August, as he did back in 2003--there wouldn't be headlines like "Time to panic in the Bronx?" or lines like "Has he lost it?" working their way into coverage. Because Rivera's failures this week came against the Red Sox, six months after he was credited with two blown saves against them in the ALCS, there's a rush to pass some kind of judgment based on a vanishingly small sample of events.

...Save yesterday's outing, Rivera hadn't pitched poorly, and in fact, had pitched very well in at least one of the games, blown save or no. The common thread isn't failure by Rivera; it's that the Yankees asked him to protect four one-run leads. Certainly in the ALCS, the Yankees' failure to capitalize on late-game situations was as much a factor in their losses as anything Rivera did.

That's not to say Rivera is 100%. Whether his elbow is still bothering him, or just the lack of work he got in spring training because of the elbow, he clearly wasn't the same in the second of back-to-back games. He's not done so much as he's still in the third week of spring training, trying to get himself into game shape. That's a much more plausible explanation that inferring, from two outings, that the Cyborg Reliever has suddenly lost his power pack.

there's more to it than that, but you've got to pay to read.