THE YANKEES REPUBLIC

SAMSON OF THE DIAMOND

2011-08-03T10:52:00.000-07:00

"How large is the price, how endless the nagging pain that must be paid for a personal assertion against the familiar ways of the world... that most of us lack the strength to pay."-- Irving Howe

No fan who writes a web log about professional sports does so unless the emotional reward exceeds the compensation money can supply. I include myself in this company. Major League Baseball, the National Football League, and to a lesser extent, the NBA, at their most competitive, arouse in me a visceral passion the world outside of fiction rarely can satisfy. Still, my love for the Game has rarely migrated backstage to embrace any particular sentiment for its players.

This isn't to say that I haven't admired or respected or celebrated a select few for their dedication to their craft; or for the rigor of their discipline; or for the grace and beauty their performances consistently exhibit, or for their capacity-- in moments when the odds, the elements, age or injury, or dwindling talent conspire against them-- somehow to muster reservoirs of mettle, desire, ingenuity, and resilience and defy the clock, overcome the score, foil his opponent, silence his critics and transcending the seeming limits of the body's strength and endurance wring victory from defeat by sheer force of will.

Muhammad Ali, Dan Marino, Bernard King, Reggie Jackson, David Cone, Bernie Williams, to name just a few, have inspired me in their triumphs--- and, on occasion, notwithstanding their defeats-- to believe that every once and a while, if only for brief and fleeting moments, that in spite of genetic endowment, ingrained character, adverse conditions and mortal flesh, we actually can guide our destinies and triumph over circumstance.

Yet I wouldn't consider any of these men "heroes" of mine either. I don't idolize professional athletes individually or collectively. Their personal lives don't especially interest me. Their money and celebrity don't infatuate me. My awe, respect, and gratitude for them doesn't differ materially, in fact, from the sentiment awakened by an especially vivid fictional character a gifted and incandescent actor has animated on stage. The performance stirs me, not the actor in costume or the man inside the uniform.

This may explain why the widespread idea that professional athletes should act as role models and uphold some irreproachable standard of rectitude and decorum, few among us actually observe, because little children look up to them always has struck me as rank hypocrisy-- at best, a gross abdication of responsibility, and at worst, a perverse rationalization for it. If children idolize athletes or aspire to emulate them, then the fault, dear Brutus, lies with us.
For we have failed then as adults to propagate moral values more lofty and eternal than fame, wealth, and status and have failed as a country to throw up, for emulation, heroic examples beyond those who embody our religion of success. Power no less than impotence abhors a vacuum. In a void, a child will venerate the idol nearest at hand.

Excellence alone, after all, does not a hero make.

To paraphrase the author Albert Murray, a hero is the representative man who pits himself against the inhuman-- atrocity, injustice, brute nature. Yet half the reason the boxing ring, the gridiron, the parquet, or the Diamond exert their hold on our imagination is because through their concrete color-blind rules, their professional impartial judges, their tangible, quantifiable, and immediate reward of merit they enclose a Platonic arena from which the bugaboos upon which the hero forges his sword have been banished. When men in uniform fan across the field, it evokes in our imagination, to quote Joseph O'Neill in Netherland, an arena of perfect justice.

Along the way, the professional athlete certainly invites failure and defeat; he certainly contends with the elements; and on occasion, he even risks bodily harm. The hero however confronts ostracism, vengeance, infamy and death. This is because he doesn't merely confront danger; the hero seeks it. And he welcomes its mortal antagonism because in the sacrifice he incurs to contest it, he honors a value higher than his financial security, his social status, his personal reputation, or even his life. For by doing so, Murray tells us, he magnifies "the glory of courage, the power of endurance, [and] the splendor of self-sacrifice... [P]romising young men... do not become heroes by simply keeping their police records clean and their grade point averages high enough to qualify them for status jobs and good addresses inside the castle walls" Or, one might add, nor do they merely rack up home run totals high enough to enter Halls of Fame.

No, before any professional baseball player can lay claim to the hero's mantle, he has to have risked and sacrificed for a cause greater than himself and to have suffered the revilement and decimation begotten because of it. He has to have endured the tragic fate of Curt Flood. Indeed, as HBO's documentary "The Curious Case of Curt Flood" portrays him and his sacrificial battle with Major League Baseball-- a portrait that never shrinks from the smoldering pride and stubborn defiance and frequently improvident excess that underwrote its protagonist's reckless courage and flawed nobility-- its creators have identified in Curtis Charles Flood a consummate America hero and man truly deserving of a Hall of Fame.

THE FLOOD & THE RAINBOW
For those of you unacquainted with Flood's biography or his story's significance in baseball history, I summarize.

On October 7, 1969, a mere year removed from the St. Louis Cardinals' second consecutive National League pennant-- honors which owed a great deal to their star center-fielder-- the franchise traded the 31 year old, 3-time all-star outfielder to the Philadelphia Phillies. Rumors of the Cardinals' intent to trade the fleet outfielder had circulated throughout the season. And Flood swore if it came to fruition, he'd defy it and refuse to go. Good to his word, Flood never reported to Phillies' camp. But rather than concede the immutable unfairness of a system that denied a man any say in where he played even after his 11+ years of service to it and merely retire with his reputation and equanimity secure, Flood chose instead to fight City Hall.

Contesting his trade, in January 1970, Flood filed suit against Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, Major League Baseball, and all the League's then 24 clubs. In it, the former Cardinal contested the League's then existing "reserve clause" regime -- so-called because every player's contract contained a provision in which his team "reserved" the right to renew their players' contract indefinitely and at whatever salary the club chose-- as an illegal restraint of trade under the Sherman anti-trust Act; an unconstitutional violation of the 13th Amendment's prohibition of involuntary servitude according to the 13th Amendment; and unlawful breach of any number of Civil Rights Acts. Flood v. Kuhn essentially asked the Court to repeal baseball's anti-trust exemption, to annul the reserve clause in every player's contract, and to grant Flood and derivatively, all players, the right to free agency. The player's union financed the suit with this very motive. And its President, Marvin Miller, in fact, warned its lead plaintiff before he initiated the action the grave risk he assumed. At best, he could win a Pyrrhic victory. The Court would award him a right in principle, no team then would choose to exercise in practice. Triumph might introduce free agency to baseball from which fellow and future players could profit. However, Flood, himself, would remain a free-agent forever.

Heads, Major League Baseball wins; tails, Flood loses. Seldom have men risked so much to gain so little.

In March 1970, Flood lost his petition for a preliminary injunction. In August, he lost his claim for a permanent injunction and for damages. Two years later, Flood lost on appeal at the Supreme Court. In between, he lost his physical skills and mental stamina, his capacity to focus and his will to play; as a brief, halfhearted, and abortive attempt at a comeback with the Washington Senators in 1971 ended in anguish.

13 games into the 1971, his career came to an abrupt and fateful ending. At the age of 33, Curt Flood had played his last inning in professional baseball.

NO, MASSAH, I WON'T GO
Now, as any fan of the game knows, teams deal players all the time, uprooting them from their homes and sending them to work half-way across the country. Most of the time, abstract numbers and competitive need propel the transaction. And sure, a baseball player insulated from America's tortured racial history might have perceived his trade as nothing more sordid than business as usual: the Cardinals suffered from lack of power; the Phillies, lack of speed. The Cardinals coveted Phillies' first-baseman Dick Allen's thirty-plus home runs. The Phillies, on the other hand, desired Flood's defensive prowess, plate discipline, and proficiency at generating runs through his speed. However, in this instance, critical elements beyond the players' complementary skills-- indeed beyond the field entirely-- drove the Flood-Allen transaction.

In the essay, "Curt Flood, Gratitude, and the Image of Baseball" collected in his recent book "A Level Playing Field," Professor Gerald Early explains. Both Flood and Allen had developed the reputation of being "problem players". Worse still, at a time when baseball still expected the black athlete to repay his sufferance with grace, humility, and gratitude, both were black "problem players". Richie Allen, a tense, brooding, withdrawn man, had earned the stigma by antagonizing his teammates and alienating Philadelphia's white-working class fan base through fights, unexplained absences, and self-inflicted injury. (The first-baseman, notoriously, cut the tendons in his hand by putting his hand through his car's headlight.) In St. Louis, on the other hand, fans and teammates alike adored and respected the gregarious and urbane Flood. Bob Gibson, in fact, appears in interviews throughout HBO's documentary and exudes the affection and admiration he must have felt for Flood in recalling their time together. [**]

Cardinals' management, it seems, shared Gibson's affection initially. Then, however, the organization's prize center-fielder chose to criticize his team's trade of Orlando Cepeda for a first-baseman named Joe Torre. This also happened to follow a petty and gratuitous speech team owner, August Busch Jr., delivered during Spring Training about thankless ballplayers earning high salaries and incurring no risks. After which, his center-field hand, evidently, compounded his trespasses by committing baseball's cardinal sin. Flood dared to suggest that perhaps owning a monopoly in St. Louis baseball franchises might expose its proprietor to something less than the perilous vulnerability an independent business owner or pioneering entrepreneur risks. And in doing so, he violated, what Early calls, baseball's reigning ethic of gratitude-- the dogma that the game's players (its blacks especially) owe a debt of thanks to its owners and fans, as if professional athletics were a privilege its industry vouchsafes rather than a status the athlete earns.

Early writes,

"The professional baseball industry [this includes all the yahoo sportswriters it co-opts] fosters the expectation of gratitude by mythologizing the game...propagandizing it as a symbol of American democratic values.... thus masterfully and subtly turning the public against any player who does not express that he feels blessed to be playing it."

THE TEMPLE FALLS
In 1976, the odious reserve clause regime did topple however. In the Messersmith-McNally case, a labor arbitrator discerned the fundamental injustice the Supreme Court had allowed sentimentality to obscure and awarded the two players free agency. From there, the marketplace swamped the old regime and Versailles crumbled soon afterward. Approximately one hundred years after its founding, America's pastime finally accepted the principle of free labor.

And so, two years later, writer Richard Reeves decided to interview the man who'd dealt the foundation its first blow. But free agency's lonely standard-bearer had suffered for his cause in the intervening years and had no desire to revisit the battlefield. His joust with the windmills had left him battered, broken, and desolate and had stripped him to a shell of the man he once was. As it turned out, the scaffolding that he'd dislodged eventually had fallen, but in the interim, fragments of debris had landed on top of him.

When Reeves finally caught up to him, Flood had begged him to withdraw. "Please, please...don't bring it all up again. Please. Do you know what I've been through? Do you know what it means to go against the grain of the country? Your neighbors hate you. Do you know what it's like to be called the little black son of a bitch who tried to destroy baseball, the American Pastime?"

Flood's "Battle Royal" had cost him first a career. Then turning him into an outcast and sending him into a European exile, it cost him his home, his moorings and his standing. Then, saddled with rage and resentment, wandering for a decade in search of the solace of anonymity and oblivion, it cost him self-possession and peace of mind. Until finally, home again, robbed of sanity and financial security; choking on the bile that comes of bitterness swallowed and anguish stifled, the injustice that he'd gambled everything to rectify eroded his defenses, deformed his character, cost him his health and claimed his life. The man whose implacable voice Baseball could not throttle, throat cancer silenced. Curtis Charles Flood died a largely forgotten man at age 59.

THE TWILIGHT PATH OF MEN
To its credit, HBO has resurrected Flood's story and brought him the recognition and vindication he has long deserved. Still, it bears asking the question: does the institution responsible for destroying this man honor and revere him for his courage and perseverance or exalt and cherish him his sacrifice? Who grieves the loss of free agency's John the Baptist. The $30 million a year superstar Flood enabled? The membership of the Player's Association he empowered? The $7 billion a year corporate industry known as Baseball Inc. that now reaps titanic profits from the very free agency-- through the Hollywood star system free agency wrought--- Curt Flood once espoused and Major League Baseball, in all its myopic atavism, battled so ruthlessly to defeat?

Where in Cooperstown's stands a monument for the man who spearheaded the end of the indentured servitude to which baseball's owners clung as though not only the game itself but their very livelihoods depended on it? Where shines a bust to the genuine hero who "struck out against injustice... and whose tiny ripple of hope... had swept away a mighty wall of oppression and resistance;" whose act spawned a revolution in a pastime steeped in its own hidebound prejudices and romantic nostalgia and liberated it from its own worst intractable, self-defeating proclivities? In all baseball's vain, self-aggrandizing, and meretricious rhetoric about heroes and legends, where does it hallow the memory of Curtis Charles Flood?

Nowhere. And notwithstanding HBO's arresting and much-needed documentary about him, America's pastime isn't likely to fete him anytime soon. For Curt Flood's biography belongs to the counter-myth of baseball. It is the story of ruthlessness and brutality and greed baseball doesn't like to acknowledge and the nation doesn't wish to hear. It's the story of Josh Gibson, Donnie Moore, Charlie Shoemaker, Doug Ault, Brian Powell, and most recently, Hideki Irabu: these are the men the game used up, discarded, and then disposed of; men it as good as killed or literally left to die. Their tragedies people the real-life grotesque of depression, suicide, alcoholism, failure, and ignominy that is flip side to baseball's certified mythology about heroes, legends, fame, glory and the American Dream.

And here lies Curtis Charles Flood's greatest significance. For as much he may epitomize the doomed innocent in a racial parable or signify the tormented athlete in a sports anti-myth, Curt Flood figures ultimately as the noble martyr and paladin in a grand American Tragedy.

He personifies the great national tradition of implacable resistance and vehement dissent running from Roger Williams through Patrick Henry and Harriet Tubman to Martin Luther King. The Citizen so exercised by injustice, so intolerant of oppression, so immune to the Bitch Goddess' allure that he will court failure, risking wealth, career, power, prestige, reputation, standing, family, love, and if necessary, life itself in behalf of a cause-- in behalf of, for Americans, the cause. It is the cause for which religious dissidents, venturesome settlers, dissolute colonials and incorrigible revolutionaries defied the power and might of the greatest empire on earth to secure an elementary human principle and from it, to spawn a new kind of a nation-- one without ancestral monarchs, inherited classes, or an established church and where its citizen controlled his fate, above all, through the inviolate right to sell his labor and to own its fruits.

By another name we call it the cause of freedom. And to introduce it into one of the new nation's oldest institutions no less than a hundred years after its organized birth, the St. Louis Cardinals' center-fielder invested and lost everything -- career, livelihood, status, family, equanimity, health and life.

Yet a game which doesn't salute the heroic sacrifice of Curtis Charles Flood accordingly or commemorate his brave struggle or mourn his tragic legacy or establish a place for his daring gallant failure alongside the anodyne successes celebrated in its Hall of Fame isn't deserving of its national mantle: The so-called "American pastime" is just another name.

_________________________

**In fact, anyone who wants to witness an example the fundamental distinction between a champion athlete and a genuine hero need only compare respectively the savvy and artful accommodation Gibson admits he negotiated with the status quo and the self-destructive, bullheaded confrontation with it Gibson ascribes to Flood. Gibson's enigmatic personality and calculated tact seem to mine a survival strategy belonging to a very different tradition in his people's history. One to which Ralph Ellison memorably voiced it in the Invisible Man's father's death-bed confession: "Live with your head in the lion's mouth... overcome 'em with yeses, undermine 'em with grins, and agree 'em to death and destruction, let 'em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open." In this, Gibson acts as Daniel to Curt Flood's Samson.

[1] We saw this expectation resurface recently in the clamor about whether Derek Jeter "owed" it to the fans to appear in the 2011 All-Star game. Expecting as much from Jeter is the equivalent of Anheuser-Busch demanding that its CFO play in the beer industry's (not even the company's, mind you) annual exhibition softball game during his summer's single four-day weekend.

CHASING 3,000

2011-07-08T09:04:00.000-07:00

Baseball movies, as a rule, traffic in cheap nostalgia and treacly sentimentality. They don't reproduce the rigorous and humbling game that professionals play or the stifling regimented lifestyle ballplayers lead. They produce a romantic fantasy. They project a Field of Dreams where glorious heroes bestride the Diamond like gods; where hardy, stoic role models play for love and vindication, not money; where tickets sell for a buck, hot dogs, for a quarter; where the crack of the bat, the pop of the ball, the whiff of the mitt, and catch with dad deliver the most unadulterated and gratifying satisfaction life can supply.

"Chasing 3,000," a film released in 2010 with little fanfare, largely adheres the genre's formula in its portrayal of the legendary Roberto Clemente's pursuit of 3,000 hits in the waning days of the 1972 baseball season. Clemente's flirtation with the historic milestone following a late-season flurry forms the backdrop to the story of teenage brothers, Roger and Mickey, two avid Pirates fans transplanted from Pittsburgh to sterile Southern California during the 1972 season and the Odyssean 3,000 mile trek across country they embark upon to witness Clemente's achievement live and among 50,000 like-minded fans at Three Rivers Stadium.

As if two baseball-obsessed teenage brothers' penniless cross-country pilgrimage in the family jalopy to see their beloved hero-- in defiance of their overprotective, solicitous mother-- didn't carry enough prepackaged bathos, the story adds an extra dollop of saccharine by saddling the little with brother muscular dystrophy. Indeed, the family moves to L.A., much to Roger's chagrin, to alleviate the burden on Mickey's disease-ridden lungs. The contrivance of Mickey's frail health serves to complicate the brothers' drive across country and manufactures for the film its principal element of suspense as the brothers race against time to reach Pittsburgh before Mickey's lungs fail, Clemente attains 3,000, and the cops, alerted by their frantic mother, apprehend them.

Lost, meanwhile, is just why 3,000 is such a momentous milestone or why Clemente had gained an iconic status in baseball long before he earned his 3,000th hit and long before he died three month later in a tragic plane crash. Clemente counted among the game's heroes largely for his humanitarian work off the field. What's more, he performed the pioneer role for his group that Jackie Robinson and Hank Greenberg had fulfilled before him, paving the way for the Latino superstars that followed him and functioning as the living symbol of Hispanic immigrants' aspiration for complete acceptance and full integration into American life. And the heroic status Clemente enjoys to this day is a testament to the pastime's function as a solvent of the nation's pluralism almost since the game's inception.

I evoke "Chasing 3,000" here because as Derek Jeter approaches the same milestone all the meretricious hype and hoopla that has accompanied it suffers from a kindred sentimentality that similarly obscures its significance. Of course those susceptible to glib symbolism can read into Jeter's landmark-- coinciding as it does with Barak Obama's Presidency-- some kind of democratic token or monument to an increasingly post-racial society. And despite some superficial parallels in the two men's temperaments and ancestries, I suspect both would resist any interpretation that would serve to minimize the racial prejudice they've had to overcome because of America's obscene legacy of imposing social and legal disabilities on anyone born with "one-drop" of African blood.

Still, those quick to dismiss Jeter's role as a racial symbol, like Robinson or Clemente, should consider the strange fixation TV cameras have exhibited over the years with Jeter's parent. Can you recall another contemporary Yankees whose parents have rivaled the Jeters for the air time cameras shower on them? Did the families of Don Mattingly, Paul O'Neil, Bernie Williams, Mariano Rivera, Jorge Posada, or any other recent iconic Yankees never attend ballgames? Other than Harlan Chamberlain, Joba's handicapped father, the cameras however seem to ignore player's families. Perhaps the voyeurism says more about our tacit prejudices and ingrained reflexes than we realize or care to acknowledge.

Still, what strikes me as the regrettable omission which links "Chasing 3,000" and the media's coverage of Jeter's impending feat is their mutual failure to account for the milestone's significance as an athletic accomplishment or baseball feat. Sure, we've heard time and again that the Captain is about to become only the 28th player in the game's history to number 3,000 hits and the first to amass the total in a Yankee uniform. But there the discussion typically ends. No one seems to address its comparative difficulty or significance. Is the milestone arbitrary? If not, what distinguishes it in distinction or prestige from all the other numbers baseball celebrates-- 600 homeruns or 300 wins or 2,000 RBIs or 700 steals or 54 consecutive games with a hit. Is one monument more prodigious an exploit than the others? Examine the list of the elite 28 players again. Does each conjure in your mind an aura of greatness? And if so, does the player do so because of the milestone or in spite of it?

I don't profess to know the answer to these questions. But presumably, the manifold commentators who hold themselves out as the game's experts and who presume to enforce these milestone's sanctity each year when casting their Hall of Fame ballot, should know the answer or at least, offer an informed opinion. Alas, I haven't heard one.

Instead, the tedious daily narrative recycles endless speculation on which day of the week Jeter is more apt to attain 3,000 or how much pressure he's apt to face as he approaches it or how eager the Yankees and their fans are to see him hit the magic number at home. Worse, it seems to provoke the equally petty and academic discussion about how soon afterward the Yankee franchise can hallow the one player in their history to total 3,000 hits by unceremoniously dropping him in the batting order. In fact, the conjunction of the two subjects-- the dispatch with which the echo chamber clamors to consign Derek to the dustbin moments after his coronation--- only dramatizes just how much these pundits professed regard for Baseball History reeks of the same pious sentimentality and intellectual fraudulence which besets Hollywood's version of it.

Accordingly, when Cooperstown tabulates the voting next November and the phalanx of Baseball Writers, bloated with sanctimony and intoxicated with indignation-- when these self-appointed Guardian of the Milestones fan across airwaves to exalt the sanctity of the numbers and to deplore "steroid cheats" for defiling its liturgy and to justify rejecting Bonds or excluding Clemens, savor a good sneer. For what the Guardians protect isn't the sanctity of a democratic shibboleth. No, what they jealously guard-- in presuming to anoint one a Heroic Legend and to brand another a Anti-heroic Outlaw-- are the prerogatives of power. Woe unto him who doesn't genuflect before their altar.

So Derek Jeter, be prepared. After the bow, expect to Kneel.

MUDDLING THROUGH

2011-06-07T06:39:00.000-07:00

So here it is, sprung a little early perhaps, but offering the season its unavoidable, if equivocal, touchstone nonetheless.

No doubt, their rosters still will evolve, if not undergo major renovation, by the time these two arch rivals next do battle during three days in August. Nonetheless, this the third confrontation in as many months with Primeval Nation should allow the Yankees' front-office a revealing glimpse of its team's flaws, an accurate estimation of its strengths, and a reliable index of its fate.

At present, one can't help but see in the 2011 Yankees a paler incarnation of those mid-decade Torre teams less assembled than improvised-- a haphazard patchwork stitched together with threadbare arms; graying vets; and erratic lineups dependent on the home-run ball but that through their pluck, moxie, canniness and heroics from unlikely sources nonetheless manage to brave the dog's days and to transcend their irremediable flaws to reach October, only to expend themselves in the process and to fall in the first-round when younger, faster, more prolific teams feast on debilitated bodies, withered bats, and creaking arms.

