Accursed Yankees

Enough of the ephemeral, such as politics, moral values, airstrikes on "insurgents" in Fallujah. Let's talk us some baseball!

Thanks to Alex Belth for the link, but Allan Barra has a terrific rebuttal to the Red Sox-centric NY sports press today, He starts off by reminding Boston fans that in 1980 the Phillies won a world championship after a 97 year drought (97 years!), and they were expecting the start of a dynasty. They haven't won since.

And he does a great job in putting the lie to sportswriterly talk that the 2004 Boston team was a bunch of goofy volunteers whose good cheer and teamwork ("there's no 'A-Rod' in TEAM") made them the better team, while the Yankees are a bunch of money-grubbing mercenaries who choked in the clutch.

It has practically become an article of faith among local writers and commentators that the right way to win a pennant is for a team to cultivate players through its own farm system. If this is true, then how to explain the Red Sox, whose only homegrown player is Trot Nixon? The Yankees didn't win, so it goes, because they didn't have enough left in their farm system to trade to Arizona for Randy Johnson the way Boston had enough left in theirs to trade for Curt Schilling. Well, the three gems in the Red Sox system who went for Schilling were pitchers Casey Fossum, Brandon Lyon, and Jorge de la Rosa, who were a combined 14-32 this year with a collective ERA of almost six runs per game. The Yankees had several studs in that category, including Felix Heredia, Scott Proctor, Jose Contreras, and Tanyon Sturtze, whose collective ERA this season with the Yankees was about 5.6. For some mysterious reason, the Diamondbacks wouldn't bite on the Yankees' lemons as they did on the Red Sox's lemons; I'd love to believe that this had nothing to do with Arizona's willingness to make the front end of a deal that resulted in the Brewers, Bud Selig's old team, dumping high-priced slugger Richie Sexson, thus taking a chunk out of Milwaukee's payroll. But let that pass. The point is that the deal for Schilling, baseball's ultimate mercenary -- salary $12 million a year and a rÈsumÈ that includes pennant-winning stints at Philadelphia and Arizona and millions of fans who cursed him for being a hired gun when he left -- was precisely the kind of deal that Steinbrenner and the Yankees would have been criticized for if they had made it.

The number one target for blame, predictably, is Alex Rodriguez, who just a few months ago the Red Sox and their fans were lusting after -- lusting so hard that Commissioner Selig, ever ready to stick it to Steinbrenner, personally intervened to try and make the deal. Rodriguez was flogged by, among others, Mike Lupica (Daily News, October 22) for coming up "as small as an exercise jockey in Games 6 and 7 against the Red Sox" and by just about everyone else in the sports media for failing to step up in the postseason. Of course, this isn't just an exercise in Yankee bashing, but an illustration of how the playoffs and World Series have turned us into an audience with a two-day memory. Manny Ramirez ended the 2003 season being ripped as a selfish slacker who took time off for illness and then showed up at a bar with his pals. We will remember 2004 as the year Ramirez -- who made enough horrendous plays in left field to make Sox fans forget Bill Buckner -- won the MVP while A-Rod flopped.

In point of fact, A-Rod (in 26 postseason games) has outhit Ramirez (in 78 postseason games) by 74 points, .330 to .256, and in 11 postseason games this year had the same number of total runs (19) as Ramirez had in 14. But somehow A-Rod has been tagged as a guy who can't deliver in the clutch; it's a good thing Willie Mays, who batted .247 with one home run in 25 postseason games over his career, isn't playing today.

The whole bit about the farm system is also interesting because, as Belth notes, there has been precious little attention paid to sabermetrics and the role of Bill James in putting together the Red Sox. They're just a bunch of "idiots" who just love to play the game. Bull. They are a collection of players whose strengths and weaknesses were identified and analyzed in order to put the strongest team out there, based on their individual statistics over their respective careers.

Now, can the Red Sox maintain that championship caliber in the wake of new pressure to get back to the Serious (something the Yankees contend with every year, and have down so since, I don't know, Nineteen Twenty Three), while players with shiny new rings will want contracts commensurate with their success, and deal with fans who are now sentimental about Pedro, Varitek, Millar, Cabrera, etc.?

Meanwhile the Yankees (who by the way, I consider the home team for the Reality-based community) are in the news.

Derek Jeter, despite relentless criticism of his fielding over the years, finally earns a Gold Glove.

All-around mensch, and Brooklyn-native, Willie Randolph will be leaving Joe Torre's side as Yankee bench coach to be the new manager of the Metropolitans.

And the era of Mel Stottlemyre, the pitching coach who cajoled, flattered, criticized, and befriended some of the best assembled pitching staffs in history from 1996-2003, may be coming to an end (Stottlemyre denies this). 2004 did not count as a great pitching staff, by any means, and that probably wore him out, and he had to hear the bitter complaints about him in the NY sports press, that he couldn't "fix" Javier Vazquez and was no good with young pitchers like Weaver. But I think when pitchers such as Clemens, Pettite, David Cone, Mike Mussina, Mariano Rivera, etc. speak of the man with reverence, I think he's got to be pretty good.

And, finally, in Hot Stove news this morning, will Alfonso Soriano and David Wells be donning the pinstripes again? Inquiring minds want to know! Soriano is an exciting player who makes too many errors and strikes out too often, but he's an explosive upgrade over Miguel Cairo. Cairo was great this year, but definitely played above his career level. David Wells has about 350 pounds on a frame that's about as old as Babe Ruth's, but he's still a crafty, much needed lefty and much loved by the NY fans.