New York to Jimmy Rollins: We Wish We Knew How to Quit You

There's always a reporter for the local newspaper of a championship team whose job it is to cover the opponent throughout the playoffs and into the World Series. For the New York Daily News, that reporter has been Roger Rubin. Rubin's main job in covering the Series – especially a team like the Phillies – is to get an opposing player quote that will drive traffic to the site, elicit response from the sports talk radio crowd and distract people from the New York Post's ridiculous artist renderings.

Usually, following the opponent during a World Series run is the bottom of the barrel for a sports writer covering the game. While all your colleagues are getting doused with champagne and grabbing quotes for stories that will be hung on cubicle walls for a year and stuffed in scrapbooks for a lifetime, you're stuck in a dejected locker room with players who aren't in any sort of mood to talk. And, frankly, the losing players don't see you every day like their own beat guys, so why would they give you the quote, if anyone?

But the 2009 Philadelphia Phillies are a different bunch than most. These Phillies love to talk – especially New York lightning rod Jimmy Rollins. Remember that a few years back when the Phillies had won exactly nothing in 15 years, Rollins called the Phillies the team to beat -- a direct jab at the rival Mets. More recently, Rollins has taken other jabs at New York, the Mets specifically, even invoking their name during his World Series parade speech last year (for full disclosure, I thought bringing up the Mets during that speech was petty and unnecessary).

Before the World Series, Rollins stayed in the New York headlines by proclaiming on The Jay Leno Show that the Phillies would win in five, maybe six, games. Obviously now we know that Rollins was wrong, but his prognostication did come on a talk show, so perhaps we could chalk that up to entertainment and fueling the World Series buzz more than overconfidence in his team.

So what was Rollins thinking last night, when he gave the Daily News another headline? Philadelphia's Jimmy Rollins: Phillies are still better than New York Yankees, the headline reads for Rubin's story today. And if you read the actual story, which most people undoubtedly won't do before jumping off the ledge to call Rollins every derisive name one can think of, you'll find his quotes are quite innocuous, given the circumstances.

"They were the better team this series," Rollins said Wednesday night. "Do I think we're the better team? I really do. They just executed. I think we weren't playing bad, but they were playing that much better. ... They got the hits, we didn't. It's that simple."

Of course the guy thinks his team is better. The defending champs got back to the World Series and for much of the six-game set, played pretty pedestrian baseball. What else is a prideful guy going to say just minutes after his season ended with a loss? But unlike the fire-starting Rollins has done before with the New York media, this wasn't a jab at New York. Unless, of course, you only read the Daily News headline – then he's still the detestable player New Yorkers think he's always been.

The fact is, New York needs Rollins just like he needs them. You don't fill the tabloids with "both teams played hard." Maybe the Daily News took some liberty with Rollins to further stoke the flames of this rivalry – without a villain it's hard to have a hero – but I don't think Jimmmy will mind. If Yankee fans read Rollins' comment and it gets them angry enough to take a second away from reveling in their own excellence-by-association, then, in a way, maybe Rollins wins a little, too.

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.