2011's team recalls its doomed predecessors' infirmities perhaps because so much of its success stems from the mystifying eclat of two fallen aces chronic injuries seemingly had reduced to ragged journeymen but to which the Yankees-- through their own improvidence, impatience, myopia, and a chronic ineptitude at cultivating their own-- had to resort to fortify the weakest rotation $50 million could buy.

Call it luck. Call it Mystique and Magic. Call them 2011's version of Aaron Small and Shawn Chacon. But there they are-- straight out of Hollywood Central Casting. Barty and Fred, confounding age, shaking off injury, defying expectations and lifting their team ERA to the rank of 4th in the AL. Freddy, through deceit and guile, evoking the last gasps of Mike Mussina. Bartolo, through renascent velocity and incorrigible heft, inviting comparisons to Roger Clemens in his twilight, on the one hand, and to David Wells at his pugnacious best on the other. (During post-game interviews, you half expect to see Carrie Fisher materialize chained to Colon's waist)

Indeed with their 123 ERA+ and 121 ERA+ respectively, Garcia and Colon, together, account for the Yankees' rotation surpassing even the most optimistic expectations and in large part, for the marginal distance currently separating New York and Boston.

Only the certain knowledge that fortune like this can't last; that wizardry of Garcia's and Colon's kind only casts its spell as long as one declines to peer behind the curtain; that eventually an Aaron Small will reveal himself to be Aaron Small and a Shawn Chacon will return to being Shawn Chacon; and that to expect either Garcia or Colon, let alone both, to continue to perform this well through the summer-- or just to stay healthy for as long-- demands a blindness of faith few Yankee fans can muster.

Indeed, closer scrutiny of the Yankees' and Red Sox' rosters and the uneasiness only mounts. Apart from the Yankees bullpen and their late inning corps of Chamberlain-Robertson-Rivera, the Red Sox are at least the Yankees' equal and subtract Colon's and Garcia's aberrant success and Boston is far and away their superior. Although the runs scored totals roughly mirror each other, the Red Sox own a younger, quicker, more disciplined lineup that excels the Yankees in Runs Created (321 to 291), team batting average (.270 to .251), on-base percentage (.341 to .334), pitches per plate appearance (3.96 to 3.90), RISP with 2 outs (.262. to .242) and the gap between them widening as Adrian Gonzales, Carl Crawford, and Kevin Youklis all shake off their early season doldrums and reach their career averages.

Sure the two most prominent under-performers in the Yankees' lineup Jeter (80 OPS+) and Posada (82 OPS+) could rebound as well but their advanced ages suggest less aberrations than the erosion in skill that in our amphetamine-free game that now bedevils players over 35. And, above all, in comparing the two team's starting rotations, the Yankees' current advantage appears fleeting. Upon which prospect are you more likely to stake your faith: on Buchholz, Lester, and Lackey improving (108, 103, and 54 ERA+ respectively) to match their career averages (121, 127, 111) or on Colon and Garcia continuing to confound theirs.

The Red Sox already have beaten the Yankees in six of their last seven meetings this years. True, the mound pairings have favored Boston but more importantly, on the field, they've demonstrated themselves the superior team.

AGE CAN WITHER HIM

2011-05-09T10:28:00.000-07:00

Why can't we allow our superstar athletes simply to age gracefully and exit the stage with their pride and dignity in tact? Why the incessant probing; why the ravenous obsession to pinpoint the game, the season, the year in which the player's skills eroded, his reflexes dulled, his luster faded, he will not again duplicate the mastery his performance once displayed?

Of the 12 scouts or officials contacted, none thought Jeter would approach his old self. – New York Post, May 8, 2011

Of course, through the years, one learns that, from the pack of reporters who cover baseball, not to expect much in the way of independent thought, seasoned wisdom, or imaginative empathy. Perpetual deadlines, exhausting travel schedules, a twenty-four media cycle’s insatiable appetite for content, and a journalistic marketplace so ravaged by competition that the lowest common denominator rules; all conspire to precipitate, night in and night out, the same bumptious questions, the same hackneyed debates, the same one-dimensional narrative. Is the Captain mired in a prolonged slump or is this, at thirty-seven, what age hath wrought?

Perhaps, the question persists because the obvious answer satisfies neither the ambitious reporter nor the anxious fan. A definitive answer, that it, awaits 2011’s conclusion and perhaps, 2012’s as well. Recall the flock of vultures circling David Ortiz after he floundered in 2009 and struggled through the first months of 2010. How many predators had stalked still vital (and lethal) prey? By 2010's conclusion, Ortiz had proved the obituaries premature.

For as often as the scriveners invoke baseball's exalted tradition, history rarely informs their commentary unless they have a moral ax to grind. Which consists, more often than not, of a quibble with some player's deviation from their own provincial narrow code of personal decorum: Player X, that is, dared to breach his time-honored responsibility as a social role model. No, the Pride of the Yankees, says Bill, would never have squired strippers around Toronto. The Yankee Clipper, says Joel, would never have resorted to artificial performance enhancers. No, the Sultan of Swat, says Wally, would never never never have placed his interest above the team by refusing demotion in the lineup. To mine a pearl of wisdom Justice Byron "Whizzer" White, himself a former professional athlete, unearthed many decades ago, "the deeply rooted traditions" of any institution are arguable. More often than not, they reflect less objective fact than the orthodoxy of their arbiter.

Admire the irony though. Only yesterday these self-same arbiters were preoccupied with condemning, reviling, and ostracizing Alex Rodriguez for ingesting magic elixirs designed to prolong his career and to preserve his stellar talent and prolific productivity on into his early 40’s? [1]

Today, the mob pursues the mid-30's superstar once celebrated precisely because he shunned the Wellspring of Youth to which so many of his contemporaries succumbed. Listen carefully enough during the post-game press conference though and you can hear reverberate through the clubhouse an echo of the voyeuristic malice, morbid curiosity, and voracious bloodlust that once pursued A-Rod.

“Joe, we’re now 30 games into the season, when is it time to drop Jeter in the lineup?”

A question the manager deftly skirts for yet the fifteen time this week, “Our priority is winning, Joel. We’ll do anything necessary to help the team accomplish its goal.”

Sure, Girardi's practiced platitude has defused the latest foray, but the manager knows that he can't repel the slavering mob indefinitely. What with the radio jackals baying and the ESPN mouths driveling and the press corps, at long last, tasting blood, the Captain’s Teflon armor won’t hold forever. If the crowd turned on Mantle, the Yankees have to know, Jeter's aura won't save him either. This history the moral scriveners know all too well.

For in the gloaming they can hear the swans warbling for Mr. November, and in the clubhouse they can spy the Captain’s “bleeding drops of reds.” No voice sings to the gallantry of aging naturally and no Stadium cheers indignities born with grace. The Guardians of the Diamond have come to watch Age make mortals of legends and to administer last rites. They come to bear witness that however many millions earned, however many starlets bed, however many records broken, Jeter suffers like the rest of us.

For one inarguable national tradition does endure. Americans prefer their heroes dead.

[1] Never mind that cheating the aging process antedates even our national pastime as an American tradition. Ponce De Leon went searching for a Fountain of Youth five hundred years ago. What middle-aged man who swallows Viagra; what post-menopausal woman who injects Botox; what college student who pops un-prescribed Ritalin; what aging stage actress or senescent rock star who “get by with a little help from their [Benzedrine] friends”; what American possibly could begrudge McGuire, Bonds, Clemens, and Rodriguez for taking drugs (legal, extralegal, or illegal) to enhance their performance, to lift their team, and to cling to the uniform and the spotlight for as long as their bodies would carry them?

RECKONING BY THE BOOK

2010-10-28T20:56:00.000-07:00

Many people I knew... shared a habit of mind usually credited to the very successful. They believed absolutely in their own management skills. They believed absolutely in the power of the [] numbers they had at their fingetips... I had myself for most of my life shared the same core belief in my ability to control events... [Yet] some events in life would remain beyond my ability to manage or to control."-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

For this Yankee fan, the end of a season invariably tinges the days that follow with an inconsolable emptiness. For six months the game's daily drama and the team's unfolding fate weaves its narrative into the fabric of life, and then, with the abruptness of death, defeat rends the thread, familiar faces recede, and the vivifying tonic that brightens the evening and crowns the day suddenly evaporates. No mourning rituals, No redemptive meaning, No residual solace. Only an aborted plot -- a deus ex machina ending to an unfinished novel.

But this year I can't but wonder whether defeat, in the end, might not serve a greater good; whether, for some within the Yankee hierarchy, it isn't justly deserved.

No, not the players, of course; their season came to a premature, unceremonious, and ill-favored end. Too many sprouted and flourished this year; too many battled and excelled; too many suffered through injuries and persevered through pain not to achieve a success short of their aspirations. The star arrival of Robinson Cano; the budding efflorescence of Hughes and Gardner; the grizzled marvels of Pettitte and Mo; the steadfast yeoman mettle of Tex and A-Rod; and the redoubtable, 300lb Atlantean pillar holding it all up, the double YES, Si Si: would that they received accolades equal to their pluck, tenacity, and splendor and to my gratitude.

In the franchise's upper reaches, however-- from the manager up to the highest echelons of its business department-- Yankee Pride, recently, has meant something more like Yankee Hubris. And if the financial executives don't account for the team's latest defeat, they certainly could benefit from the chastened reflection and withering self-scrutiny rarely stirred in its absence.

Reevaluation ought begin with the 1.5 billion dollar Colosseum and its unintended yield-- exorbitant ticket prices inflated beyond what many can pay or the market will bear; a permanent supply of vacant seats; lower tiers filled with passionless, fickle dilettantes, a permanent corporate gentility ringing the field whose luxury box amenities and royalty suite perks a Prateorian guard has to protect against the descent of the ardent, demonstrative, raucous Pinstripe faithful now confined to remote bleachers and nosebleed grandstands and treated like an unwelcome hoi polloi.

In the new Stadium, Yankees have erected the modern equivalent of an Elizabethan Theatre or Metropolitan Opera House. Class hierarchy and status symbol abide everywhere and personify the very caricature the Yankees' spiteful rivals ordinarily have to cite a 200 million dollar payroll to portray. Only with a World Series to inaugurate their luxury Palace, none but the churlish could complain. This year, however, no championship trophy will silence the objections. Season ticket-holders will vote with their feet. Fading novelty, grossly inflated prices, and PSL contracts' imminent expiration may deliver a reckoning Randy "Shlayger" Levine and Lonn "them eat" Trost hadn't bargained for-- the law of diminishing returns. And the usual blend of strident defensive broadsides and smug Olympian rationalizations to which they've resorted when the subject has arisen in the past won't save them.

May they reap what they've sown-- a drought followed by the whirlwind.

BASEBALL OPERATIONS
More worrisome however than the financial department's arrogance is the dogma that has gripped the team's baseball operations. Manager and GM, it seems, have turned statistical analysis into a theology, and with it, they've fallen prey to the blindness which afflicts the converted in his zealotry.

In an interview Michael Kay conducted on his New York radio show, he recently asked Brian Cashman, "Do you have a problem with Joe [Girardi] going strictly by the numbers? Would you rather he go by the gut?"

To which Cashman responded, "I definitely don't want people going by gut. I wanted people to make informed decisions. It's about being educated and being informed... If you can set yourself in a position to have a rational process in place, then you'll put yourself in a position to succeed more than fail. And I think gut is just irresponsible."

It must comfort the GM to imagine that he and his skipper can manage events on the field according to a "rational process." Unfortunately, the game no more unfolds according to an empirical formula or yields to collective control than do financial markets, international relations, or population growth. Too much human enigma separates statistical probabilities from scientific certitude.

Now, one hardly expects a GM to know much about history or philosophy but had he read Rousseau or Freud or simply studied late 20th century Russian history, he might have recognized in his worldview what we might call "the fetish of reason". After all, the Marxists, too, thought that they could isolate the laws of history and deduce from them the future.

Likewise has sabermetrics seduced Cashman and Girardi. From them, it seems, they've forged a crutch from what best serve as a tool and in the process, have forgotten that intuition and instinct are at least as integral as reason and logic to sound judgment. One problem with placing too much faith in them is that statistics illuminate what has happened more clearly than they forecast what will. Even inside the Diamond, heart and emotion, desire and will, singularity and contingency, chaos and luck, too often, still prevail. The fastidiously prepared and studiously memorized "match-ups" contained within a black book do not determine the outcome, even if one somehow could choose the metric most applicable to the situation at hand.

With a one-run lead in the 6th inning of Game 4 of the 2010 ALCS, for example, which statistic should the Yankees manager heed? With David Murphy at-bat and Benjie Molina to follow, should Burnett's complete history against Murphy and Molina, respectively, control? Or is it Burnett's performance against them in 2010 that matters? Or is it perhaps his overall performance this year in similar middle-inning predicaments? Or rather, is it how he fares after a 100 pitches; or with 2 outs; or at Yankee Stadium; or in the post-season; or if you walk Murphy, with men in scoring position? Or how does one weigh any of Burnett's figures, moreover, against the corresponding numbers Boone Logan, a reliever limited largely to lefties and one or two innings, has compiled?

Even if Girardi bases his decision on the numbers, he still has rely on an educated guess-- on inductive reasoning-- for the right statistic to choose. A "gut" decision isn't "irresponsible". It's inevitable.

Now, would the Yankees would have won the 2010 ALCS had Joe Girardi discarded his black binder and ignored the statistics and chosen more wisely in the situation described above? Probably not. The numbers may not forecast the future but they don't lie about the past. When his team bats .100 points less than his opponent's over six games and his pitching staff yields, on average, three and half more runs, even the canniest of managers isn't likely to stave off defeat. Still, Girardi's decision-making in the series certainly didn't help. Whether it was intentionally walking Murphy in Game 4-- putting the tying run in scoring position and the go-ahead run at first-base-- or whether it was his folly of repeatedly opting for Logan, Robertson, Mitre in critical situations-- most notably, Robertson, in Game 6, despite batters' .440 average against him -- meanwhile shunning Joba or saving Wood until too late, his discretion eluded him. Instead, much like last year during the postseason, pressure seemed to paralyze the manager so that rather than allowing the game's situation to dictate his decision, he fell back on some preconceived notion the statistics had inscribed.

Which suggests that the manager's fixation with the numbers actually indicates a failing more fundamental and more troublesome-- it implies either an incapacity to learn from mistakes because of a worldview so circumscribed it can't recognize or assimilate error and a character so rigid it cannot adapt or grow. Indeed, because past proficiency does not guarantee future success, on the probability that Girardi lasts another 3 years I wouldn't hazard a bet.

THE GIRARDI COMPLEX

2010-10-06T08:38:00.000-07:00

No doubt, the moment will arrive. The question is when and how badly the manager will cost them.

Figure Sabathia will make Girardi's task easy. Averaging 3.79 pitches per plate appearance, the Twins rate about league in plate discipline. And with his ace receiving a much-need eight day respite, the manager will let C.C go as deep into the game as performance, pluck, endurance, and mettle will carry him.

The pratfall, unfortunately, is apt to occur much later and thus at a moment all the more pivotal. Imagine Game 2 with the still not fully recuperated Pettitte reaching a 100 pitches sometime in the 6th inning or perhaps, in Game 3, while a still young Hughes battles his way into the 7th before his innings totals reach unchartered terrain and his efficacy wanes.

Like most contests between the Yankees and Twins in the postseason, the game will be close at the time. Perhaps, the teams will enter the 6th or 7th tied or with a run separating them. Imagine Pettitte's cunning and guile holding the Twins at bay through six until the aging veteran surpasses the hundred pitch mark and the fatigue sets in. Or perhaps, the fastball and curves Hughes was throwing innings earlier on the corners starts to drift into the zone as he pitches his unprecedented 182nd inning in a season.

The Twins capitalize and within the blink of an eye, mount an incipient rally. A walk, a single, and with runners in scoring position, Joe Mauer waits on deck. And as the momentum suddenly shifts, game and series enter a watershed moment and upon the outcome, the Yankees' post-season fortune suddenly hinges.

The camera, naturally, will pan to the dugout. The shot will frame Joe Girardi frantically flipping through pages in his trusted black binder, searching for the key that will unlock the enigma his decision confronts with him. As usual, the expression on the manager's face will betray everything. The furrows in his forehead will deepen, he'll rock on his haunches, and an unseemly grimace will imply he hasn't had a bowel movement since January.

Having arrived at the answer his homework holds, the diligent student will stride to the mound, signal to the bullpen, and remove his disgruntled starter. Summoning his one and only lefty, Girardi will hand the ball to Boone Logan. But the modest .711 OPS the AL's reigning MVP has compiled against left-handed pitching and the two hits in seven plate appearances he's accumulated against Logan won't matter. Star will abuse novice and double down the line. Still, Girardi made the conventional call. Few can quibble with his decision.

But next ensues the Girardi hallmark-- the decision that defies common sense and eludes cogent reason. It begins with the genuinely perplexing question. Should he stick with Logan to face right-hand hitting Delmon Young because left-hand hitting Thome follows? Young's .927 OPS against lefties certainly excels his .781 against righties, as one might expect, but the disparity in Young's splits pales in comparison to his successor. Thome's OPS is 1.154 against righties and .769 against lefties. Further obscuring the answer, Logan hasn't faced either. Inside the dugout, the spinning wheels accelerate.

Eiland trots out to the mound to stall. Girardi returns to black binder. The camera this time features him riffling its pages frantically for the answer it doesn't contain. "Matchups"-- Girardi's favorite shibboleth for what he may or may not realize are statistically insignificant sample sizes-- won't decide the question. Neutralize Young with Joba or Robertson and lose Logan. Or gamble with Young and neutralize Thome. And the only means the manager has to resolve the dilemma will be to exercise the very faculty in which he has proven time and again he is desperately lacking-- instinctive judgment or if you prefer, intuition. A faculty Girardi's behavior often suggests he doesn't merely distrust but that he, moreover, represses consciously. As such, here is where Girardi, time and again, falters, and the reason why isn't all that opaque or complicated.

So often we hear the cliche about baseball. "Baseball isn't like the other professional team athletics." In baseball, the harder you try, the greater you fail. Batters press. They squeeze the bat. They step in and out of the box as their thoughts overwhelm them. They obsess about the pitcher's repertoire, his situational tendencies, his pitch sequence, prior at-bats against him. On the other end, pitchers, tormented by anxiety or frustration, sabotage their native gifts as well. A starter aims the ball instead of pitching it. He fixates on the umpire or overthrows.

How often, for example, have we observed A-Rod's obsessive conditioning, relentless work ethic, and assiduous study come back to haunt him? How often have his virtues, under pressure, instead of relaxing him, conspired to derail his talent? Or by contrast, how often have we observed the far less talented Jeter marshall his aloof, Olympian coolness and thrive as consequence. So, too, Bernie and his lovable but inscrutably serene abstraction.

Each provides an object lesson in the role the mind plays in baseball. Together, they dramatize the vacant mental state best suited to baseball. The Buddhists call it nirvana-- literally, the extinction of consciousness. For only by extinguishing thought, do we alllow the body's natural instincts, the muscle's ingrained memory, and the athlete's sublimely acute reflexes to assert themselves. Where reason yields, man can react. And in the land of the Diamond, the vacuous mind reigns. (Or in Boston, if you prefer, the Idiot is King.)

No less with managers does this axiom apply. Recall 1995 and the ALDS. Was there ever a more devoted, industrious, intellectually prepared manager than Buck Showalter? Yet in Game 5, after Showalter had exhausted and deflated his closer the two previous nights, he let David Cone nearly destroy his arm by throwing just shy of 150 pitches. Then he removed Mariano Rivera, after he easily retired two batters, only to hand the game to Jack McDowell. I needn't remind how the drama ends. Still, how did Showalter not know he possessed the most dangerous weapon Panama ever created? How could a manager so prepared, so reflective, so knowledgeable about the inner workings of the game possibly blunder? (By the way, it's no accident either that just a year later, the manager whose temperament shared much in common with his captain and his star center-fielder, rehabilitated his closer, discovered the greatest reliever of all-time, and won a World Series with much of the same talent.)

Ah, the fault, dear Brutus, lies deeper within. For high-strung, tightly-wound, smoldering managerial aggression, few but Billy Martin can equal Buck Showalter. Though Girardi certainly belongs in the discussion and therefrom his flaw stems.

Alas, Girardi's temperament less resembles the Yankee manager he once worked for than Joe Torre's predecessor. No one should gainsay Girardi's intellect or fail to applaud his work ethic. But the most innovative and advanced information money can buy are no substitute for receptive instincts and discriminating judgment. In fact, statistics, too often, encourage the fallacy the numbers are clairvoyant. No, like player, like manager, only a mind at ease can intuit the moment and unleash his subconscious to respond accordingly.

The Yankees enter the 2010 post-season, if not necessarily with a less talented team than in '09, than certainly with a older and on paper, less formidable one. As a consequence, Girardi's decisions at critical moments are apt to determine the Yankees' fate more now than before. But in the hours before game time, the manager would better serve his team by spending less time scrutinizing video or studying his opponent's weaknesses or pouring over scouting reports than in a yoga room or with his kids or on the phone with A-Rod's therapist. Whatever it takes to relax him.

Otherwise, when that pivotal moment does arise-- as, no doubt, it will-- Girardi won't use the statistics that crowd his binder. Instead, the statistics inside will use him.

In which case, the only numbers which will matter will inscribe one-way tickets on flights leaving New York.

HOW TO LOSE GAMES AND ANTAGONIZE PEOPLE

2010-09-14T09:25:00.000-07:00

Query: how do you know it's September? Because the Yankees manager's bullpen decision have begun to defy reason and worse, because he won't deign to explain them.

The Yankees won a World Series' last year, but it wasn't because of Joe Girardi. To the contrary, they won in spite of him.

For some reason, the frequently mercurial and arbitrary rationale governing Girardi's allocation of his bullpen earned him the extenuating charge of "overmanagement". The characterization is misleading however. Haste is no less culpable a vice than complacency. A manager's consistently premature removal of his relievers jeopardizes his team no less than unwarranted faith in them. The former, in fact, begets the latter. Using and discarding his best relievers, as Girardi so often did through the playoffs, ultimately compelled him to rely on inferior ones. Having deployed and removed Robertson and Chamberlain before circumstances warranted, Girardi had then to rely on the likes of Coke, Hughes (8.54 ERA in the '09 post-season) and Bruney. The most infamous instance cost the Yankees Game 3 of the ALCS and perhaps, Game 5 as well. Mismanagement wears many guises.

