Elegy to a Yankee center fielder

Larry Mehnkin has a nice piece begging Bernie Williams to pack it in.

I love Bernie Williams, at least as much as a heterosexual man can love another heterosexual man he's only seen on television and a couple of times from a few hundred feet away with several thousand other people in a baseball stadium. I don't want to see him playing poorly, I don't want to see him playing for another team.

But I also don't want to see him playing for the Yankees, he no longer has any value to them, and while loyalty is a very nice thing, it's something that's best cast aside in baseball. The point is to win games, not be nice to your friends, and Bernie Williams can't help the Yankees win games. He needs to go.

But who am I, or anyone else, particularly Phil Allard, to tell him to hang it up? No, Bernie is not a very good baseball player any more, but there are dozens, maybe hundreds of professional ballplayers who aren't good enough to keep playing in the majors, and they keep it up. It's not for money, or pride, or because someone talks them into it, it's because it's baseball, and who in their right mind would willingly walk away from that?

These guys don't owe us anything. They don't owe it to us to leave a special memory of them at their peak, they don't owe it to us to stop playing when they're no longer helping the team. They owe nothing to anyone but themselves, and if they want to keep playing, and someone wants to keep playing them, then that's their right.

I am inclined to go in a different direction. As Joe Sheehan pointed out recently, any team sporting Bubba Crosby as its starting CFer can't be too picky about who their fourth outfielder is. Nevertheless, the fear for all of us Jankee fans, especially those of us who know and love Joe Torre, but are generally made nervous by his decisions when it comes to "experience," is the knowledge that the temptation to play Bernabe in center will be just to great for the skipper to withstand.