Last night in Tampa, a new one arrived. With the Yankees having lost three consecutive games and six of their last seven; with the team playing to decide 1st place; and with the Bombers tied 0-0 in extra-innings against the divisional rival poised to snatch the pennant from them, to whom does the manager entrust the game? One of his most forbidding relief pitchers, Joba Chamberlain? No. One of his most consistent andd reliable arms, David Robertson? No. Instead, the manager selects two of his worst. First, Chad Gaudin. Next, Sergio Mitre. Gaudin comes within one strike of walking in the winning run. Mitre promptly finishes the job by ceding the game winning homerun.

Perhaps, Gaudin and Mitre superficially impressive ERAs hypnotized Girardi. If so, don't let them deceive you. A closer look at the game logs available on Baseball-Reference.Com reveals that Gaudin owes his 4.00 ERA largely to stifling teams like Oakland, Seattle, and Kansas City. Likewise, Mitre and his 3.65 number. Neither fares well against opponents that can hit. AL East teams have a combined .300 batting average against Gaudin in 2010; against Mitre, it's not much better.

Joba Chamberlain, by contrast, despite his inflated 4.72 ERA has amassed a 2.00 ERA over the 18 innings he's pitched since July 30, and through all of 2010, he's held AL East teams to a .215 batting average. While Robertson boasts a 2.64 ERA since the 1st of June.

So with 1st place hanging in the balance and the Yankees in danger of losing for the seventh time in eight games, where exactly were Robertson and Chamberlain? Indeed, after Girardi's baffling decision sealed his team's fate, reporters asked the manager this very question during the ritual post-game interview. Consider not just his guarded and circular responses but his adamant refusal to elaborate upon them.

Kim Jones: "In the extras, to go Gaudin and Mitre there, in those spots... did you have everyone available?"
Girardi: "No, I did not... So I used the people available and we'll go from there," says the manager with a dismissive flick of his hand.
Kim Jones, again, "Any injury concerns there?"
Girardi: "Well, they've [Chamberlain and Robertson] been used a lot lately so it's something we thought we had to stay away from."
The Daily News' Mark Feinsand: "Joe, Joba hadn't pitched since Friday, the two days off didn't help?"
Girardi: "We just thought he needed another day."
Feinsand: "Was it something you saw?"
Girardi: "No, No, we just thought he need another day."
Jones: "Was it the pitchers who indicated to you that something wasn't all right"?
Girardi: "No, we talk to our guys and make sure they're all right. We communicate with them them and that's what we do."

Unfortunately, the transcription above doesn't fully communicate Girardi's terseness in response. Worse than the manager's condescending refusal to justify why he felt it necessary to rest Chamberlain for a third straight day (or to withhold, Robertson, for a second) are his curt antagonistic tone and his surly contemptuous manner.

Granted, Kim Jones, still, after all these years, can ask some inexplicably foolish and bumptious questions, but her inquiry above reflects the very questions that occurred to practically every Yankee fan watching last night's game and as it happens, to the YES broadcasters calling it.

First of all, unless Chamberlain is injured or has complained of arm fatigue, it defies explanation that he would NOT be available last night. Joba has pitched a sum total of ONE inning since Wednesday, September 8th, five days ago. And Robertson hasn't pitched much more either. He has pitched a sum total of TWO innings in the identical period.

No one denies the value of apportioning relief pitchers' innings and resting their arms as the season nears its end and the team prepares for the probability of playing in the post-season. But the significance of the Yankees' game with the Rays' didn't materialize out of thin air. A pennant race has embroiled the two teams for months now. If Girardi didn't anticipate the importance of having his premiere relievers rested and available in advance of the series, then the manager, at best, has been remiss. Still, Girardi claims he expect his two relievers to be available Tuesday. But what if neither is needed Tuesday or Wednesday? (Thursday happens to be an off-day.)

In that event, Girardi hasn't just been remiss in squandering his best starter's remarkable outing against his team now leading the Yankees in the standings. Should it prove unnecessary, in fact, for Girardi to use either Joba or Robertson Tuesday or Wednesday against the Rays, then Girardi's allocation of his relievers over the last week and a half will look outright delinquent. Don't forget: while ostensibly "conserving" his bullpen, Girardi also deployed his forty-year-old closer Friday night in 90 degree Texas heat-- a Texan heat that contributed to at least two Yankees starters sustaining injuries over the last four seasons.

Watching Joe Girardi's post-game interview last night recalls something The New Yorkers' Roger Angell wrote a few years ago in a review of "The Yankee Years" about the current manager's predecessor. No, Torre can't claim to have distributed the bullpen's workload with any more foresight, prudence, or equity than his successor. Yet as Angell observed, in a game that, too often, encourages men to act like boys, Joe Torre never ceased to play the role of adult among men. (Perhaps, this explains why the Yankee players who deported themsevles likewise through Torre's tenure and continue to do so to this day have stayed so loyal to him.)

Girardi could stand to learn from them a lesson or two in civility and professionalism. Because treating the press like a petulant and antagonistic adolescent would a captious parent, however exasperating the loss, profits no one. We forgive an adult the occasional unhinged outburst. But smoldering disdain leaves a toxic odor that lingers for a considerably longer duration.

After all, professional athletes earn our respect and our admiration through their willingness to fail in public and to stand at their lockers afterward and to endure with stoicism the disappointment and the criticism it incites.

If the Yankees manager can't fulfill the expectations the world asks of his players, when his contract expires, he should do us all a favor and find another job.

EMPERORS, LORDS, & THE NBA'S ROTTEN GARDEN

2010-07-13T06:04:00.000-07:00

The consoling grace of squandering a week engrossed in the vacillations of a free agent whose "Decision," in the end, arouses only disgust and disappointment is that those, upon whom the NBA had palled for the last seven years, can now safely return to ignoring it for seven more.

During the winter's cold, dreary months, the Yankees needn't worry that another new York mistress will steal my heart. For no other team commanding my allegiance has won a Championship past my toddling years. And from the events of the last week, it would seem the Knicks aren't likely to fill that void anytime soon.

In the wake of Lebron James' rebuff, many a fellow Knick fan will wish to vent his or her dejection, frustration, and ire upon the athlete who spurned his team and to denounce him for the media circus "His Decision" excited. However justified the sentiment may be justified, its target isn't. Call the "King" what you will; but, he, at most, is the catalyst for our tribe's fury and vexation. Abject failure and risible ineptitude has characterized the Knicks since the time Lebron James attended high school in Akron. And the reasons for it lie in origins older than a single off-season and stem from causes more fundamental than the choices of a few free-agents.

Apprehending the latter begins with the following question: why does the colloborative decision of 3 millionaire athletes to work together generate an outcry while the conspiracy of 32 billionaire owners to cap their wage escapes mention? After all, LeBron James did not create the system where salary caps protect billionaires' pocketbooks, constrict the number of teams eligible to bid, and relegate others to decades of competitive oblivion. Lebron James, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Bosh did not create a system where one single team actually could afford 3 of the game's top ten players because no other franchise could offer either one individually or all three collectively more money. Nor, of course, did LeBron James create the economic regime that accounts for the same three or four teams representing their conference in the finals every year and for the same five franchises, over the last decade, winning the league's championship. In fact, since the NBA instituted the salary cap for the 1984-5 season, only 7 of the league's 32 teams have won a championship: the Celtics, Lakers, Pistons, Bulls, Rockets, Spurs, and Heat. By contrast, over the same thirty-five year period, SEVENTEEN different Major League Baseball teams have won the World Series.

Critics nonetheless complain all the time about Major League Baseball's revenue disparities, competitive imbalances, and its players' inflated contracts. Yet the Miami Heat just accomplished a feat equivalent to signning Albert Puljols, Hanley Ramirez, and Joe Mauer and no one decries the NBA's financial system. Not even the Yankees have the financial wherewithal to match such gluttony, signing 3 of the game's best and youngest players to six year contracts while they're still in their prime. Of course, that's because, in baseball, Puljols, Ramirez, and Mauer earn an amount commensurate to their worth.

THE TYRANNY OF LITTLE LORD JIM
Sure, LeBron James may imagine himself the "King," but Knicks fans shouldn't let the presumption fool them. He is not the sovereign responsible for the Reign of Errancy that has cast a pall over the Garden and has turned the name "Knickerbocker"-- a name steeped in the pride and dignity of Dutch New Amsterdam-- into a word synonymous with epic pettiness, paranoia, and melodrama in the executive suite and chronic losing, failure, and farce on the court.

How else to characterize the stewardship of an owner who prizes subservience to success? How else to judge a CEO who rewards incompetent GMs because they are servile and ingratiating but who dismisses ingenious coaches and trades gifted players because they are outspoken and defiant? How else should we judge an executive as transfixed by his competitors' advertising billboards as their basketball talent? How else do we regard a businessman who decides the most effective way to forestall bad press isn't to address the ineptitude accountable for generating it but instead to intimidate the journalists responsible for reporting it? How else to perceive the son who stands to inherit a media empire but whose own father appoints him to manage an entertainment arena because there, he, ostensibly, can inflict less damage? (Little did the father suspect that his idiot son would generate so much unflattering press he'd come to personify his family's entire operation.)

Yes, James Dolan's sovereign idiocy has ruled Madison Square Garden for eleven years now. So pathetically deluded is the man, in fact, that he confuses necessity with courage. "It takes courage to play where the lights shine brightest," Dolan said about the Knicks' acquisition of Amar'e Stoudemire. Courage? Only if valor includes a surgically-repaired knee, a league-maximum un-insured contract, and a $100 million dollars.

Few failed, of course, to miss the veiled slight contained beneath the facile praise. Cablevision's entitled son may possesses a little more tact perhaps than Kwik and Loans' founder but they share the identical sense of entitlement. Like Dan Gilbert, Dolan intended to deprecate the character and to question the heart of a player who possessed the ability and the discretion to refuse him. After all, why should the NBA's most coveted player select a team that has accumulated the league's worst winning percentage since 2002? Why would he join a franchise that even with his own addition has little chance to win a championship? Why should he choose to play for an owner eligible to bid on him only by accident? Indeed, who knows that but for Anucha Brown Sanders' lawsuit and David Stern's plaintive urging, the man James Dolan recently dispatched as his emissary to court the King might still be running the Knickerbockers. God bless the sexual harassment suit! No, the only MSG entertainment, at present, that rightfully deserves the lion-hearted is the circus-- the Ringling Brother's, that is, not the Knickbockers'.

IN PRAISE OF VISIONARY TYRANTS
Of course, in his thin-skinned self-pity and vindictive paranoia, Little Lord Jim has inspired comparison with another infamous tyrant who haunted New York sports for decades. His recent death, no doubt, will inspire eulogies that soften or expurgate his worst cruelties and excesses; that exaggerate his nobility, generosity, and compassion; and that credit him with historical legacy he probably doesn't deserve. A sentimental distortion about which I've written before. (http://theyankeesrepublic.blogspot.com/2009/03/boss-turtleneck-last-yankee-king.html)

In fact, I can't help recalling that famous cover Sports Illustrated published in 1993 upon Steinbrenner's return to baseball following his second suspension.(http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/cover/featured/9370/index.htm)

Dressing the Boss in King George's garments titillated at the time, but perhaps Napoleon's garb would have been more symbolically apt. Sure, the Emperor conjures an image of the tyrant par excellence, the man whose appetite for empire no amount of conquest could sate. But Napoleon, in conquest, also heralded liberation. He emancipated peoples enslaved and disenfranchised for centuries by Popes and Kings, ushering the Enlightenment into the heart of benighted Europe and projecting East the liberty, egalite, and fraternity the Rights of Man contemplated.

Likewise, for all his abuses and depredations, Steinbrenner emancipated the professional athlete from the clutches of owners' exploitation, parsimony, and prejudice. Capitalizing on Catfish Hunter and Reggie Jackson's availability, he built the Yankees Empire but in doing so, also eliminated the last vestiges of the reserve clause's oppression and commencing the era of free agency.

A visionary leadership responsible not only for resurrecting baseball's preeminent franchise from the moribund futility to which CBS's neglect had consigned them, but also for inaugurating the team-owned, regional sports network and raising the value of his team by over a hundred times the amount he paid for it.

It was also Steinbrenner's founding and launching of the YES Network, in fact, that provoked his turf battle with Little Lord Jim. And the lawsuit the Dolans' instigated to abort the YES Network before its birth exemplifies much of the difference between Little Lord Jim and Emperor George III and the diametrically divergent fortunes their teams have enjoyed under their respective tutelage.

The Dolans, on the other hand, illustrate the insidious complacency and ruthless incompetence all monopolies breed. When faced with upstart rivals, monopolies don't endeavor to improve their own product to stave off the competition. They don't adapt to new cirumstances. They don't rejuvenate their infrastructure. They don't innnovate and invent new products or search out new revenue streams. Instead, they throttle the competition. They muster their political power to abort its inception or they throttle it through litigation. Tactics the Dolans have deployed over and over again, whether to derail the Stadium the Jets envisioned on the West Side Long Island railyards or whether to deny the YES network access on Cablevision systems.

It should surprise no one then that under Little Lord Jim's stewardship the Knicks entrusted their franchise to a charlatan who ensnared it in a salary straitjacket and slowly mortgaged its future while ownership did nothing. Celebrated coaches and talented players with the temerity to defy him Little Lord Jim fired or ordered traded. While to this day for his former GM's ingratiating smile and shrewd obedience, the Monopolist rewards him still. Rumors already abound of the charlatan's imminent return.

For seven years, the expiration date on LeBron James' contract read July 1, 2010. For seven years, "the King" spoke of transforming his star into an international icon and the fertile opportunities America's media capital presented. For seven years, the man galivanted about New York City effusing with affection for its vitality. For seven years, he attended Cleveland Indians games, flaunting a Yankee cap and touting the Bombers' commitment to excellence. For seven years, he acknowledged the thrill playing at Madison Square Garden represented.

Yet for the first five of those seven years, Little Lord Jim approved trade after trade and ratified contract after contract that made acquiring the one athlete that could transform his franchise's woeful fate less and less a possibility. Were it not for Anucha Brown Sanders' charges and David Stern's urging, indeed the False Prophet Isiah still might be nodding and smiling while the organization he led burned.

Credit Donnie Walsh for managing in two years to remedy enough of his predecessor's damage simply to offer him a contract. But qualifying for seat to bid isn't quite the same as winning the auction. And the five years of executive complacency and misprision that preceded Walsh unfortunately prevented him from offering the King the very thing the Emperor could offer Reggie Jackson thrity-four years earlier; could promise him indeed the very thing every professional athlete cherishes, above all-- the opportunity to win and to win as often as possible in the limited time his game gives to him. Who better than Steinbrenner to know about greatness and egomania and to woo Reggie with the narcissist's most coveted role-- the opportunity to play Messiah and to lead his team into the Promised Land after years of futility, ignominy, and aimless wandering.

Of course, the Little Lord Jim didn't entertain the possibility. No, the entitled son of Cablevision thought too highly of New York's innate appeal and to the promise he could offer of acceding to the billionaire's throne, just like him. Indeed, about what product does the cable billionaire know more or is he more equipped to sell than his own sense of entitlement? What could James Dolan possible know, after all, about "courage"?

THE CIRCUS IS COMING
You can, if you wish, choose to believe the Garden's premiere clown or its amateur conspiracy theorist and to excuse the near decade long reign of errancy that Donnie Walsh ended only yesterday.

It may rankle less to think that as Spike Lee claims, "it was rigged." That James, Wade, and Bosh conspired years ago to play together and intended from the outset, besides, to do so for the Heat and in Miami besides. From which it follows naturally that the Knicks are free from blame and maybe, it's true that after the years of havoc, Isiah Thomas wreaked, the franchise couldn't redeem itself. By 2008, the team couldn't recover quickly enough both to assemble a contending roster AND to secure cap room to offer three free-agents maximum contracts.

But one inconvenient fact belies the argument. Dwayne Wade didn't invoke his Larry Bird rights. He didn't sign with Miami for the additional $30 or so million the Heat could pay him. You see, were Wade, Bosh, and James determined to play for one of their three original teams precisely so the host player could reap the extra-money, then indeed, their collaboration would have foreclosed the Knicks. Only Dwayne Wade signed for $3 million LESS than Bosh and James ($107 million to $110). What this means is that had Isiah Thomas' Eddie Curry albatross not still encumbered the Knicks payroll, Walsh could have opened enough space in New York's payroll for all three players and would have occupied a position no less advantageous than the Heat. The Big Three might have decided, in advance, to play together but who says they necessarily decided to do so in Miami? Who says New York wouldn't have attracted them had the Knicks been in a financial position to crown them its Royal Family?

Of course, perhaps the latest dream the Garden is pandering already has persuaded you to renew your season tickets, to continue to tune to MSG, and to cultivate the hope that Carmelo and Paul will join Stoudemire to save the Knicks. And if you believe that, well, I have a team to sell you in Brooklyn. For at the Garden these days only clownish escapades, circus melodrama, and magic illusion seems to grow.

Thanks, but no thanks. While Kobe and James vie for supremacy and one of the NBA's Elite 7 franchises racks up yet another championship, I'll conserve the time, money, and energy and in the dark and frigid depths of winter, warm my heart beside baseball's Hot Stove, where free enterprise percolates, where competition sizzles, where balmy Bronx summers loom around the corner and where the Emperor's legacy burns forever bright.

For to err is Dolan; but to see the future is Stein.

THE FALLACIES OF DEFENSIVE METRICS

2010-05-28T13:45:00.000-07:00

"Basketball scorers count mechanical errors, but those are a record of objective facts: team A has the ball, then team B has the ball... But the fact of a baseball error is that no play has been made but that the scorer thinks it should have. It is, uniquely, a record of opinions" -- Bill James

If you’ve ever instinctively recoiled at a statistic that could reckon Derek Jeter the worst shortstop in baseball or doubted a respected front-office's decision to replace Mike Lowell with Adrian Beltre and Jason Bay with Mike Cameron, a recent article in New York magazine will vindicate your skepticism.

In “Database Loaded,” (New York, April 18, 2010) author Will Leitch sheds light on the arcane world of defensive metrics. And in explaining how they operate, the author unearths many of the subjective judgments, speculative assumptions, and dubious conclusions that characterize them.

Space and audience constrain Leitch from an exhaustive accounting of their infirmities or a thorough consideration of their more far-reaching implications. But in following him one step further, the flaws he identifies beg the question whether (1) the obstacles to quantifying players' defense aren't inherent and insuperable and whether (2) metrics that further presume to calibrate it in runs notwithstanding possess any real utility at all.

Now, this isn’t to join the obscurants who summarily dismiss sabermetrics and/or disparage those who formulate them. As the foundation of the old baseball Establishment’s power and privileges crumble and fade and the grizzled, tobacco-chewing lifers abdicate power to the overeducated Excel specialists, the last redoubt of the old-time religion is defended by the Yahoos.

Item: Among the phalanx of pitch-fork populists who dominate WFAN’s airwaves, one recently derided sabermetricians as “40-year-old virgins, who work at Burger King and live in their mother’s basement.” (About which one might object, "Joe, you've overestimated by at least twenty-five years. By the law of averages, at least a few sabermetricians had to have gone to high school with your daughter.")

THE SABERMETRIC REVOLUTION & THE NEW FRONTIER
Yet in their nostalgia for the pecking order of high school, what the Yahoos overlook is that the athletically-challenged "nerds" and "geeks" they once scorned have acceded to the GM's throne in organization after organization for a reason. The quantitative analysis at which they excelled held elementary insights into the game and profound wisdom about its players the cigar-chompers had ignored. One day, long ago, visionaries like Bill James had cleared a path through the trees and opened for them a new world.

James had detected the biases and inadequacies inherent in old statistical staples like RBIs, batting averages, and fielding errors-- fallacies that were perhaps self-evident but that no one had pondered thoroughly enough to recognize. For example, the conventional wisdom regarded a .300 batting average and 100 RBIs as the hallmarks of great hitter. No one had stopped to see the obvious: that a hitter cannot earn a “run batted in” unless the players preceding him in the lineup have reached base before him. 100 RBIs could as easily attach to a player of Lou Gehrig’s caliber as Wally Pipp’s. Indeed, during the 1920s, it did. Pipp amassed 109 RBIs in 1923, however, chiefly because the player hitting third, one ahead of him, reached base in an extraordinary 54.5% (.545) of his plate appearances that year. (Guess who he was?)

By contrast, newer metrics like RISP and OBA—a hitter’s batting average with “runners-in-scoring-position” (RISP) and on-base percentage (OBA)— judged hitters far more on their individual merits and thus served as more effective and reliable analytic tools. Leitch observes how commonly recognized RBI's falsities have become. But I, for one, am still old enough to recall a time when through the 70s and 80s, Phil Rizzuto, Frank Messer, and Bill White could broadcast an entire season of Yankee games without ever once discussing a player’s on-base percentage or commenting on his plate discipline or mentioning his proficiency at accumulating walks.

Probably not until Michael Lewis’ Moneyball illustrated how the Oakland Athletics capitalized on OBA to acquire players the marketplace undervalued did the newer metrics enter the broadcast vernacular. But by then, the Wall Street whiz kids running things had discarded OBA and were seeking out newer tools to identify players whose price didn’t reflect their value. After all, once an innovation develops into a staple, it no longer confers a competitive advantage.

Enter the New Frontier, defensive metrics—statistics that can tell the forward-thinking GM which players’ deft fieldwork, sweeping range, and supple glove can prevent runs but whose salary doesn't yet reflect the win values his skills confer.

The two defensive metrics which have acquired the greatest currency, Leitch explains, are Runs Saved (RS) and UZR (Ultimate Zone rating). The former, RS, John Dewan’s company, Baseball Info Solutions, devised, with help, no doubt, from Bill James. (Baseball Info Solution’s website lists the Master as a consultant.) The latter, UZR, sabermetrician Michael Lichtman, developed; the findings, for which, his FanGraphs website publishes. While Leitch happens to focus on Dewan’s RS metric, it also notes that in logic, method, scale, and above all, in the totals they assign most players, the two metrics differ very little.

Leitch's article carries significance for a number of reasons. Although baseball journalists and commentator cite or mention these defensive metrics all the time, few actually have taken the time to explain how they operate: Leitch does. Secondly, Leitch identifies much of the technological void that besets their method and the fundamental guesswork that necessarily burden their data. Above all, Leitch conveys, without necessarily stating it explictly, how misleading defensive metrics' pretense is to tabulate a mathematically certain result.

The "Runs Saved" statistic may suggest a mirror image of the "Runs Created" figure James conceived for hitting [(Hits + Walks) * TB/ (At Bats +Walks)] (since refined). They both, after all, reckon their totals in baseball's precious currency-- runs. But the result of tallying up a players' Runs Created and Runs Saved to derive a total picture of his run value wouldn't differ too much from adding the price of a Rogers Centre's ticket and one from Yankee Stadium to project the total cost of a Blue Jays-Yankees home-and-home series. Sure, both franchises denominate their tickets in dollars. Only the Blue Jays' ticket prices reflect Canadian currency.

No, the analogy isn't exact because prices are set not derived. Still, enough fanciful conjecture, subjective judgment, speculative assumption, and fundamental bias riddle the "Runs Saved" model that the defects raise the question whether the final numbers tally anything useful at all.

RUNS SAVED: THE NEW DOMINO THEORY?
According to Leitch, Dewan's "Runs Saved" statistic propelled much of the Boston Red Sox's off-season and in particular, inspired the organization's decision to replace Lowell with Beltre and Bay with Cameron. I find it difficult to believe that a GM of Epstein's competence and with the critical intelligence a legal education should instill could examine the RS metric's methodology and take them at face value. Though it wouldn’t be the first time the hubris of the New Frontier's Best and Brightest courted a tragic fall.

Whatever the case may be, let’s use Boston’s hot-corner to illustrate a few of the RS metric's many frailties.

Baseball Info Solution judges the two third-baseman as follows: “Adrian Beltre made 26 more plays than the average third-baseman, saving 21 runs [while] Mike Lowell made 23 fewer plays than the average, costing his team 18 runs.”

• Beltre +26 made plays vs average 3d baseman-- which translates into a Runs Saved = 21
· Lowell -23 made plays vs. the average 3d baseman-- translating into a RS = (-18)

The above numbers encourage, but do not justify, the following deduction. Had Beltre played third-base instead of Lowell in 2009, the Red Sox would have allowed 39 less runs (21 – (-18)) and in turn, won about five more games.

Actual Red Sox Runs Allowed in 2009 (Lowell) = 736
Projected Runs Allowed in 2009 (Beltre) = 687.
(RS^2/RA^2 + RS^2) = expected winning percentage = Δ(.031) = 5 wins

The problem, however, is the human bias upon which the numbers rest.

Recall what James once said about the error statistic: "It is, uniquely, a record of opinions." Elide the "uniquely" and one could as easily have characterized Runs Saved's methodology. Subjectivity and conjecture abound.

THE DATA

According to Leitch’s article, Dewan employs 15 to 20 video scouts and charges them with watching every single game played during a season and logging every ball’s destination on a grid divided into 3,000 zones and superimposed over the playing field.

“'Each of our video scouts has a computer screen with a replica of the field... We mark the exact location and velocity of everything,'" Dewan told Leitch, "At the end of the season, Dewan has a complete log of every [] hit to each of roughly 3,000 zones." Exact? No, not really. 3,000 zones spread over the 90,000 sq. ft. of the average MLB ballpark's fair territory still leaves a considerable margin for error. In baseball, remember, mere inches determine seasons. Even less exactitude characterizes hits' velocity and their type. See below.

A hypothetical record looks as follows:

• Location = Zone 187° /290’
· Velocity = Medium (or Fast or Slow)
· Type = Fly Ball (or Grounder, or Line Drive, or Fliner.)

What the hell is a “fliner,” you ask? Or what speed qualifies as “medium”? Or upon reviewing the hit recorded above, would all 20 video scouts, for example, have agreed independently on its taxonomy? And by the way, where does the above log account for the angle of trajectory, spin, and precise vector. How does the model adjust for variations in ballparks’ s square footage? What about where the relevant fielder was positioned when the ball landed in Zone 187° /290’?

APPLYING THE DATA

Once they compile the raw data, they apply it as follows. From what I can gather, the computer model, more or less, simulates the computer matrix AVM Systems devised for the Oakland Athletics and the operation of which Lewis describes in Moneyball.

The market for security derivatives, evidently, inspired the model and informs its logic. Derivatives-- at least, as I understand them--value and trade in an individual securities' component parts. Likewise, each subdivision among Dewan's 3,000 zones receives a run value. The value stems from the average run contribution balls hit to that zone have produced over the last ten years, given x outs and y runners on base.

To see how this works, first imagine a hypothetical 2009 game. (Keep in mind: I've arbitrarily invented the actual run values for purposes of the illustration.) In the first inning, Derek Jeter hits the ball and winds up on second base with no out. Jeter, accordingly, has created 0.7 runs for the Yankees because over the last ten years, every MLB team has scored, on average, 0.7 runs when a lead-off runner has reached 2nd base with no outs.

Of course, Johnny Damon, next at-bat, will alter the game situation and in turn, the Yankees' likelihood of scoring runs. Damon either will reach base or generate an out. The first increases the Yankees chance to score; the latter diminishes it. So let's say, Damon hits a seeing-eye single (grounder) that that travels (fast) to Zone#187/290 through the hole between third and short. Whether Jeter or not scores, Damon will receive a Runs Created number equal to the average number of runs teams have scored in identical situations over the last ten years. Because over the last ten years, every hit recorded at Zone#200 with a runner on second-base and no one out has resulted in the hitting team scoring on average 1.1 runs, Damon will receive a Runs Created value of + 0.4. Conversely, on the fielding team, the out Mike Lowell failed to record will earn him a negative Runs Saved value. Rather than simply assigning Lowell the inverse (-0.4), the model will assign his Run Saved debit based upon the average performance of 3d baseman in fielding fast grounders hit to Zone #187/290 with a runner on second base and no one out and the average run credit/debit it realized for his team.

Sounds eminently valid, no? The problem, of course, is you can't simply equate Damon's batted ball to Zone 187/290 with every other one that travelled there over the last ten years. Each one has its own precise speed, angle of trajectory, vector, spin, and type. And because our current technology does not (or cannot) permit us to measure the latter variables with precision, Dewan's log doesn't record them and human error necessarily enters instead.

Neither, of course, does the model, account for the Red Sox’s positioning of Lowell? It assumes the difference between where Lowell and every other third baseman throughout the league has positioned himself the last ten years doesn't differ significantly in distance. Further imprecisions stem from definition. Dewan's metric, evidently, doesn't register recorded outs. (It can't right? Who records the out, 3d baseman or 1st baseman). RS's metric unit is "plays made." But what precisely qualifies as "a play made"? Does merely fielding the ball qualify as a "play made"? What if Lowell caught the ball but didn't throw it because he wanted to hold Jeter at 3b?

Does the system account for the play that saves the run but doesn't record the out? Or what if Lowell fielded the ball but then Damon's speed forced an errant throw at 1B? Is that a "play made"? What if Youklis' agile stretch at 1b compensated for Lowell's throw? Is that a "play made"? What if Lowell holds the ball, baits Jeter, and tags him running to 3rd? Is that a "play made"?

As you can see, the “Plus/Minus” figure still may carry some heuristic value. But with all of its flaws, converting the number into Runs Saved further compounds the conjecture and the unreliability of the result. Think about it. How many shortstops' defense actually improves with age? Jeter's Runs Saved total was -23 as recently as 2007 (and as low as -28 in 2005) but tallied a +2 in 2009. Hey, the Captain's accomplishments never ceases to amaze me. But could Jeter actually have defied everything we know about the shortstops' historical performance, skill regression, and the aging process and not only dramatically elevated his defensive play at the age of 35 but improved it by 25 runs besides. And if not, what value is there in a metric that insists upon calculating its value in a "runs saved" that doesn't share an identity with the runs scored on the field?

HITING V. FIELDING: INCOMMENSURABLES?
Advances in technology may augment these metrics' accuracy but they may never match the validity and utility of hitting statistics. In fact, by calibrating players’ defense in runs, defensive metrics obscure the fundamental difference between fielding and hitting and encourages the misconception that a perfect identity exists in their scales.

Leitch writes,

“A hitter’s job is easy to quantify: He succeeds in getting on base (or hitting the ball out of the park) or he doesn’t. But countless variables can affect whether a fielder even has a chance to make an error: where’s he’s positioned, how quickly he reacts to the ball of the bat, what route he takes toward it, how quickly he gets the ball out of his glove, how hard he throws the ball to another fielder… But how do you decide whether the left-fielder should have been in a better position to catch a shallow, looping fly ball…It’s an extremely structured method of collating subjective judgments."

Leitch is right, of course, but not precisely correct. Batting statistics do indeed owe their simplicity and their validity to quantifying (1) an empirical fact—a batter either hits the ball or doesn’t— and (2) a uniform and binary outcome— he either reaches base or he induces an out.

Yet strictly speaking, fielding statistics also measure a verifiable either/or result as well: (1) a fielder either "made the play" (so defined) or he didn't. As argued above, the ambiguity, in part, springs from the definition. What qualifies, that is, as a "made play" deserving of '+'? Simply fielding the ball or actually recording the out? If Lowell dives, gloves the ball, and bounds to his feet, does he have to throw Damon out at 1st or does holding Jeter at 3d qualify? Does "plays made" quantify the smart but prosaic play, the time when Lowell held the ball and yielded the infield hit to prevent the runner from scoring, and how does it weigh it against the consistently spectatacular but foolish play that sacrifices a run to an out? (Think Robinson Cano in the latter instance)?

But the inchoate definition points to a more endemic ambiguity. I imagine the metric tabulates "plays made" rather than "recorded out" because a recorded out frequently implicates multiple players the ultimate credit for which, it's impossible to assign. If Lowell happens to record the out only because Youklis' deftness saves the errant throw, does the 1b deserve the credit or does the 3b for giving Youklis the chance to begin with?

Hitters enter the batter’s box alone. Hit, walk, strikeout, or homerun— on his team, he alone, controls the outcome. Opposite him, only the pitcher compares in agency; and eight teammates still support him. Isolating, let alone, quantifying a single fielder’s influence on his team’s fate, on the other hand, introduces a range of variables and a labyrinth of complexity belonging to another order of magnitude entirely.

Compare the relative simplicity in isolating the dependent variables that influence hitting stats. In the above hypothetical, Johnny Damon's Rund Created credit of 0.4, for example, depends upon the pitcher, the ballpark, or the opposition's fielding proficiency, among other factors. (And the unbalanced schedule means that Damon's runs creation incorporates a disproportionately greater number of AL East pitchers, ballparks, and opponents' fielders over the last ten years than average.) But then again, the batted ball of every other hitter in the American League is disproportionately weighted in an identical respect and it's an average of them that determines the run value of Damon's batted ball.

More importantly, the most influential variable of all-- the pitcher whom Damon faces-- changes once, at least, every game. As a consequence, we can't attribute Damon's total Runs Created to his aberrant success against any one particular pitcher. Conversely, a pitcher's Fielding Independent Pitching Statistics--strikeouts, walks, homeruns-- enjoy a parallel independence because of the myriad number and variety of hitters he faces.

Not so with fielders however. Mike Lowell played 107 games at third-base in 2009. He played almost all of them with Nick Green or Julio Lugo at SS, Youklis at 1B, and Jason Bay in the outfield. How much of Lowell's -23 "plays made" and -18 Runs Saved is owed to the inadequacies of his adjacent fielders? If Adrian Beltre had had to play alongisde of Nick Green and Jason Bay in 2009, how many fewer "plays made" would he have recorded in Zones around 3d baseman, for example, or in foul left-field because he had to shade to his left to compensate for his shortstop's and left-fielder's shortcomings? The Red Sox replaced all three this off-season. Perhaps, they apprehended the inherent difficulty of assigning responsibility for the inordinate number of balls that fell on that side of that side of the field to any one of them.

PITCHER OR FIELDER: WHOSE BALL IS IT ANYWAY?
But it isn't merely a matter of separating one fielder's responsibility from another. Beneath rhe runs saved concept lies our ignorance of the respective contribution of fielders' and pitchers' on the ball in play.

Recall the insight Voros McCracken discovered about pitching that Moneyball's chapter on Chad Bradford discusses. The reason why Earned Run Average doesn't gauge pitcher's performance accurately is because as it turns out, hits-- and by extension, the runs generated from them-- depends too greatly on both the fortuity of the ball’s bounce and his fielders' proficiency. McCracken found that the ERA's of pitchers like Greg Maddux and Randy Johnson fluctuated too widely from year to reflect their efficacy. Only outcomes they alone controlled-- strike outs, walks, and home runs-- showed the uniformity indicative of their consistent dominance on the mound.

This doesn't mean the pitcher exerts zero influence on whether a hitter sets a ball in play. It only means we haven't yet been able to quantify it. Quoth James, Baseball Abstract, p. 885 "A pitcher does have some input into the hits/inning ration behind him, other than that which is reflected in the home run and strike out column."

The converse of which is necessarily true as well. Upon balls set in play, we can't quantify the relative influence of the fielder either. How much of Mike Lowell's and Adrian Beltre's '+/-' and "Runs Saved" totals, therefore, reflect the idiosyncratic abilities and deficiencies of the Red Sox's and Mariners' pitching staffs? Seattle yielded the fewest runs (689) of any team in the AL in 2009. So too, their pitching staff's park-adjusted ERA+ of 113 led the league. To whom, do we credit the feat: the guy on the mound or the eight men surrounding him?

Why is this signficant? Why do we need to quantify the relative contribution of pitcher and fielder? Because what does it matter that Beltre saved 21 runs above the average 3rd baseman if you can’t calculate how this 21 Run Saved figures in the 689 runs his team allowed? One cannot simply deduce that with the average 3d baseman the Mariners would have allowed 21 more (689 +21 = 710) because we don't know how many runs the Mariners' pitchers would have prevented regardless. Consequently, we can't translate Beltre's Runs Saved figure into the most important knowledge of all: how many wins did the Mariners' accrue because of him?

E PLURUBUS UNUM: A ROMANTIC'S DISSENT
Baseball assumed the title of "The American Pastime" for a myriad reasons owing to the institution's history and pedigree. But one reason often overlooked is symbolic one--the identity its character shares in common with the nation itself.

For alone among the country's three professional team sports, baseball embodies America in microcosm. It captures the tension roiling within a pluralistic society committed, at once, to forging a cohesive nation out of a motley immigrant people and at the same time, to honoring the principle of individual freedom. In team athletics, the confrontation between pitcher and batter, resembling as it does individual sport like a tennis match, is inimitable. From this individual contest suspended within the matrix of a group competition evolves baseball's unique fetish of numbers. What's more, upon it rests our county's peculiar fixation with individual merit and our celebration of the pastime as a Platonic arena which rewards it.

It perhaps also drives the compulsion to break the game down into its component parts and to place a value on each. More ominously, it may also enourage the hubris that we can. The scientific method, you see, is a seductive temptress. No sooner did Newton, for example, demonstrate we could apprehend much of our world through mathematical formula than did many come to believe we could explain all of it as such. That with scientific advances and technological progress, we could unlock the key to human history, to war and peace, to surfeit and famine, to eternal economic plenty, political freedom, and human happiness and to reduce it to universally applicable formula. Then, one day a mustachioed tyrrant (or two) actually tried to implement it. And in trying to order the fate of millions, his sacrifice of million gave wicked illustration to the limits of empirical formula in comprehending social behavior and in measuring human motive and desire. The Age of Reason had made fools of us all.

This isn't to imply anything sinister about sabermetrics of course or to make common cause with the Yahoos who deny its revelations. I merely wish to sound a cautionary note. To warn how little space lies between James' insight that statistics contains hidden truths about the game the naked eye cannot see to the leap that statistics contain all of them. To dispute that with the latest technology and the right formula we can quantify and ultimately explain everything from the precise interrelation of hitting and fielding on runs to how adjacent fielders' proficiency affect their performance to how and why hitters inexplicably enter slumps and just as precipitately emerge from them.

For at some point we will reach the tipping point. Imponderables like herd behavior and attribution bias and bystander effect will manifest to thwart logic and reason. And the mysteries that enshroud the game will announce they forever elude us.

And when the day arrives, may we have the wisdom to recognize it. More importantly, may we have the gratitude to welcome it. For that's the day the science of baseball will yield to the art of baseball and it will inspire the silent awe worthy of the sublime.

CAN THE YANKEES DEVELOP STARTING PITCHING?

2010-03-28T09:42:00.000-07:00

"Cashman didn't want Lily. He preferred Igawa... Billy Eppler, an assistant to Cashman, had raved about Igawa..." -- The Yankee Years

As so often in the repetitive and trite debates that dominate the media’s sports coverage, the dispute about how Joba Chamberlain best serves his team has obscured a series of far more important questions the young pitcher’s career raises about his franchise and its future. Now that management has consigned to the bullpen the most promising young phenom New York has witnessed since Dwight Gooden, fans, again, need to ask whether the Yankees front-office is capable of identifying, nurturing, and developing starting pitching.

Following the 2005 season, after all, Cashman’s ascendance and the Boss’ retreat was to have marked a seismic change in this regard. Perhaps, for the first time in the Steinbrenner era, the organization acknowledged the importance of cultivating its own starters. Cashman revamped his amateur and pro scouting departments, and within a few short years, the Yankees started to tout the wealth of young pitching prospects their farm system boasted. Hughes, Chamberlain, and Kennedy and just a few steps behind them, Russ Ohlendorf, Humberto Sanchez, Alan Horne, Jeff Marquez, Daniel McCutchen, Andrew Brackman, Dellin Betances-- altogether, they supposedly, heralded a new era. No longer would the Yankees have to depend on the inefficient free-agent market and improvident trades to build a rotation.

With a rotation of Sabathia, Burnett, Vasquez set to open the 2010 season, it appears very little has changed in the Bronx however. Hughes’ expected start on April 15 may comfort some, but it’s been 3 years since his first start in the major leagues and he has yet to complete more than 72 innings in that capacity. While Andy Pettitte, pitching perhaps in his final season, perfectly symbolizes the ongoing problem.

For not since Pettitte himself burst into the 1995 rotation has the Yankees’ farm system produced one of those hardy, mettlesome, 26-and-under rotation staples that organizations depend upon each season for 200 or more quality innings as their front-office milks him through four to six years of non-negotiable offers, niggling arbitrations, and below-market contracts. No Halladay. No Lester or Beckett. No Bedard. No James Shields. No Verlander. No Buehrle. No Sabathia. No Santana. No Lackey. No King Felix. No Zito, Mulder, or Hudson. The Yankees amateur draft hasn’t selected Him. Their international scouts haven’t signed Him. And the GM’s office hasn’t traded for Him. Through the Bronx a procession of stunted prospects, fragile arms, tantalizing impostors, and discarded talent has come and gone instead: Milton, Westbrook, Lily, Irabu, Weaver, Kennedy, and Wang. And neither Chamberlain nor Hughes has shown, to date, he won’t follow right behind them.

During the era’s first decade, one needn’t look beyond the owner’s box to find an explanation for the futility. The Boss had sacked, demoted, or marginalized his most discerning evaluators and had elevated toadying underlings. Until 2005, Brian Cashman occupied the GM’s office but possessed it in name alone. He was hardly a figurehead however. To the contrary, the nominal GM orchestrated the trade of the only two young prospects among the lot who burgeoned into, if not aces, then certainly fixtures of their teams’ rotation, Westbrook in Cleveland and Lily in Oakland and Toronto. True, Cashman’s gamble on recruiting Sabathia and Burnett with money, generous compliments, and solicitous reassurance— an underappreciated skill in a GM however large the wallet he wields – instead of trading Hughes for Santana rewarded him with a World Series.

Nonetheless, the Yankees fifteen-year-long failure to accomplish what every other AL franchise, save perhaps the Texas Ranger, has achieved in the interim-- to acquire or to develop that young stalwart who can anchor their rotation at negligible cost for years to come-- blights this franchise and imperils its future. As Joel Sherman recently observed, in 2013, four Yankees, 33 and older, will consume $90 million in payroll—Sabathia, Burnett, A-Rod, Teixeira and that still excludes the approximately $20 million Jeter, in addition, will earn. Relying on the free-agent market to fill a rotation ultimately exacts a toll. The question is only when it accrues. And for the cost and its consequence, Cashman should not escape responsibility.

Unfortunately, the yellow journalism that colors practically all sports coverage these days from print to radio to television conceives the world in two dimensions and projects it in black-and-white. Winners are geniuses. Losers are fools. The 2008 Cashman whose season ended in September became the petulant, blinkered little drone who’d assigned two rookies to his rotation and then whined when the press blamed him for the consequences. The 2010 Cashman whose team won the World Series became the astute, shrewd visionary because he obtained a starter with a lifetime 4.45 ERA in the American League. Of course, Cashman is neither prodigy nor fool. At some duties he excels. Notably, at bargaining and at recruiting. Rival GMs can’t fleece the Yankees anymore. (Where the Boss mortgaged the future for the likes of Phelps, Rhoden, Barfield, and Henderson; Cashman forbears.) Likewise, he deals well with agents, his recent contretemps with Boras over Damon notwithstanding. In signing Sabathia and snaring Teixeira, he shone. In player development, however, his office ranks somewhere between mediocre and wanting. The ongoing failure to harvest major league starters offsets its success in cultivating middle-relievers and in procuring supplemental bench players and some promising hitting and catching prospects.

The failure reaches far beyond the identifying, drafting, and signing of amateur talent. The problem may not even implicate the selection process at all. No, Joba’s fate and Chien-Ming Wang before him raises questions about the Yankees’ nurturing and development process. It hardly seems coincidental that abrupt and mysterious velocity deficits, suddenly, befell both Wang and Chamberlain as starters. And in each instance, Cashman continued to start them notwithstanding. In Wang’s case, they promoted a pitcher with one rotator cuff surgery already in his pedigree after a mere three minor league starts. Three starts, as it happens, in none of which Wang’s velocity had recovered its earlier heights. Cashman still assigned Wang to the bullpen and then moved him into the rotation. Two months and six starts later, still languishing at 91-92 mph instead of his usual 95-96, the Taiwanese Wunderkind tore the rotator cuff yet again. And the career of the Yankees’ most prodigious home-grown starter in a decade came to an unceremonious end after a mere two seasons in which he’d completed 200 innings. (Compare, by contrast, the Red Sox’s handling of Matsuzaka under similar circumstances; see “Free Wang, Curb Cashman,” Yankees Republic, May 27, 2009)

A similar fate, more recently, has afflicted Joba Chamberlain. The oft-repeated cliché ascribes his diminished fastball to deficiencies of character and/or stamina. Joba feeds on adrenaline he can’t sustain over six or seven innings. Hence, he belongs in the bullpen. Premise and conclusion conveniently ignore Chamberlain’s twelve starts in 2008 in the major leagues and his starts in the minor leagues in 2007. To illustrate just how spectacular Chamberlain was in 2008, compare his 12 starts in 2008 to Hughes’ 13 starts in 2007.

Joba - 2008 - 12GS, 65.33 IPs, 2.76 ERA, 1.30 WHIP, 10.2 K/9
Hughes - 2007- 13 GS, 72.66 IPs, 4.46 ERA, 1.28 WHIP, 7.2 K/9

A quick glance at FanGraphs explains why. Contrary to the received wisdom, as a starter in 2008, Chamberlain threw a 95-97 mph fastball from his first pitch to his last. Merely recall his start in Boston in late July 2008 when Joba threw 7 shut-out innings and struck out 9 Red Sox hitters and carried the Yankees to a 1-0 victory over Josh Beckett.

Then, injury befell Chamberlain in Texas in August, and by September, his absence all but eliminated the Yankees from playoff competition. Yet as with Wang, Cashman re-assigned his pitcher to the bullpen. And even though Joba’s velocity hadn’t returned, Cashman let Girardi pitch him the entire month as a reliever. To this day, the pitcher and his fastball haven’t recuperated. FanGraphs shows Chamberlain's average fastball velocity fell from 95.0 in 2008 to 92.5 in 2009.

The oddity is how the seeming indifference to their young virtuouso's diminished velocity comports with the organization's meticulous, near neurotic, enforcement of his innings limits and his pitch counts. Stranger still, if no physical ailment currently hampers Joba Chamberlain and if temperament and/or mechanics account for the velocity deficit, why have the Yankees relegated him to the bullpen for the foreseeable future now- now at the very moment when the two-year training program designed to prepare him to throw 200 major league innings finally has concluded. Could the Yankees, actually, have rendered such a momentous decision for their future (and Joba's) on 3 or 4 Spring Training starts?

The example of Justin Verlander would counsel against deciding matters of such consequence on so little evidence. Recall that after flourishing in 2006 and 2007, Verlander suffered a dramatic setback in 2008. His ERA rose from 3.64 to 4.84. His fastball's average velocity fell from a high of 95.1 in 2006 to 93.6 in 2008.

The Yankees have derived their formulas for innings limits and pitch counts from statistical evidence that shows how increasing the workload of 26-and-younger pitchers by more than 30 innings from season to season exposes them to injury. Tom Verducci and Will Carroll's anecdotal evidence certainly persuaded me. What I wonder is whether the Yankees have studied the long-term consequences shuttling a Chamberlain or Hughes back from the rotation to the bullpen to the rotation will have on their health and development. The disruption and irregularity alone seems to belie logic that animates innings caps and pitch counts-- slow, gradual conditioning and regimentation in a violent, unnatural motion.

All of which leave too many unanswered questions for anyone to extol the Yankees' front-office. At the end of 2010, Andy Pettitte, by all accounts, will retire; Javier Vasquez's contract will expire; and the Yankees will have to find, at least, two more starters to replace them. Worse, with Joba installed in the bullpen, no internal options currently commend themselves. Can this franchise continue to pay a premium for starting pitching to compensate for inadequacy below?

Cliff Lee and his agent, no doubt, already have begun to ask the same question.

U.S.A. & THE VALOR OF DEFEAT

2010-03-03T15:32:00.000-08:00

"No battle is ever won. They are not even fought. The Battlefield only reveals to man his own folly and despair and Victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools."-- Faulkner, The Sound and The Fury

An oft repeated cliche about professional sports is that the field holds no place for moral victory. To the winners belong the laurels. While the losers suffer everything from an ignominious oblivion to condescending pity and malicious ridicule. From its campaign hustings to its ball fields, for the defeated, America is unkind and lonely world. Ask anyone from Michael Dukakis to the bereaved of Donnie Moore.

It is important, for this reason to honor, the 2010 men's Olympic hockey team.

No, it will not offer the weary players any solace. Nor will it comfort the broken-hearted millions who plunged from elation to despair in that fleeting period on Sunday night separating silver and gold. Alas, miracles on ice may come but once a lifetime.

Yet we forget the likes of Zach Parise and Ryan Miller and Brian Burke at our peril. For in their defeat, they impart an invaluable wisdom found perhaps nowhere in America outside wars' graveyards and the novels of William Faulkner. It's the lesson the Greeks teach us in their tragedies, if not in their Olympics, about the splendor born of lost causes. It's the lesson that we often achieve our greatest glory not in the magnificence of our victories but in the mettle and tenacity with which we contest the odds and in the nobility and grandeur we attain, as a consequence, even in succumbing to defeat.

And for this lesson alone the 2010 team deserves an honored seat right alongside the 1980 team in the annals of this still fledgling, adolescent country's Olympic history.

After all, miracles of success breed instinctive awe and will earn lasting immortality all on their own. No act of conscious or conscience is needed to secure them their legacy. But America's Horatio Alger myth notwithstanding, the lot of most of us is a fate both more desperate and obscure.

And for us that know no glory, may USA 2010 live forever. We cherish you in quiet inspiration.

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS: PENNY WISE AND CASH STUPID

2010-01-28T02:12:00.000-08:00

“And if, to be sure, sometimes you need to conceal a fact with words, do it in such a way that it does not become known, or, if it does become known, that you have a ready and quick defense”— Machiavelli, The Prince

Is there a reason, financial or strategic, that the Yankees suddenly have decided that 2010’s payroll must be lower than 2009’s? If so, I’d like to hear it. Was it the hardship of collecting only $2,000 for all those $2,500 Legends Suite tickets during 2009 regular? Was it the sacrifice born of selling out only eight games en route to winning a World Series instead of the maximum eleven? Was it the miscalculation in estimating the “Inaugural Season’s” concession and souvenir sales which resulted in a realized total that only exceeding the projected amount by 200%? Or maybe it was the forbearance they exercised by forswearing the price increases $5,000-a-seat to $50,000-a-seat ticket licenses authorized? Or is the explanation simpler still? Does Prince Hal regard caprice the hallmark of power and the laurels of victory permanent extenuation?

If the rationale isn’t evident, the consequence certainly is. To save a few extra million dollars in payroll, the Yankees risk forgoing the windfall each additional post-season game they play would yield them. See The Business of Baseball In the aggregate, they may have saved themselves nothing at all.

Meanwhile, for about $8-10 million dollars in one year contracts, the Yankees could have added three additional players that would have dramatically improved their chances of returning to the World Series. A $7-8 million dollar allotment for Damon would have dramatically improved their lineup. While for $2 to 4 million (four if a tendered contract, less if merely a guaranteed one), the Yankees could have re-signed Chien Ming Wang and bolstered the depth of their rotation. (This is to say nothing of the $1 million dollars by which the Yankees could have lengthened their bench by offering Eric Hinske the amount he accepted from the Braves.)

Indeed, for all the near unanimous approbation that has greeted Brian Cashman’s personnel decision this off-season, few have examined their financial wisdom given the new payroll constraints. Has the GM made the most efficient use of the off-season budget allocated him? Because from this perspective, the Yankees front-office’s decisions suggests a far more equivocal judgment than the received wisdom would imply.

GRANDER SONS
Let us not begin however by stinting praise where it's so clearly deserved.

Cashman's acquisition of Curtis Granderson belongs alongside his trades for Abreu, A-Rod, and Justice as among the Yankee GM's most adroit and inspired. In one fell swoop, he upgraded his team at center-field, procured another premiere offensive player under 30 (adding to last season’s Teixeira signing) to achieve his goal of a younger lineup, saved money to allocate elsewhere by replacing one of two $13 million salary slots (Matsui and Damon) with Granderson’s $8 million-dollar-a-year contract, and filled a cornerstone position with a player combining the rare gifts of power and speed and possessing, as such, the potential to develop into a deserving heir of Bernie Willliams’ mantle.

Of course, the full cost of what the Yankees relinquished, in the bargain, won’t materialize for some time. Furthermore, the Tigers GM Dombrowski, arguably, has reaped the greater dividends in every trade he and Cashman have struck since 1998: (i) the Mike Lowell trade (1998); (ii) the 3-way Jeff Weaver transaction which netted the Tigers Jeremy Bonderman (2002); and (iii) the disposing of Sheffield.

Qualifications, aside, as of January 2010, Granderson more than merits his cost. The Yankees yielded (i) Phil Coke-- an endearing if erratic left-handed relief pitcher who posted league average statistics in his first full major league season; (ii) Ian Kennedy—a prospect victimized by the early success he, never again, could match and limited opportunities to rebound-- and (iii) Austin Jackson—the position player with the highest ranking in the Yankees farm system but still probably years away from fully ripening.

Perhaps, the only reason why Cashman could obtain Granderson without greater sacrifice is because the center-fielder’s anomalous 2009 tarnished his value. By most indicia, Granderson’s 2009 was a subpar season. Despite hitting 30 homeruns in 2009, the ex-Tigers’ batting average and on-base percentage fell about 30 points from 2008; his strikeouts per plate appearance rose by 2.0%; and his OPS+ dropped to 100, the very figure of league average production. However, the inauspicious picture these paint can be deceiving. Both Granderson’s base-on-balls and pitches per plate appearance deviated little from his career numbers. More significantly, Granderson’s actual BABIP (Batting Average on Balls in Play) (.275) differs markedly enough from the BABIP his Line Drive percentage (21%) would predict (.330). Together, they suggest that the unlucky bounce of the ball accounted for much of the decline in Granderson’s batting average (and concomitantly, his base percentage) than a genuine regression in his performance. The same phenomenon likely explains Swisher’s swoon in 2008 and his return to his career averages in 2009.

At present, a prominent Achilles Heel nonetheless excludes the Yankees’ new center fielder from the game’s elite-- his lethal vulnerability to left-handed pitching. Granderson’s career OPS+ against lefties is a woeful 28, compared to 128 against right-handers. On Granderson’s ability to correct this defect, or to mitigate it, will hinge his legacy in Pinstripes.

PRODIGAL SONS, LOYAL SONS & SONS FORSAKEN
Still, whatever additional production the Yankees gained with Granderson in center-field, they promptly squandered in left. Nick Johnson may be able to fill the void left by Matsui's departure, but Gardner, however able an outfielder, cannot replace Damon or compensate for his loss.

Let's take each in turn.

No steadfast Yankee fan these last six years can fail to appreciate the contribution Hideki Matsui made to his team from his first game in Pinstripes on Opening Day in 2003 to his last in Game 6 of the 2009 World Series. The man his countryman call Godzilla entered and exited with a theatrical flourish few successors will equal, let alone surpass. If only for twice sealing the post-season fate of the Yankees' arch enemy Pedro Martinez-- once in 2003 ALCS and again in 2009's World Series-- he has inscribed for himself a permanent place in the Yankees lore.

(A reputation for clutch performance his “late and close” statistics at Baseball Reference only further illustrate. In the 503 plate appearances Matsui batted in the 7th inning or later-- and with the game tied, the Yankees ahead by no more than a single run, or behind no more than the potential run of the on-deck hitter-- he hit .325 with 25 HRs and 85 RBIs, good for a 125 OPS+. Throughout A-Rod’s career, by contrast, he has posted a 92 OPS+ in “late and close” situations.)

Beneath the dramatic flair however lay the tragic flaw-- the Achilles' Heel or perhaps, more accurately, the Atlas' Knee. Compelled early in his career to uphold a record for consecutive game played, Matsui inflicted lasting damage to his body. As such, he hasn’t appeared in more than 143 games since 2005. In 2006, a fractured wrist limited him to 50 games; in 2008, his chronically arthritic knees sidelined him for July and most of August. Chronically arthritic knees, which, as late as 2009, moreover, prevented his manager from starting him for more than four consecutive games as even the DH? How many teams need to rest their DH 20-30 games a year to keep him healthy?

But because Cashman signed Nick Johnson, a DH who can play the field but only first-base-- a position at which the Yankees already have a younger, more durable and proficient player-- Matsui's liability survives him in different form.

With Johnson's own history of injuries I don't quibble. I grant the Yankees their logic that none are chronic or recurring. Neither do I demur because of the ostensible loss in power posed by replacing Matsui's bat with Johnson's. To the contrary, while Johnson's injuries have sapped his power in recent years, his OPS+ numbers since 2005, actually, have exceeded Matsui's three of those five years: (i) 2005 (137 v. 130); (ii) 2006 (149 vs. 128) and (iii) 2008 (124 v. 108); and in one of the two seasons Matsui's were higher, 2007, Johnson didn't register an at-bat because a freak collision in '06 sidelined Johnson the entire year to follow. (If you place any stock in statistics that combine offensive and defensive value-- and I place little-- Johnson's Wins Over Replacement Player, since 2005, have surpassed Matsui's all four season Johnson played.)

No, my objection follows. In the 40 or so games, the Yankees decide to use Jeter, A-Rod, or Posada at DH, Nick Johnson can neither spell them in the field nor compensate for their replacements' inferior bat by improving the bat at the position where Johnson does play. With Damon as the primary DH, on the other hand, he'd have spelled Gardner in left-field and would have neutralized the loss that Posada, Jeter's and A-Rod's defensive replacements, Cervelli and/or Ramiro Pena, now pose.

For this flexibility alone, Damon, on a one-year contract, was worth his price.

In fact, the ostensible defensive liability that Damon posed in the outfield has been greatly exaggerated as well. Now, I've always regarded metrics that depend upon subjective or relative judgment rather than incontrovertibly objective and verifiable facts with skepticism. That is, Player X did or did not register a hit or a walk in Game Y. We can argue with the official scorer but not with the result: Player X stood on first. From this, we can deduce his likelihood of scoring. Whether Player X should have caught or even reached the ball that sailed over his head in the 9th inning is another matter entirely. Matters get murkier still when assigning a run value to the miscue. Did Player Y hit the cut off man? Did Player Z field the ball cleanly? And on the next pitch, how will the pitcher throw with a runner on base, the eight other fielders set themselves, react, field? Metrics go from murky to practically opaque when you combine this figure with offensive statistics to obtain an aggregate run value.

Still, in this instance, as a heuristic, they illustrate the foolish improvidence of spurning Damon at the cost of an additional 5 or 6 million dollars. After all, the Yankees' front-office, purportedly, uses them to assign players a economic value. Well, according to FanGraph's WPA statistic, even allowing for the defensive upgrade the Granderson-Gardner tandem provide in the Yankees' outfield, they still represent a total regression from Damon-Melky or Damon-Granderson. Together, Granderson and Gardner average a WPA of (0.78 + 0.57 = 1.35) Together, Granderson and Damon combined average WPA since 2004 is (0.78 + 1.77 = 2.55)

THE ARBITRARY PAYROLL LIMIT

The optimist might conclude that a team that scored a league-leading 915 runs in 2009 and won the World Series needn't worry themselves over one left-fielder. But the 2009 Yankees are only a year removed from the old, infirm, lumbering relic that struggled to score runs and by generating only 789 in total, finished 7th in the AL. Should injury befall their 38 year-old catcher for any period of time, disable their oft-injured Designated Hitter, or again, fell their indispensable 34 year old third-baseman and the Yankees will discover themselves mired in similar straits all over again-- an average to above-average lineup and pitching rotation second, and certainly no better, to their arch rival in the division.

Indeed, the starting rotation the Yankees have constructed for 2010 deserves a post of its own. (The cavalier recklessness, the unapologetic error, and the imperial effrontery that has characterized the team's treatment of Chien Ming Wang deserves one in itself.) For now, it's worth asking why Cashman squandered $11.5 million dollars on a starter with league average statistics in the teeth of budgetary constraints. In the four years, Javier Vasquez has pitched in the American League, his ERA+ has exceeeded 100, the league average benchmark, once, in 2007. Likewise, in 3 of 4 seasons, he yielded 29 or more home runs.

2004 - YANKS- ERA+ = 92
2006 - CHISX- ERA+ = 98
2007 - CHISX - ERA+ = 126
2008- CHISX - ERA+ = 98

If the Yankees wanted to guarantee themselves 200 innings for their fourth rotation spot-- an imperative with which I agree-- they probably could have obtained more with less. For Vasquez's salary, they could have signed two from the gallery of Duscherer, Bedard, Washburn, and Garland on one year contracts and still retained enough money afterward to offer Wang the guaranteed major league contract his agent required. Instead of depending upon one league average pitcher to give them 200 innings, they Yankees could have spread the risk over 2 or 3. Of greater benefit still, they would have conserved Melky and the prospects they traded for Vasquez to upgrade left-field this off-season or if necessary, in July, at the trade deadline.

In fact, the Yankees' unceremonious disposal of Wang may surpass in folly their spurining of Damon. The team's erstwhile ace may or may not recover the velocity upon which both his sinker, specifically, and his performance, generally, hinge. Still, why the Yankees didn't see the merit in risking $4 million dollars for a pitcher whose ERA+ of 124 and 122 ranked among the league's best when healthy, defies prudence and logic. Remember: three year ago, the Yankees paid Octavio Dotel $2 million while he underwent rehabilitation in Tampa. More confounding still, after the Yankees declined to tender Wang a contract, they balked at offering a major league contract regardless of the price.

All of which the Yankee attribute to and justify by the new regime of fiscal prudence they've proclaimed.

Now, when the Yankees invoke payroll limits during contract negotiations to enhance their bargaining leverage, so be it. If it's necessary to field a championship caliber team, so much the better.

But when, after fielding a team totalling $200 million dollars or more the last year five seasons, H&H Steinbrenner & Sons suddenly find religion and declare a payroll limit a year after moving into a palatial state-of-the-art ballpark where the median ticket price is $90 (see Baseball Analyst, 05/02/09) and concessions and souvenier sales, in the "inaugural season" reportedly doubled their projected totals-- then the Yankees insult their fans and demean their season ticket-holders.

More troublesome still, when the Steinbrenners arbitrarily decide 2010's payroll must be less than 2009's, if only by a dollar; when they cling to the peremptory figure they've set irrespective of the circumstance or the consequence in personnel; when they forgo a player not because his price exceeds his value (a figure FanGraphs estimates for Damon in 2010 is $9.7 million) but because their own pointless edict compels them; when the Yankees are willing markedly to weaken their team, in sum, over a difference of $4-6 million dollars, then Alice has returned to Wonderland and we truly have entered Prince Hal's reign, a terra incognita that is austere, obdurate, brutish and ominous.

FOR WHOM THE PENDULUM SWINGS

2010-01-08T10:00:00.000-08:00

Andy Warhol once observed that everyone’s famous for fifteen minutes. Of course, Warhol died before the internet age further abridged the nation’s memory and attention span. Today, fame’s half-life doesn’t last a quarter of an hour.

Take the NFL Giants’ Tom Coughlin. Remember this September when the Daily News’ human weather vane anointed him New York’s paradigmatic coach? (See “Giants Coach Is The Man All Other New York Coaches Want to Be,” Lupica, 09/06/09.) It was around the time the press was searching for the moment’s facile theory to explain why the Yankees manager they’d portrayed as an autocratic and abrasive control freak in 2008 miraculously had become the authoritative, congenial father figure in 2009. All at once the echo chamber bleated in symphony, “Credit Coughlin.”

No doubt originally conceived in the bowels of Howard Rubstein’s p.r office and then spoon-fed the press, the Girardi story ran as follows. Following his equivocal debut as the Yankees manager, Joe Girardi retreated to home and hearth in Florida to search his soul. And on the road to St. Petersburg he had a revelation. Perhaps, his Olympian peremptory manner had alienated a few players and his penchant for secrecy, a few reporters after all. Then and there, Joe resolved to mend his ornery ways and to appeal to higher counsel. Within days, the manager digested Coach C’s Super Bowl Instructional Manual: yes, you too, in one easy step can remake your image. Later, New York’s favorite championship coach received a phone call. (Yankee sources assure me Joe Torre, in Hawaii, wasn’t accepting calls.) Perhaps, Tom told Joe to take the kids to play pool, and if they were good, to buy them ice cream.

If honest, the Giants Coach would have imparted some old newspeak wisdom. Want to change how the press portrays you? Easy, win, baby; just win. For those who lose can do nothing right and those who win do nothing wrong.

Remember the furor Girardi’s heterodox and erratic decisions throughout the post-season ignited? Well, if you do, you’re alone. “Oh, you think I recklessly squandered my relievers, overtaxed my starters, and pushed my closer to the brink of physical injury?” “Well, buddy, you can kiss my ring.” To the victor belongs the history and the press was rewriting it before the champagne dried. With Coughlin’s help, they wrote, Girardi had transformed himself into a winner.

Until six weeks later, that is, when the scribblers reversed creditor and debtor on the bill of gratitude. It seems now the mentor has been saved by his disciple. How quickly they learn! Indeed, just this week, NBC’s Josh Alper mused that were it not for Girardi’s World Series, the Giants might have dismissed his once celebrated mentor. “Coughlin isn't getting fired, though you have to wonder if that outcome might be different if the Yankees hadn't won the World Series.”

Don’t ask for whom the pendulum swings... it swings at thee.

THE PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN

2009-12-01T13:51:00.000-08:00

With the first official skirmish between Scott Boras and the owners now joined, baseball, now, officially can embark on the 2009 off-season. Let the free-agent signings begin. Of course, unlike the regular season when owners in Miami and Pittsburgh, at the very least, must honor competition’s form and actually field a team before they can profit from it. Nothing, alas, will compel them to compete this off-season. Nothing will induce them to vie for free-agents even though the Commissioner’s stimulus package hands them $40 to $80 million dollars for this very purpose. If history is any guide, they’ll pocket the money instead. “George, Randy, Lonn, thanks, we’re going to Disney. Hell, you guys had such a good year; I may even buy the wife that hotel she’s always wanted.”

Take the Pittsburgh Pirates for example. When Scott Boras dared to question the Commissioner’s recent announcement that six franchises lost money in 2009, the Pirates’ President, Frank Coonelly, protested. More accurately, he protested too much. After all, what middle-American franchise can survive on a measly $75 million dollar stipend to supplement the proceeds from 1.6 million tickets sold at a brand new ballpark and from local broadcast contracts?

$40 million in central fund monies (shared national TV, marketing, licensing, MLB Network and MLB.Com)
$35 million in revenue sharing (the redistributed proceeds from a ~34% tax on each team’s revenue + the luxury tax)

I mean, how’s a team supposed to balance its books when it then has to pay those guys in uniform $49 million dollars in salary. (And The Washington Times’ Thom Loverro had the obtuseness to liken the Yankees to AIG?) Perhaps, Uncle Bud, can donate some of his $18 million dollar salary?

The articles linked as follow corroborate the numbers above. The Daily News; ; The Business of Baseball; ; Payroll Figures; ; Revenue Sharing Allocation

In all seriousness, though, how is one to trust, let alone to sympathize with, an industry where the zeal with which the Bosses shroud their balance sheets is surpassed only by the Mob’s? And to keep them confidential, there is no mendacity they will forgo. The script typically goes as follows. The owners cry poverty. From the ESPN pulpit, baseball’s clerisy decries “competitive imbalance” and warns us ominously “about the future of the game. Talk of salary caps ensues, lockouts threaten, and baseball joins Alice in Wonderland where a Pirates’ greed is noble, a Yankees’ largesse is an evil, and the object of the Game is to profit rather than to win.

The irony is that of the fourteen league pennants won since 2003, teams with payrolls well under $100 million have accumulated six of them. Take the 2008 Tampa Rays ($43 million); the 2003 Marlins ($49 million); the 2007 Rockies ($54 million), each ranked 25th or lower in aggregate payroll. Or one echelon above them, the ’04 and ‘06 Cardinals and the ‘05 White Sox all ranked 11th and 13th respectively. As a composite, they suggest that not only are an owner’s means and munificence not the primary index of his franchise’s win total, they don’t even consist of necessary conditions for the seven October victories required for a World Series.

The outcry for a salary cap only deepens the irony. The balance of power in sports no less than in international politics is subject to the rule of unintended consequences. By binding teams’ spending and encumbering players’ mobility, salary caps yield dynasties their constituent glue by cementing their hold on talent. Take the NBA, for instance. The league has convened 10 championship finals since 2000. Two teams, the Lakers and the Spurs, have represented the Western Conference in 9 of those 10 series, and between them, they’ve won 7 of the 10. Contrast the NBA’s socialized oligarchy with the MLB’s liberal free market system. Professional baseball likewise has totaled ten World Series this decade. Yet 8 different teams have represented the National League; 6 teams, the American League. All total, the Fall Classic has crowned 8 distinct champions. During the same period, only the Pistons in 2004 and the Heat in 2006, managed to break the Spurs-Lakers’ stranglehold on the title.

Of course, the system of Tory capitalism Major League Baseball has chosen over a salary cap doesn’t alone account for the more competitive landscape it creates than the NBA and the greater comparative opportunity it offers teams for upward mobility. Basketball, for example, lends itself to dynasties for discrete, albeit related, reasons. With the acquisition of a single, preeminently talented superstar talent like Kobe, Duncan, Jordan or Bird, one team can dominate the league and monopolize its championship for as long he plays plays. (Nonetheless, the salary cap then accentuates the imbalance because it inhibits the superstar’s rivals from remaking their roster and assembling enough intermediate talent through trades, free-agency, or waivers to neutralize him.) Too many other quirks and caveats distinguish the NBA from MLB for me to gauge whether the salary cap causes, or merely contributes, to King Kobe and his serfs or to quantify its influence—not in this post anyway.

Still, I hardly wish to romanticize baseball’s paternalistic free market either. The six years of vassalage under which a player serves his teams before granted free-agency smacks of a feudal order more than any parallel NBA institution. Apart from its basic injustice, it also distorts the free-agent market. Players rarely reach free-agency before their late 20s at an age well into their career’s prime. The distortion this causes is two fold. On the one hand, the team that drafts him receives two to four seasons when his talent and productivity have peaked at a marked discount. Arbitration rarely awards him his market price. On the other, the team that signs him to a long-term free agent contract pays a surcharge on those seasons later in his career when talent and productivity have started to regress.

Okay, but what does this have to do with my beloved Yankees, you ask? Well, consider its implications. First of all, it means that the signing team pays the drafting team a de facto subsidy. When the Yankees expend $23 million dollars on CC Sabathia for 2010, they, in effect, are compensating him retroactively for 2007 and 2008 seasons when the Indians paid one of the game’s best pitchers $9 and $11 million respectively. Secondly, a market that inflates free-agent salaries illustrates that a $200 million dollar payroll isn’t quite the competitive advantage one might imagine. Far from indicating a team that has plundered a championship by assembling the most prolific roster money could buy, a team with salary obligations 40% higher than its nearest equal likely evidences a surfeit of long-term contracts for veteran players that pays the player well above his worth. It’s no accident then that the Yankees’ payroll has exceeded $100 million every season since 2001 and surpassed $200 million every season since 2005 and yet through those nine seasons, they’ve won ONE World Series. Nor is it a related coincidence that measured by average age, the Yankees, during that same period, have ranked as the 1 or 2 oldest teams in the American League every year save 2002.

The Yankees' 2009 further illustrates the point. This year, the Yankees won 14 more games than in 2008. Yet contrary to the popular canard, the improvement owed less to the $60 million dollars they paid their three new free-agents than to the recuperation and rejuvenation of long tenured veterans. In my next post, I will devote my annual valedictory of the Yankee's season to analyzing the statistics that bear this out.

THE GREAT RESENTERS

2009-11-16T10:47:00.000-08:00

"Paul had a sense of injustice early on... If his older brother was in the process of winning, he was lucky. If he won, he had 'cheated'"-- Molly O'Neill, "Coming to the Plate"

Now that didn’t take very long, did it? Barely had the parade ended or the champagne dried before the bile began to ooze and the vitriol to swell. Outside the Castle on River Ave., the Jacobins gather to besmirch the King, to tarnish his crown, and to discredit his accession.

It’s a old and tedious canard Yankee fans know too well. Composed of assumptions so tenuous, logic so facile, and malice so transparent, the argument, distilled to its essence, amounts to two whole sentences. Twenty-nine teams in major league baseball can earn a Championship. The Yankees can only buy one.

Seldom does the ressentiment of hypocrites and socialism of fools provide more titillating comic relief.

WASHINGTON'S CORPORATE POPULISTS
Ever year we witness the photo-op. A professional sports franchise wins a title and the President invites the team to the White House to favor them with his compliments. Congress, otherwise the more deliberate branch, strikes earlier. Not wanting the aura to fade, they introduce ceremonial bills congratulating the team in the days following their victory. With minor excpetion, the resolutions pass unanimously. After which, Congressmen return to their customary business-- self-promotion.

Last week it was the Yankees's turn. So Bronx Congressman Jose Serrano introduced House Resolution 893 congratulating the team on their 27th championship because the nation's poorest and most densely populated Congressional district finally had a reason to boast and preen. They'd partaken of a triumph to call their own, even if only vicariously.

Who could possibly object? Where to find such people lacking a modicum of grace, gallantry, or sportsmanship that they would begrude the Bronx downtrodden their flash of glory? Look no farther than the Capitol building; the U.S. Congress teems with them.

An unprecedented 17 House member, in fact, voted 'no' and reminded Americans of the rancor, pettines, and puerility that has come to epitomize the nation's legislature.

Item # 1: “Beantown’s Jacobin”
Asked why he voted against House resolution 893Massachusetts Congressman Bill Delahunt replied, “For those of us in Red Sox nation, it was a sad, sad day. It tells you something about the corrosive nature of money in sports and politics.”

The distinguished Representative from Quincy, after all, knows whence he speaks. Since 1989, Congressman Delahunt has received $34,000 in campaign contributions from Liberty Mutual Insurance Company-- the fourth largest property and casualty insurer in the United States. A $100 billion dollar corporation, no little thanks to Congressman Delahunt, you and I now insure against catastrophic losses. Under the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act of 2002, our tax dollars now re-insure Liberty Mutual for claims owed to terrorist attacks. Coincidentally, Massachusetts’ scourge of money and politics “corrosive” voted for its re-authorization.

Item #2: “The Agrarian Demagogue”
Congressman Bruce Braley, evidently, concurred with the Representative from Liberty Mutual.

Asked why the representative from Iowa's 5th district wouldn't extend New York's Yankees a simple courtesy, his spokesperson said, “Congressman Braley simply could not vote in good conscience for a resolution honoring the moneyed interests of the Wall Street Yankees.” I didn't know the players and coaching staff held second jobs. Then again, Girardi always has reminded me of an investment banker.

Regardless, it seems the side of the hand the Congressman shows "Wall Street" varies with the year. In 2009, the Wall Street Yankees get the back of hand. To the Wall Street Bankers, in 2006, however, the Prairie Populist extended the palm. Since his election, in fact, Braley has accepted $10,000 in campaign contribution from the American Banking Association. (See Open Secret.com)

That the fiscal regime under which major league baseball operates make the supposedly progressive U.S. code-- over which the Congressman ostensibly wields influence no less- seem oligarchic, by comparison, doesn't seem to faze him either of them.

If the Iowa and Massachusetts Congressmen fancies themselves Populist crusaders out to slay Robber Barons and to soak the rich, they would do better to hunt among the coroporations situated in their districts. For example, when was the last time Liberty Mutual Insurance Company indemnified a competitor? What about Iowa’s John Deere & Co: how much did they contribute to the competitive wherewithal of other manufacturers of agricultural machinery?

Apart from the taxes the U.S., New York state, and New York City collect from the New York Yankees, the team also redistributes a share of its profits to its fiercest competitiors. In 2008, the Yankees paid major league baseball $100 million dollars in revenue-sharing fees and luxury taxes. Largesse that comprises 25% of the total $400 million in proceeds Commissioner Selig’s office subsequently donated to small-market franchises like the Pirates, Indians, Padres Rays, and Marlins, among others. In fact, the Pirates and Indians, received $40 million and $20 million, respectively, in subsidies. (See “Revenue Shearing,” by Bill Madden, NY Daily News, August 16, 2009). The Marlins' stipend falls somewhere in between. (Hardball Times, "The Loria of It," March 5, 2008)

If the call of justice in baseball really moved them, Delahunt and Braley would revile the greed and venality of the Pirates' owner, Robert Nutting, and the Marlins' owner, Jeffery Loria, among others, that enable them to pocket monies the Commissioner specifically earmarks for acquiring and retaining their talent. In 2008, the Marlins' $20 million dollar payroll matched their subsidy; likewise the Pirates $48 million dollar payroll approximated theirs. The revenue each team garnered from broadcast rights and ticket sales their owners would have their fans, their cities, and their rivals believe evaporated into thin air. Delahunt and Braley's selective outrage is akin to railing at Pfizer for purchasing Wyeth meanwhile condoning Glaxo for exploiting U.S. tax loopholes to move job overseas.

Meanwhile, the great malefactors of wealth on Wall Street, bankers who receive bailout checks from which they award themselves million dollar bonuses while their companies waste away, find kindred pirates in Pittsburgh and related sharks in Miami.

THE TRANSPARENCE OF MALICE
Then again, demagoguery is Congress’ native language. What's a journalist's excuse?

Observing how the press reported the Yankees's 27th World Series, one would guess that journalism suddenly suspended its profession's sacred ethic of objectivity for sports coverage. A homily about money's insidious and inexorable influence colored the beat reporter's narrative. The columnists, meanwhile, celebrated a belated Halloween. Dispensing with empirical fact, reasoned logic, historical context and intellectual coherence consistency, their columns instead invented ever new and more elaborate theoretical trappings and editorial disguises for a mantra worthy of a New England adolescent: "God, I hate the Yankees." Albeit, it lacks the Red Sox fan's cri de coeur's simple integrity.

To quote ESPN Peter Gammons, “the clichéd response to [their] winning the World Series seemed to be a universal ‘The Yankees bought the Series,’ as if somehow they went outside the rules of law and bought Cook or Palm Beach County.” (“Blame the System,” ESPN, November 7, 2009) (I trust that Gammons, in his hyperbole, didn’t intend to evoke Cook County’s notorious thralldom to perhaps the most irredeemably corrupt political machine in American history—not consciously anyway.)

Gammons' blog post hardly mounts the most vigorous or cogent defense on the Yankees’ behalf. Perhaps, Gammons recalls the 2007 season and the immediate parallels it suggests too vividly. If so, he’d do well to remind his colleagues.

Before recapping it, I excerpt a few choice selections from the detractors below.

Exhibit 1---"The Best Team Money Could Buy," by SI.com's Joe Posnanski (11/06/09), "You have a sport where the New York Yankees... spent $50 million more than any other team, that team with three sure Hall of Famers and as many as four others and as many as four others, that team that bought Milwaukee's best pitcher and Anaheim's best hitter and Toronto's No.2 starter and Boston's favorite idiot and the most expensive player in the history of baseball and so on, that team will win the World Series, spray champagne... and tell you that they won because they came together as a group and kept pulling themselves off the ground. "

Exhibit 2 - "“The New York Yankees win the World Series. That is not, in itself, a very remarkable sentence to write…. They have the largest payroll in Major League Baseball for the ninth successive year: $201million" (Times Online, Tom Dart, 11/05/09)

Exhibit 3 -- "Rooting for the 2009 World Series champion New York Yankees is like rooting for AIG. The Yankees are the perfect symbol for the times - bloated excess…While the federal government was bailing out AIG, the Yankees were charging thousands of dollars for the best tickets in a new $1.6 billion ballpark paid for in part with public funding and tax breaks That's like rooting for a bully. Is there really any joy in that?" (Thom Loverro, The Washington Times, 11/06/09)(emphasis mine)

(Actually, "public funding" and "tax breaks" did not finance Yankee Stadium; tax-free NYC industrial revenue bonds enabled the Steinbrenners to borrow money at a lower interest rate because the City guarantees the loan. Hence, the bonds only cost taxpayers if the Yankees default on interest payments-- a remote possibility. What's more, the City can't forgo tax revenue it never would have collected. No NYC IRBs = No New Stadium = No Bonds to tax. But hey why should a few facts stand in the way of good diatribe?)

Exhibit# 4-- "Even Brian Cashman said last night the Yankees are a product of their payroll and then defended it, saying they play by the rules. Which is entirely true... they rose from third place because they simply outspent everybody else on Burnett, Sabathia and Teixeira. It's not complicated.” (All You Can Do is Wear It," by Boston Globe's Pete Abraham, 11/05/09) (Et tu, Pete?)

WHAT, FILTHY LUCRE SOIL THESE PURE BRAHMIN HANDS?
Consider Abraham's argument for a second. It does betray a superficial cogency, does it not? The Yankees finished in third-place and missed the playoffs in 2008. Consequently, in the off-season, they aggressively pursued and successfully signed Sabathia, Burnett, and Teixiera-- the last of the three, by outsmarting and then outbidding their arch rivals. With $60 million in annual salary spent and three premiere free agents corralled, the Yankees returned to the post-season the following year and took home a championship. In sum,

Preface: In 2008, the Yankees didn't qualify for the playoffs.

Premise A: In the 2008 off-season, the Yankees, as a consequence, leveraged their preeminence as the league's highest grossing franchise to acquire three expensive, marquee free-agents.
Premise B: The following season, the Yankees won the World Series ("Wear It"
Conclusion: Because the Yankees spent $60 million this off-season on free-agents to improve their team, they bought themselves a championship.

Follow the money, right?

Only two basic flaws riddle the above syllogism. First, its logic suffers from the classic fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc. That is, simply because Premise B (World Series) succeeded Premise A (major free-agent signings) in chronology does not mean the first cause the second. No doubt, it may have. Then again, pure coincidence could account for Premise B supervening Premise A. Or, more likely, a whole array of unacknowledged factors like Posada's and Matsui's recovery from injuries; the augmented offensive production Jeter, Cano, and Melky contributed; Hughes' mastery of the set-up role, among other improvements, just as easily could explain why the Yankees 2009 season surpassed their performance in 2008. Only a sophisticated statistical analysis can separate each factor and isolate its overall contribution.

Second, the press seems to invoke the "Follow the Money" rule rather capriciously; its sudden self-evident truth and received wisdom inspired less by the spending's circumstances than the spender's identity: the upstart merchant or the thrifty Brahmin.

Observe its selective and indiscriminate application to two teams' parallel trajectories.

In 2006, an AL East team-- let's call them TEAM B: 'B' for Brahmin-- possessed a $120 million dollar payroll good for the second highest payroll in baseball. On August 2, 2006, the Brahmins led their division with a 64-42 record and seemed fated for a rewarding October. Somewhere along the way however Manifest Destiny foundered. The Brahmins lost 11 of their next 15 games, suffered a rash of injuries, accused a star hitter of malingering, bickered in the clubhouse, and maligned each other in the press. Then, to culminate the fall from grace, management, to mask its hubris, played the gentility card.

Wrapping themselves in the mantle of impecunious virtue, the Brahmins Front-Office blamed their collapse on an "Uber"-franchise, the New York Yankees. (Management would renew this charge three years later when a certain free-agent first-baseman spurned them and joined their enemy.) Evidently, the money changers-- the Uber-franchise, that is, in the original German-- had purloined Bobby Abreu. A contract the landed gentry, on the other hand, insisted their poverty precluded. You have to sympathize with these poor dispossessed patricians: after all, how is a team with a $120 million payroll, and boasting the league's highest ticket prices besides, supposed to compete with the "Wall Street Yankees"?

So sworn to virtue, the Brahmins meanwhile tumbled from 2nd place to 3rd and in fact, barely averted a losing seaso, finishing 81-81 in 2006 and spending October at home.

Perhaps their superior virtue didn't console them, in the end, after all. Because as soon as the World Series ended, Team Brahmin started to spend like the noveau-riche arrivistes at whom they loved to look down their nose. In one month, they bought the free agent market's three premiere players at their respective positions. (Hmmn, sounds familiar, eh?)

Team Brahmin immediately signed the most expensive and prolific shortstop, Julio Lugo; and a coveted outfielders, J.D. Drew-- recently a Dodger with whose contract these ethical paragons may or may not have tampered. Then, miracle of miracles, they somehow managed to outbid the Uber-Franchise for the best starting pitcher, Daisuke Matsuzaka, paying $50 million just to negotiate with him and another $50 million on his contract. (The Yankees would return the favor three years later with Teixiera, albeit with much screaming and thundering by the Brahmins. To the aristocracy, turnabout is not fair play.)

By winter's end, Team Brahmin spent over $200 million and by Opening Day of 2007, their annual payroll rose from 2006's $120 million figure to $145 million, still good for the 2nd highest in baseball. Although in 2007, the 2nd highest payroll stood a full $30 million more than the $115 million dollar Mets.

THE DOUBLE STANDARD
Recall how the Red Sox-- I mean, Team Brahmin-- fared in 2007 after their spending spree in the preceding off-season? They won fifteen more games and not only returned to the playoffs, they claimed the AL East crown and won their second World Series in four seasons.

Only in the weeks following theit 2007 triumph, strangely, Congressman didn't deplore money's pernicious role in sports. Nor did baseball writers style "screeds" (Posnanski's word, not mine) invoking competiting balance and baseball's "best interest" to disparage Boston's triumph as a championship suborned. To the contrary, the pundits practically fell all over themselves to extol the Red Sox GM Office on their ingenuity and shrewdness and to declare their championship a testament to their ownership's initiative and resourcefulness.

Read the difference in a few selections from two of the same publications I excerpt from above, Sports Illustrated and The Boston Globe:

Exhibit A- "Boston's duo of GM Theo Epstein and manager Terry Francona make a superb tandem. It's refreshing to see a GM and manager get along to this degree. Also, it doesn't hurt that both are terrific at their jobs. Epstein engenders some jealousy for being so good so young." (John Heyman, SI.Com October 29,2007)

Exhibit B -- “A lot has been made of the big-name, big-money stars who helped the Red Sox win, but good teams make smart decisions; and this title, like the last one, was just as much about the throw-ins, afterthoughts and castoffs whom the Sox have given a home.” (“These Are Not Your Father’s Red Sox,” Michael Northrop, Sports Illustrated, November 7, 2007)

Exhibit C -- “Henry, the low-talking hedge funder, has had considerable help in Lucchino, Werner, and of course, the brilliant young GM who has spawned a new generation of BlackBerry-wielding, stat-driven, cold-blooded hardballers intent on reinventing baseball operations” ("Foresight Is Their Specialty", by Dan Shaughnessy, Boston Globe, November 4, 2007)

Now, had the Tampa Rays recently won a World Series, then their 25th highest, $60 million dollar payroll may have justified the stark discrepancies, indicated above, in the press' coverage and overall narrative. But the Red Sox $143 million payroll in 2007, 2nd in baseball, hardly qualifies them for the role of hero in a morality tale about the power of intellectual sophistication and economic thrift to prevail over Big Business' colossal predatory financial might.

Financial wherewithal leveraged through free agent acquisitions, as such, either explains both the Red Sox 2007 championship and the Yankees in 2009 or neither of them. Or rather, their World Series' triumphs, together with the (i) the Phillies', in 2008 on a $98 million dollar (11th in the league); (ii) the Cardinals' in 2006 on a $89 million (also 11th in the league); (iii) the Chicago White Sox's in 2005 on a $75 million dollar payroll (13th); and (iv) the Marlins' in 2003 on a $49 million dollar payroll (25th): all together they dramatize the lie inside the Resenters' great canard. First, money alone has not and cannot buy a championship in basseball. More importantly, money may not even rank as the most influential factor, among many, in the winnowing process.

The Bombers, their players, personnel department, and ownership deserve better than the deceitful broadsides, begruding acknowledgment, and qualified accolades their championship, by and large, has garnered them. But don't expect it anytime soon. Nothing succeeds like excess-- demagoguery in Congress, duplicity in the press, and in baseball, the sore loser's resentful outcry. Little distorts the mind, deranges the senses, or unleashes the bile more than another title won by the New York Yankees.

GIRARDI'S REIGN OF TERROR

2009-11-03T05:45:00.000-08:00

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the [post] season of light, it was the [post] season of darkness..." -- Dickens, Tale of Two Cities

In a Media Age where sports figures speak in a scripted platitudes worthy of elected officials, seldom has a manager, in an unguarded moment of candor, unwittingly revealed the flaw in judgment he alone can't recognize. "I don't like to think too far ahead," said the Yankees' manager before Game 5 of the 2009 World Series.

So we've noticed. And, now, as a consequence, the season hangs in the balance.

On the threshold of a twenty-seventh championship, two distinct, discrete choices presented themselves to the Yankee manager for how best to allocate his pitching over the 2009 World Series final three games in order to grasp that elusive fourth win that has confounded the franchise since 2000.

Choice A: Start Burnett, Pettitte, and Sabathia, in Games 5, 6, and 7, respectively, all on three day's rest.

Choice B: Assemble a piecemeal start from Gaudin, Aceves, Bruney, and Robertson in Game 5; while preserving Burnett, fortified by five days' rest, for Game 6 and assigning Sabathia, no better or worse for wear than in Scenario A, Game 7. Clinging, as such, to a trump card in Andy Pettitte, holding him aside, ready to enter at a moment's notice should Girardi need, in either two games, to remove his starter early and to enlist his bullpen.

Logic and Reason argued for Choice B. Neurotic compulsion dictated Choice A.

Let us count the ways:

1) Burnett's statistics and temperament, each, militated against a Game 5 start. First of all, Burnett has not fared well on the road this season, yielding 6 earned runs in 6 innings pitched as recently as the ALCS Game 5 in Anaheim. Compare, for 2009, the 4.59 ERA away with the 3.51 ERA at Yankee Stadium and likewise, the disparity in batters' OPS+ against him-- 92 at home; 108 on the road.

2) Second, starting AJ in Philadelphia also promised to saddle him with a lineup bereft of its fifth hitter, Matsui, the DH, in addition to weakening it with a left-handed centerfielder against his left-handed opponent, Lee; to say nothing of the innate offensive deficit Burnett's preassigned catcher, Molina, represents.

3) Third, through Game 2 of the World Series, Burnett already had pitched 232 innings in 2009, the most of his career. While starting Game 5 on short rest-- which most pitchers complain disrupts their control-- threatened further to exacerbate Burnett's singular Achilles Heel. When command of the "hook," as he calls it, inexplicably eludes Burnett during a start, the erratic righty neither can recover his release point or more importantly, his composure, nor compensate with alternative pitches. His confidence consequently flags and his performance suffers. (By contrast, the four outing that account for Burnett's 2.33 lifetime ERA on three days' rest hardly consist of a representative sampling; three of which he started in a single season, 2008.

4) In a similar vein, 37-year-old Andy Pettitte, through Game 3 of the World Series, has thrown 220 innings this year, the most since 2005. The effect of which clearly showed in his last start through which he labored. Indeed, he confided to teammates afterward, "I had nothing," as the ever discreet Johnny Damon then revealed. Now, Pettitte, a pitcher who depends upon controlling a cutter, curve, and changeup, will have to start on three days' rest for the first time since September 2006 in a Stadium, where, he has acted as Burnett's foil and antithesis, compiling a 4.59 at home and 3.71 away. Worse, as of Tuesday afternoon, Girardi wasn't even certain Pettitte could start so soon after he muddled through his last outing. When asked who would pitch Game 6 in Pettitte's stead should the necessity arise, Girardi actually responded, "Gaudin," without betraying the slightest inkling he appreciated the irony.

5) Why did Gaudin pose such an obvious choice for Game 5, despite not having started since September 28th or having pitched since October 20th? Because at the very worst, a Gaudin could have recorded 2 innings and then yielded the final six to bullpen (assuming, that is, the Phillies wouldn't have batted in the 9th). In retrospect, how much worse could they have fared in Game 5 than Burnett, Robertson, Aceves, Coke, and Hughes actually performed?)

6) Finally, the off-day, that followed Game 5 would have alleviated whatever strain a combined six innnings from Aceves, Bruney, Coke and Robertson had exacted. More importantly, in scenario B, Girardi wouldn't have had to worry about sparing his bullpen's second and third tier anyway. For behind Burnett and Sabathia would have stood Andy Pettitte, on 3 or 4 days rest, poised to save the day by pitching 2-3 innings out of the bullpen-- an insurance policy well worth the investment upon considering that Sabathia may have to pitch for his second consecutive start on short rest and his third time this post-season.

Perhaps, Girardi's decision to return to Burnett on three days' rest after he sparkled in Game 2, was justifiable in a vacuum. But in the post-season, a manager no more can confine decisions to a vacuum than he can isolate its direct, foreseeable, and ominous consequences. Indeed, by declining "to think too far ahead" this post-season, his judgment has ranked between reckless improvidence and presumptuous malfeasance. Two taxed and depleted arms now stand between the Yankees and ignominy. From Lemon to Howser and Showalter to Torre, the stewards of post-season failure have been dismissed for far more venial sins.

No tears of my mine will fall should Girardi meet his predecessor's fate. Never have I witnessed a Yankees manager follow one inexplicable, counter intuitive, capricious, and just plain foolish move after another through the course of the post-season. The truncated rotation he devised for Games 5 through 7 only consummates them. Among other, they include (i) mismanagement of his bullpen-- calling it "over-managing" excusing the grievous risk Girardi's churning incurred by conjuring the trivial, earnest faults of the solicitous "over-protective" parent-- (ii) blind obsession with innately unrepresentative statistical samples and abstract, subjective scouting reports to the exclusion of what the current game and his players' immediate performance would suggest; and (iii) irreconcilably contradictory tactics in parallel situations.

In the last instance, compare, for example, his pinch-running decisions in the 9th innings of both the ALCS's and the World Series' Games 5. In Anaheim, recall, the Yankees trailed 7-6 with 2 outs in the 9th inning and no one on base. Fuentes walked A-Rod and Girardi pinch-ran for the 3rd baseman, despite the above-average speed Alex has shown on the bases all year following hip surgery. The manager, then, inexplicably, pinch-ran for Matsui, after he reached base next. A bizarre move in its own right because had the Yankees tied the game, they'd have entered extra-innings with Freddy Guzman and Brett Gardner as their 4th and 5th hitters and without their closer besides, summoned already in the 8th.

Cut to Philadelphia ten days later. Once again, the Yankees ignite a 9th inning rally. With the team trailing 8-5, Posada doubles, Matsui singles, and together, they've reached first and third with no one out and brought, in Jeter, the potential tying run to the plate. Now, the only outcome capable of depriving Damon and Teixiera the same opportunity should the captain fail is, of course, the lethal double-play. Which as it happens, the shortstop's inside-out swing and ground-ball percentage gives him a propensity to induce, a flaw about which his skipper, we know, is well informed. To Girardi's credit, it inspired the inversion of Jeter and Damon in the batting order to begin the season.

So knowing all of this, does the manager pinch-run for the lumbering Matsui on first base? Matsui, pinch-hitting for the pitcher, can't bat again anyway. Meanwhile, the swifter, more agile, base-stealing threat Ramiro Pena maunders inside the dugout. The self-evident benefits-- minimizing the risk of a double play and perhaps advancing another runner into scoring position-- outweighs the meager cost-- sacrificing the roster's last pinch-hitter. Furthermore, by eliminating the seventh run from the bases and in turn, the tying run from the plate, the double play threatened a comeback at least as much, if not more, as did A-Rod's presence on first base in the ALCS' similar circumstances ten days earlier. However for reasons explicable to Girardi and God alone, the manager left Matsui on base. Jeter hit into a double play, for all intents and purposes, throttling whatever chance remained of an improbable, eleventh-hour rally. Two batters later, it formally perished.

THE CANYON OR THE GUILLOTINE?
Working inside the crucible, subject to relentless pressure and the microscope's sharpened scrutiny can both expose and magnify any man's failings.

Observing Girardi's foibles and follies on display this October has been a persistently terrifying, frequently infuriating, and ultimately pitiable experience.

He paces, wincing and grimacing. Riffling through his meticulously organized binder of receipts, invoices, and sales figures, he can't find the answer he needs. His best laid plans have gone awry, but panic prevents him from re-evaluating. Instead, he scraps the book entirely. He'll try anything, so desperate has he become to reap a profit for the $200 million of human capital expended-- whether overworking employees, eliminating days off, hiring and firing his relief, mortgaging futures and/or disregarding deficits. For very soon, Christmas will arrive, Saks River Avenue will close for the season, and the tense, constipated shopkeeper the Bosses have left to manage will have to account for his losses and an opulent display case that doesn't feature a ring. Is he the overzealous, autocratic Jacobin, DeFarge? Or beneath the mask does there lie a pathetic, misunderstood, doomed but noble Carton?

Come what may the next few games, if the Yankees win their 27th championship and lead a parade down the Canyon of Heroes, rest assured, they will have overcome an obstacle greater than the Red Sox, Twins, Angels, and Phillies. The terror that reigns inside their own dugout.

IN HIS HEAD, HE KNOWS HE'S RIGHT

2009-10-20T04:47:00.000-07:00

"In your heart, you know he's right"-- Barry Goldwater slogan circa 1964 election
"In your guts, you know he's nuts" -- LBJ parody of Goldwater slogan

Perhaps Randy Levine devised this Joe's contract with an incentive clause too. For each playoff game the manager can use all his relievers he receives a $1,000,000 bonus. After all, didn't the Levine cabal insinuate that Joe Torre's cavalier style cost the Yankees in the post-season? Somewhere the Baseball Gods are laughing.

Beware half-wits armed with numbers. From Pentagon scientists' "acceptable losses" to hedge fund managers' "rational markets" to baseball manager's "match-ups": inside their little black books lie the mathematical formula for everything from winning a nuclear win to repealing the business cycle to winning the next World Series.

Whatever may come of this October, A-Rod acolytes finally can savor the thrill of watching the Human Scapegoat disarm the pundits, stifle the critics, quiet the jeers, mock the steroid tribunal, and consign Selena Roberts' yellow journalism to the sewers of history. But no one should be more grateful for the Yankees third baseman than his manager. For without A-Rod's sudden flair for the eleventh-hour, plot-turning, Hobbesian dramatics-- "there's goes Roy Hobbes, the best there ever was in this game"-- Joe Girardi already would have returned to Florida. And here in New York, the lynch mob would have tied the noose and started to clamor for Rope Day.

A sentiment that recalls something Benjamin Franklin once said, the "Mob's a Monster; Heads Enough but no Brains." Although in this case, I can't shake the apprehension that Joseph Elliot Girardi's singular brain is precisely the problem. The thin-lipped anxiety, the crew-cut rigidity, the officer's regimented strictness, obstinate certitude, and humorless laughter bespeak a man of unquestioned intelligence yet with a mind so inflexible and doctrinaire no practical wisdom or instinctive truth could violate it. The mind of beautifully wrought abstraction.

How else is one to fathom a manager who has studied all the reports, mastered all the stats, read and re-read, no doubt, every piece of information at his disposal and persists in the same recklessness from which only an inept opponent, blind umpire, and the prodigies of A-Rod (assisted by a bravura supporting performance by Jeter, Posada, Sabathia, and Rivera) have spared his team from elimination?

Why else would the Yankees' manager persist in applying preconceived formulas and "match-up" statistics for managing his bullpen-- rather than allowing his relievers visible, immediate performance to dictate his choices-- when time and again, the results has cost him. (To be sure, Bill James has observed and proven over and over again the naked eye often deceives us. The difference in impact a .275 hitter and .300 hitter make, even witnessed every day, on a team's success can't be discerned. But James never concluded statistics would enable manager's to discard his indispensable faculty, practical discretion.)

Girardi's reliance upon numbers rather than his reliever's performance has resulted in two harmful patterns. The 11th inning of the 2009 ALCS's Game 3 illustrated one: he has removed flourishing relievers in the middle of innings when neither high pitch counts nor run-scoring threats warranted it and replaced them with relievers who then falter . Second and closely related, he has squandered his most formidable relievers, Chamberlain, Hughes, Coke, and Robertson in truncated outings-- calling upon them and then summarily dispatching them-- in early innings of close games. As a consequence, when they flounder or extra-innings arise, he has had to rely upon Marte and Aceves, less proficient arms in critical situations.

Let's recap.

ALDS Game 1
Sabathia, subduing his own post-season demons, shines in his October debut as the Yankees' designated ace. Without dominating, he nonetheless delivers 6 2/3 innings of two run baseball, only one earned. He starts to languish in the 7th but weathers the storm. With the Yankees ahead 6-2, no one on base and one out, Sabathia hits Tolbert, yields a single to Punto, and throws a wild-pitch. Tolbert and Punto advance to 2nd and 3rd. However, Sabathia retires left-handed hitting Span on a pop-fly and then to face, Orlando Cabrera, Girardi makes the obvious and logical move.

The manager calls upon his ostensibly 2nd best reliever, set-up man Phil Hughes. Cabrera battles through 10-pitches but strikes out. Hughes returns in the 8th inning but again labors. 15 pitches through the 8th (25 in total), the Franchise has surrendered a single to Mauer and only recorded 2 outs. Accordingly, Girardi, in a move seemingly dictated by foresight, albeit more ominous in retrospect, summons Chamberlain for a single out. It appears Girardi simply has exercised a perfect opportunity to reacquaint Joba with his old role. But using Joba for two pitches in the 8th, and then using Mariano, despite a five-run lead, for what becomes a 23 pitch, non-save appearance, turns into a recurring pattern that will carry fateful consequences for the future.

ALDS GAME 2
The omens first realize their ill-fated prophecy. After six innings, the game is tied 1-1. While starter Burnett has thrown 96 pitches thus far, his control suffers and his pitches-per-out mount with each inning. So Girardi, wisely, removes him. Enter Joba for the 7th, the 2007 incarnation. Three consecutive 95-mph fastballs retires Span on a groundout. Two more, clocked at 97 and 95, follow to Cabrera, the third, a changeup, induces a feeble groundout. Next follows the Twins most forbidding hitter, presumptive AL MVP, the left-handed Joe Mauer. Coke time? Consult the Book. Mauer is 3 for 4 against Coke with one homerun, true; but he's also 1 for 2 against Chamberlain with a homerun. Statistically significant? Evidently, Girardi thinks so; Joba stays. Chamberlain unleashes 5 straight heaters averaging 96 mph, yet on the fifth, ahead 3-1 in the count, Mauer singles on a ground ball through the middle.

This is the moment when the eccentric, rash, and misguided decisions Girardi's bullpen management has betrayed this October first manifested. Letting Joba pitch to left-handed Mauer but then removing him when otherwise thriving, having thrown only 11 pitches in a tie game no less and insisting that lefty Coke face the left-handed Kubel-- warrants skepticism. Although left-handed Kubel is 0 for 4 against Coke and has proven throughout his career a markedly less prolific hitter against left-handed pitching than right-handed (OPS+ of 68 vs. 109), Joba has fared well against him too (1 for 3 lifetime, a single.)

More importantly, Joba is dominating; his control and velocity are nonpareil; he has only thrown 11 pitches; the day to follow is an off-day; Coke is only good for a batter, after whom, with Cuddyer batting, Hughes will follow. Worse, it's only the 7th inning, Hughes struggled the previous game, and the Yankees confront the possibility of facing extra-innings. Apres Mo, qui?

Isn't Joba too precious a resource to squander via mixing and matching righties and lefties and just for Kubel? Doesn't Joba's unrivalled fastball-slider repertoire in combination with his starter's endurance, of one to two innings at the very least, warrant greater faith in his ability to retire Kubel?

Look what happens as a consequence. Coke retires Kuble but in the 8th, Hughes struggle again. With two outs, he walks Gomez, yields a single to Harris and Punto, Gomez scores. Who's up next? Lefty Denard Span. Now, would have been a good time to use Coke, no? But Girardi can't because he expended him the inning prior. Then, in an unorthodox move, he calls on Rivera. How often has one seen a manager use his closer in the 8th inning of a game he's LOSING. Isn't Marte, after all, on the roster expressly for the purpose of the second left-handed hitter, late in the game? If not, why isn't Bruney? Anyway, Span hits Rivera, another run scores, but Mo keeps the Twins lead to 3-1 into the bottom of the ninth, when A-Rod ties the game.

But now what? Expending Mariano in the 8th inning precludes using him again in the 10th inning. (The two innings recommend against it, as does a pitch count of 27 pitches, following the 25 he gratuitously threw in Game 1.) What's more Girardi squandered Joba after 11 pitches, discarded Coke after a batter, and gone through Hughes already. So Girardi is compelled to use Aceves for the 10th inning. Aceves finishes the inning without giving up a run, but with two outs, he does walk Punto and Span singles before he retires Cabrera. Hardly a flawless outing certainly but hardly one that would demand his removal either. Consider, too, that Aceves is the reliever best equipped to pitch multiple innings because as a reliever, Gaudin is an enigma.

Does Girardi use Aceves then for the 11th? No, of course not. He enlists Marte for a single batter, Mauer, who singles, and then Girardi lets him pitch to Kubel, who does likewise. Remember earlier in the game when he let Joba pitch to Mauer but not to Kubel. Notice the contradiction. Why let Joba pitch to him and not Aceves? Anyway, with Marte failing wretchedly as usual, Girardi brings in Robertson against whom Cuddeyer hits the Twins third consecutive single. Then, Robertson performs a great Houdini act and with 9 pitches, tallies three outs, without a single run scoring.

Now, the manager who relies upon empirical evident rather than statistical abstraction might have concluded that Robertson possesses two essential qualities statistics can't measure-- heart and aplomb. Evidently, Girardi doesn't belong among this company as Game 3 of the ALCS demonstrates.

ALDS GAME 3
Through 6 innings, Andy Pettitte has dazzled, having yielded a single run on three hits and having thrown only 75 pitches. (As late as the fifth, in fact, Pettitte actually flirted with perfection.) In the sixth, Span earned only the Twins second hit against him, stole second, and then scored on a weak grounder through the hole at shortstop. Pettitte however struck out Cuddyer to end the inning.

In the 7th, A-Rod comes to rescue, homering off Pavano to tie the game, followed by Posada to put the Yankees ahead. Now enjoying a one-run lead, Pettitte returns to the mound in the bottom of the seventh and strikes out Kubel on 6 pitches, totalling 81 pitches for the game. Wouldn't it behoove the manager to exhaust every last pitch and inning from a starter who is still well under 100 pitches in the 7th inning and thriving besides? Just 48 hours earlier, after all, Girardi used every single one of his relievers save Gaudin. Doesn't Pettitte's gem recommend in favor of proceeding batter-by-batter at the very least?

Well, consult the magic book. The magic book indicates that in 2008, Delmon Young was 2 for 3, each hit a double. 2009? Nothing. Evidently, that's good enough for the engineer. Girardi enters and removes Pettitte and replaces him with Joba. Young, promptly, gets the double on Joba Girardi feared Pettitte would yield but quickly recovers. (Irony is lost on the humorless however.) Has Joba the pitcher the Yankees nursed through September to fortify his endurance for the post-season-- does Girardi allow Chamberlain to muster this strength to face another batter or two in the following inning after 17 pitches, particularly because through 2 post-season games, Hughes hasn't acquitted himself well in the set-up role? No, of course, not.

Hughes rewards Girardi's faith accordingly by promptly yielding a double to Punto and a single to Span, but Punto overruns third base and all is forgiven. The Yankees win the ALDS in three games and advance. Has Girardi learned from his experience? Does he absorb any of the lessons his bullpen decisions in the ALDS might imply?

Alas, no, the same rigid abstraction, profligate use of relievers, distrust of first-hand observation, unwillingess to acknowledge mistakes or to incorporoate its lessons, thus far, have informed his bullpen management in the ALCS as well.

THE ALCS: THE CHICKENS COME HOME TO ROOST

In Game 1, CC Sabathia leaves Girardi no room for error. Through 8 innings, the Angels collect 3 hits and a walk and score one run. Mariano is Mariano in the 9th. Girardi's Leninist syndrome recurs, however, in Game 2.

Through 6.33 innings and 114 pitches, AJ Burnett holds the Angels to two runs, largely containing the wildness that accounted for them. Although his infielders don't help him. Cano succumbs to his habit for timely errors and muffs Iybar's routine grounder to 1st. Burnett exits and Girardi assigns Coke the job of retiring switch-hitting Figgins (his career OPS+ 84 from the right side, 24 points lower than the left) and lefty Abreu Coke. Coke walks Figgins and strikes out Abreu. Having reduced Coke to a lefty-specialist, however, the manager summons Chamberlain to face Hunter and Guerrero. Hunter hits an infield single to Jeter, but Joba bears down. He gives Guerrero three consecutive fastballs at 94, 95, and 95, which the Angels DH can only foul off and finishes him off with a devastating slider. All total Joba throws ten pitches against two batters. The Game stays tied at 2 entering the 8th.

Does Girardi learn from ALDS Game 2, then, that in a tie game, at home, with a day off to follow, perhaps, it's a good idea and to ride Chamberlain until either his stuff wavers or Angel batters hit him in order to reserve Hughes to pitch after Rivera, should the game proceeds to extra innings? No, of course not. Before Joba can throw to a single batter in the 8th, Hughes relieves him. Worse, Girardi doesn't even let Hughes finish the 8th inning. With two outs, a runner on second base following a Jeter error that derailed an inning-ending double play, and his set-up man having thrown a total of NINE pitches, Girardi calls upon Mo. What does this mean? In the mere 2.3 innings since AJ Burnett left the game, Girardi has exhausted his four best relievers-- Coke, Chamberlain, Hughes, and Mo-- and the game hasn't even entered the 9th inning.

So naturally, what happens when the manager has to resort to his bullpen's B-list in the 11th inning, after Mo, himself, pitches the next 2.3 innings? Girardi goes to Aceves. He walks the lead-off hitter, Gary Matthews, of all hitters, and the Angels score to go ahead 3-2, entering the bottom of the 11th. The script here gets so bizarrely familiar that I actually wonder whether the Baseball Gods were trying to send the Yankee manager an omen of hubris he finally would recognize: A-Rod homers again, repair the cosmic breach his manager has opened. Aceves and Marte get one batter each in the 12th and Robertson the last soldier standing between Gaudin and oblivion, hold the fort long enough for the New York cold to sabotage the Angels' defense. Yanks win in an error in the 13th.

General Girardi doesn't register the message of course. ALCS Game 3, in fact, brings still more dubious decisons. This time, after Pettitte has thrown 80 pitches and holds a slender lead on the road, Girardi, for some reason, lets him pitch with a runner on first base and to his opponent's preeminent power threat besides. Guerrero makes him pay for it, hitting a home run to tie the game. In the 7th, Pettitte induces Morales to line out to left field and exits. Who follows? The prefabricated formula, of course, calls for Joba.

Thus begin the point at which Girardi's discretion degenerates from miguided to indefensible. In the interest of time and space, I'm going to elide innings 8,9,10, other than to decry Girardi's squandering of Marte and Coke consecutively on Figgins and Abreu for the 7th innings last out and 8th inning's first. The debate Mo's entry in the 9th provokes-- and in general whether a manager should deploy his closer in a tie-game on the road when, in advance, he has decided to use him exclusively for a single inning, in a playoff series he leads 2-0 without an off-day following no less-- deserves its own blog entry. Suffice it to say, I disagreed with it, but its a defensible call. What's more, its myopia, it pales before the delinquency of following Coke with Marte and the inexplicable contradiction that ended the game.

Recall Joba enters the game in the 7th inning with one out to pitch to Yankee nemesis Howie Kendrick, who triples on a first-pitch 96 mph fastball and who scores on a sac-fly. Cut to the 11th inning. Dave Robertson, owner of a 0.00 ERA for the post-season, starts the inning. His repertoire of 93 mph fastballs and a sinister breaking ball dispose of Rivera and Morales in 11 pitches. Kendrick is next. But not before Girardi can consult his magic "match-up" primer and summon Aceves. Why? The authors, evidently, warn Kendrick "sits dead red." From which Girardi concludes his seventh and final reliever before Gaudin, Aceves' and his arsenal of cutters and changeups stand a better chance against Kendrick than Robertson's staple of fastball and curve and 0.00 ERA. But doesn't that beg the question of why Girardi both let Chamberlain pitch to Kendrick in the 7th and Posada call a first-pitch 96 mph? How to explain the contradiction? I can't. Can you? All I know is that two batters later Kendrick and Mathis ended Game 3.

If Girardi sleeps better after these games than I do, I would ask him to think about a quote that occurred to me just before I finally drifted off at 4:00 am. It's hardly profound, but because of the source, it's one Girardi would do well to heed. Man and voice incarnate Girardi's managerial opposite in many ways. The dialectical formed by their thesis and antithesis might even embody something close to an Hegelian enlightenment and Platonic ideal.

The quote, excerpted from his book The Yankee Years, reads, "I don't know how long we're going to be together. But do yourself a favor: never forget there is heartbeat in this game." Rarely has a manager left his successor advice more resonant or true.

ON HOBBESIAN OCTOBERS

2009-10-02T04:52:00.000-07:00

Savor the bouquet while it lasts-- 2009 is a good year. Just don't invest in its vintage. Cream pies, after all, come cheap. Champagne that ages, on the other hand, costs far more than $2500 a seat and 50 million dollars worth of Christmas shopping.

I sound churlish and cynical, you say? Perhaps.

Please understand nonetheless that I don't begrudge the Yankees their payroll. To the contrarym I'm grateful for it. To the organization's credit, they spend notwithstanding the revenue levies and luxury taxes Selig's corporate welfare regime costs them; notwithstanding the confiscated and redistributed Yankee dollars that subsidize its staunchest rivals and resentful critics; notwithstanding all the greedy owners who pocket the bounty instead of spending it on free-agents as the "revenue-sharing" system intended and then with utterly shameless effrontery condemn the Yankees for refusing to emulate their avarice; notwithstanding all of the indignity, injustice, and ingratitude the Steinbrenners, as such, must abide; the Sons still honor the Father's vision -- the Game's cardinal law this side of the Field of Dream: if you spend it, they will come.

That is, talent repays its acquisition in victories, pennant races, fan interest, Nielsen ratings, broadcast revenue, and advanced ticket sales. That is, the purpose of professional athletics is to win, so if you're a bored tycoon out to aggrandize your profits or to feed your vanity, don't own baseball team. Go run for mayor or something and leave the battlefield to Men.

No, whatever satisfaction and muted relief September of the "The Inaugural Season" has excited-- especially when compared to "The Final Season's" last month that turned out to be more terminal than climactic-- ambivalence prevails. It's an ambivalence born of vivid and traumatic memories of Octobers past I can't quite shake-- of swarming midges, of a Gambler's revenge, of ominous rally monkeys, of fateful outfield collisions and lethal crashes to buildings, of cosmic curses subverted and of supernatural swoons inscribed.

The last post-season, in fact, I can recall with wistful fondness unfolded six long years ago. One that occurred, it seems, in another lifetime-- reminiscences of a Posada bloop and a Boone blast, echoes of Russ Hodges and shadows of Bobby Thompson. A time when Magic and Mystique guarded the Bronx and the Baseball Gods still smiled on the Yankees.

By contrast, the Ghosts of Hobbes (Thomas, not Roy) haunts recent Octobers -- American League Divison Series that were nasty, brutish, solitary, and woefully short.

And to anyone who has read The Yankee Years-- apart, that is, from Randy Levine, Michael Kay, and Cult Cashman-- the reason for the unceremonious playoff exits that have bedevilled the Yankees ever since didn't dissolve with the purging of Joe Torre.

It's origins lie deeper in the skein of injury, inexperience, ineptitude, and ignorance that stretches from Jeff Weaver to Jared Wright. Would that I were confident that 2009 has broken it.

THE BELLWETHER: AS THE ROTATION TURNS
Don't let the AL-leading 898 runs the 2009 Yankees have scored to date deceive you. The Yankees will travel into the depths of October only so far as their starting rotation will carry them. Trust Verducci no more than Virgil? Then, let history be your guide.

In 2007, the Yankees led the AL with 968 runs scored; in 2006, they did likewise, with 930; and in 2005, they finished second with 886. Their pitching staff, in runs allowed, on the othe other hand, ranked no better than an AL 5th (2006). In fact, it placed as low as 9th in 2005 and fell to 7th in 2007.

By contrast, in the six seasons the Yankees have reached the World Series over the last 12 years, the team ranked no lower than 4th in runs allowed; finishing 4th in 2003, 3rd 2001, 4th in 2000, 2nd in 1999, 1st in 1998, and 3rd in 1996.

Entering the season's final weekend, the 2009 Yankees have yielded 733 runs-- good for 6th in the league. (What's more, their starting pitching and relief pitching, measured separately by ERA, fares no better-- each rates 6th in the AL.)

More ominous still, in every season since 2005, the American League team to emerge from its four post-season qualifiers to represent it in the World Series has been the one that finished the season with the best staff ERA. (See below "No Wang," August 3rd) The Yankees head into the 2009 post-season ranked 3rd among the league's four likely entrants behind both Boston and Detroit.

TO THREE OR NOT TO THREE: THAT IS THE QUESTION
With a good reason, then, much of the debate surrounding the Yankees of late has centered on how best to maximize the team's strengths or perhaps, more accurately, to compensate for its weaknesses. Now that the Yankees have earned the dubious honor of the AL's best record, do they select the ALDS series with the extra off-day that would allow Girardi to pitch 3 starters or the ALDS without it that would constrain him to pitch 4 starters.

The media coverage, as usual, has missed entirely the decision's most vexing element. Joba fixates them so naturally, they identify him as its crux. Good Joba should start. Bad Joba shouldn't. The former prospect means a four-man rotation; the latter calls for three. The one commending the shorter ALDS, the other, the longer one.

All of which begs a more troublesome and elementary question. Does the quality and depth of the Yankees' starting rotation even afford them the luxury of pitching two starters twice? Pitcher A in Games 1 and 4 and Pitcher B in Games 2 and 5. If CC is A, pray tell, who is B? AP or AB? Could any Yankees fan envision a more terrifying prospect since Kevin Brown pitched Game 7 than A.J Burnett pitching Game 5? Supposedly, the Yankees are daring to consider the possibility. Burnett, so goes the logic, is 5-3 with 3.51 ERA at home and 7-6 with a 4.73 ERA away. Meanwhile, Pettitte's performance reflects the same disparity only in reverse-- 8-3 with a 3.59 ERA away and 6-4 with 4.59 ERA on the road.

Or perhaps, Burnett's 0.00 ERA in the post-season holds sway. Of course, the caveat there is that Burnett has a perfect era in the post-season because through eleven seasons, he's never pitched in one. As for Andy Pettitte, well, his heart inspires more confidence than his arm. True, "Andy is a 2nd half pitcher" goes the cliche, which has the virtue, in addition, of being true, but success in August hasn't always carried into October. While Pettitte's lifetime ERA in the second half is 3.61 (five-tenths higher, 4.17, in the first), his post-season statistics fall short of the Pettitte myth. Despite the championship aura surrounding him, in truth, Pettitte's career performance in the post-season parallels his performance during the regular season. Through his fifteen season, Pettitte owns a 3.90 ERA over 457 starts; and over 35 post-season starts, Pettitte is 14-9 with a 3.96 ERA. (The lesser, actually, of a pitcher often maligned for foundering in the post-season, Mike Mussina. Whom, by contrast, over 23 post-season appearances is 7-8 with a 3.42 ERA.)

The greatest virtue, in other words, of starting Joba Chamberlain in Game 4 against the like of Alfred Figaro, Eddie Bonine, or Nate Robertson is its byproduct. The Yankees' best pitcher would start the two games the word "Ace" bespeaks. CC Sabathia would pitch Game 1 and CC Sabathia would pitch Game 5. And if the Yankees face elimination in Game 4, they always could pitch Sabathia on three days rest and defer Chamberlain's start to Game 5 with Burnett (also on three days rest) and/or Aceves prepared to relieve him.

Indeed, the peril and pitfall each scenario courts and none entirely avoids would suggest hiding the whip cream, husbanding the liquor, and keeping the champagne on ice.

THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST?

2009-09-07T04:46:00.000-07:00

“And in the lighted palace near, died the sound of royal cheer; And they cross'd themselves for fear, all the knights at Camelot..." T he Lady of Shalott, Tennyson

Oh for the symmetries of history: meaningless September games closed Ruth's House and meaningless September games opens Jeter's. But praise be the difference. Last autumn rang the death knell and dimmed the Stadium lights. This year, the trumpet calls and the drums of October rumble early.

So with the Yankees' return to the post-season growing daily more inevitable, a momentary lull occasions an instant's reflection before October's passion and pleasures, torments and griefs begin.

Reader, please bear with me then. My larger point about the Yankees emerges slowly and warrants a digression through America's other signal calling. If baseball is the national pastime, then politics is its national vocation.

You see, in the decades before crowds thronged ballparks to gawk and to marvel at player's prodigious physical talent and skill, thousand flocked to auditoriums to be spellbound by edifying oratory. Before Ruth, Gehrig, and DiMaggio, there was Webster, Clay, and Bryan. Before the epic battle the audience eagerly anticipated opposed the Yankees and Red Sox across a diamond, it pitted Lincoln against Douglas behind the lectern.

Perhaps, this explains why the two arenas so often borrow from and supply each other's repository of myths, idioms, symbols, and imagery. The media now covers election campaigns, for instance, as journalists might a baseball season. Instead of analyzing policy or investigating facts, the narrative consists instead of a facile, arcane, and largely trivial discussion of tactics and strategies, of turnouts and poll numbers, of the week's winner and losers-- befitting what Joan Didion once mordantly called Washington “Inside Baseball.” Conversely, baseball, over the years, has adopted all the patriotic trappings, civic pomp, and national rites we normally associate with the political arena. Anthems, flag-waving, military pageantry, honored guests and ceremonial pitches. Could you imagine a play, movie, concert, or opera, by contrast, opening with any of these obligatory patriotic rituals?

I mention this because in the exhaustive media coverage about the Brothers Kennedys that has accompanied the Massachusetts Senator's recent death I couldn't help but see in the indirect light it reflects on baseball, in general, and in particular, the Yankees. No, I don't refer to the photographs depicting an already wan Teddy outfitted in Red Sox regalia with a smiling John Henry beside him or for that matter, to the little known friendship between the Kennedys and Steinbrenners and the homage George paid, via his press agent, in the wake of his friend's passing. The connection is more oblique but not necesarily less telling.

As Michael Lewis' Moneyball potrayed it, Baseball-- that is, both the body that governs the league (headed by the Commissioner) and the the individual teams that comprise it: Baseball, despite an identity that today owes as much today to the Money as to the Ball, in attitude, outlook, financial practices and personnel management evokes far less a competitive modern corporation or profitable niche industry than a smug, hidebound country club. It's a Club where insularity, clannishness, exclusivity, solipsism dominate marketplace shibboleths like innovation, adapatability, and efficiency and where a Club member's greatest sin "is not ineptitude but disolyalty." An institution, in other words, not so unlike the local party clubs that together constituted the urban political machines that controlled the country's municipal government from the Republic's founding until well after World War II and that in the late 1940s just so happened to launch the Congressional career of a young, pasty-faced Irish-American war hero from Boston who later ascended to the Presidency.

Only as the Boston Congressman, and later, Massaschusetts Senator's career blossomed and he fixed his ambitions on the Presidency, he abandoned the ways and habits of the machine. His campaigns depended less and less upon the party to marshall votes and to bind allegiance because his family's wealth granted him the luxury of bypass its patronage apparatus and electoral organization. Instead, Jack, and his campaign manager, brother Bobby, tapping Poppa Joe's limitless financial resources, capitalized on the new media, computer technology, and advanced statistical applications the corporate world already used to pioneer the modern campaign-- polling voters, canvassing preferences, testing campaign themes, targetting equivocal audiences, lavishing huge sums on advertising, promoting a personality cult and forging loyalties independent of party.

Consequently, Kennedy, owing no debt to the bosses for his election, once in office, needn't repay it by hiring their cronies. In the Oval Office, Kennedy then could transform the Office of Chief Executive and Presidential cabinet from a spoils system for career bureaucrats and party functionaries into an managerial Elect of the "Best and Brightest" called to higher service. Like the poll, focus group, and televison spot, merit-based Presidential appointment is now such a commonplace, we often fail to appreciate fully just how profound a reform, in this regard, Kennedy initiated.

To quote Gore Vidal, writing in 1961,

"I had not been to the White House since 1957... The corridors were empty. In the various offices of the Executive, quiet gray men in waistcoats talked to one another in low-pitched voices. Last month, I returned to find the twentieth century [] installed. The corridors are filled with eager youthful men... Kennedy is unique among recent Presidents in many ways. For one thing, he had ended the idea that the Presidency is a form of brevet rank to be give a man whose career has been distinguished in some profession other than politics or if to a politician, one whose good years are past, the White House being merely a place to provide some old pol with a golden Indian summer."

THE BRONX BRAIN DRAIN AND BOSTON BRAIN TRUST
How does all of this relate to baseball, you ask; and more importantly to the Yankees?

Well, despite the seeming paradox-- that is, notwithstanding the Kennedy family's deep roots in New England; and notwithstanding the recently departed's allegiance to Fenway, I can't help see nonetheless in the Camelot Presidency, in its rise and in its reign, a parallel to Steinbrenner's Yankees. A story about related ascents that nonetheless arrive at different destinations, a parable about roads not taken and opportunities lost.

Like Jack Kennedy, George Steinbrenner inherited the wealth and status of a prominent, hard-driving, autocratic father and like the President, the Boss, in turn, parlayed this considerable patrimony to win a birthright all his own, achieving success and renown that exceeded his family's expecations and the endowments given him. Likewise, the Ambassador's son and the shipbuilder's heir, once reaching the top, had to weather the persistent, vitriolic attacks of an establishment determined to discredit them as arrivistes and to reduce the value of what they'd achieved to their money. Ill-gotten plunder bought Kennedy his Presidency, they said; filthy lucre, Steinbrenner his Championships.

It is however in how these two embattled men governed once they acceded to the throne however that they parted company. If Kennedy surrounded himself with the Best and Brightest with the uncharacteristic concession here and there to nepotism and loyalists, Steinbrenner governed in the opposite manner.

At first, the owner may have planned otherwise, hiring in Gabe Paul and Al Rosen shrewd and savvy executives to compensate for the baseball acumen he lacked. The policy didn't last. Soon enough the Boss either antagonized or fired his most able personnel, and the best and brightest, with offers elsewhere, shunned the Bronx. Instead of an organization distinguished by the Game's Best and Brightest, it harbored the Obsequious and the Obtuse. (The exception of Gene Michael's tenure during George's expulsion, of course, is the exception that only underscores the rule.)

In fact, the moniker "The Boss" fit so well precisely because Steinbrenner conjured Boss Tweed, New York's infamous party boss. Meanwhile, the Yankees' organization the Boss' tyranny had wrought recalled the machine's waste, incompetence, and mismanagement (and pace, Howard Spira), its corruption. It ran sure enough. Then again, so did Tammany Hall, as long as no one expected efficiency, competitive advantage, or good government, and money continued to grease its wheels. So much, in fact, did the Yankees depart from the Kennedy standard of merit and professionalism that in the Boss' final years the courtiers, opportunists, flunkeys and fools that dominated his Tampa Kitchen Cabinet were probably more qualified to cook (and to drive) than to advise him about baseball.

In the meantime, the baseball front-office that came to exemplify the Best and the Brightest ideal; that prized merit, that valued credentials, and rewarded critical thinking; that adapted the private sector's latest information technology, statistical tools, computer modeling, and advanced media to assembling a winning baseball team just as the Kennedys once did to assembling a winning political campaign wasn't the Yankees at all. It was their arch rival, the Regents of Ressentiment, otherwise known as the Boston Red Sox.

To quote Tom Verducci in The Yankee Years,

"[John] Henry believed in numbers. They made him a rich man. Henry established an alternative money management firm that proudly took human emotion and subjective analysis out of play. It made trading decisions based on a proprietary, objective systems that analyzed trends in each market... Henry saw no reason why data-based analysis should not work in baseball, too... and about 20 years earlier had discovered the work of statstical analyst Bill James and other so-called sabermetricians."

It was the Yankees' former limited partner, Henry, then, who took up the Kennedy mantle and adopting the marketplace's empirical methods, technological tools, and merit system to modernize the GM's office as the Kennedy's once did the political campaign.

True, as Lewis' Moneyball tells the story, Billy Beane's Oakland Athletics pioneered the reform but economic necessity animated them as much as it constained them. Henry's team, on the other hand, had the finanical wherewithal and the intellectual will to realize it in its all manifold applications.

First, the Red Sox set about accumulating as much brain power as possible for his baseball operations, from hiring the Great Bill James himself and courting his many disciples to hiring as many experienced GMs as the sport had to offer. Conflicting titles, overlapping hierarchies, elders answering to their youngers-- none of this mattered.

Nor did Henry apply the hiring criteria the Club (Lewis' invidious term for the baseball establishment) tends to favor. For example, lifelong citizenship in Red Sox nation, friendship with the Henry family, connections to the Mayor, and an aptitude for mollifying tyrants and retaining one's job, say, didn't qualify one for an office. To the contrary, Henry's front-office personnel had to fulfill the same qualifications as the players who fill his team roster-- merit and merit alone.

Then, once Henry installed his brain trust, he encouraged and subsidized them in discovering for the Jamesian empirical method new and innovative metrics and for the latest medical and media technology new and innovative application. According to Verducci, the Red Sox front-office, for example, went about collecting the statistics of every college player in the last decade and then tracking their production through the minors and majors to devise models on how amateur and professional performance correlated. They also numbered one of two teams to send ALL their pitchers to Dr. James Andrews' Institute for biomechanical imaging to identify mechancial flaws and to forestall arm injuries. No doubt, someone in the Red Sox front-office is pouring over the latest Pitch f/x data baseball now collects to explain such anecdotal and physical imponderables as late break, speed, and movement. And in all likelihood, the Red Sox continue to tap Japan for pitching because unlike the rest of baseball, they've probably formulated a metric that predicts how a pitcher there will fare here.

No, the Red Sox GM's office isn't infallible. (As the Kennedy administration's overtures in Vietnam, and John McNamara himself, illustrate, the Best and Brightest err often.) No, they're not immune to personnel mistakes; no they haven't assembled a flawless roster; no, haven't and won't win every year. However, the Red Sox already have built one if not the deepest farm system in the majors despite drafting near the back of the line each season.

To appreciate fully what Henry has accomplished, consider for a moment a parallel world in which the Red Sox possessed the Yankees revenue stream and the Yankees, the Red Sox, but without altering the composition of their respective front-offices. Do you doubt how the two rivals would finish this season or for the forseeable future?

THE CASH-MAN'S YANKEES
With the Yankees the proud owners of the league's best record, it no doubt will seem churlish to criticize the GM's office, petty to disparage it, and willfully blind to ignore the considerable improvement its personnel decisions have registered since 2005.

This year alone the farm system yielded fruits, replenishing and stabilizing the major league roster when criticial injuries claimed A-Rod and Posada, and bolstering the bullpen. Meanwhile, George retreated years ago and mercifully, taken the Tampa HillBillies and Fool's Court with him. And if the Brothers Steinbrenner, in stature, charisma, courage or cleverness won't earn many comparison to Ted and Bobby, the George' sucessors don't appear to meddle with the baseball operations department or to tyrannize its employees.

But then again who knows? Among other frailties, the Boss' legacy of paranoia has survived him. The Yankees endeavor to conceal as much of their inner workings under a veil of secrecy now as ever. "Plans" supposedly exist for everything from Joba Chamberlain's innings count to restoring Chien-Ming Wang' velocity to guaranteeing Alex Rodriguez his hiatuses. "There's a process in place," the GM assures his skeptics. Only no one but the GM is privy to it. Neither the end results nor his faltering explanations, in the meantime, flatter him however. To the contrary, Cashman's "secret plans" for Joba and Wang recall Nixon's "secret plan to end the War," and his mangling of the English language, upon communicating them, bespeaks Dubya. Behind secret veils and contorted syntax typically lies rank duplicity and/or bungling incompetence.

Why did it require three outings in April, for example, before the Yankees suddenly realized the precipitous fall in Wang's velocity betrayed the lasting effects of his lis franc injury? And why did they continue to pitch him and ignore the injury to his arm they risked by allowing him to overthrow to compensate? Why did they promote him if after Wang's third minor league start his velocity still hadn't recovered? Why, finally, did it require Wang's agent to demand a second opinion before Dr. Andrews diagnosed the tear to his labrum? And why did they let him throw on flat ground twice in the interim?

Questions about the GM's management of Joba's innings total abound as well. If the Yankees intended to pitch Chamberlain in the post-season while honoring his innings limit, why didn't they simply defer his first outing until May 1st or May 15 to avoid a hiatus during the season? Back in April, the Yankees could have used Hughes, Kennedy, Aceves for the season's first month or acquired a career AAAA pitcher to use as their fifth starter.

Perhaps, we shouldn't diminsh though what "Cash-Money," as his acolytes like to call him, does well. Cash-Money excels at writing checks. By this, I don't intend sarcasm or a backhanded compliment. I mean it, quite sincerely. As the Red Sox have shown again and again cultivating player's loyalty, earning their good will, and recruiting them to sign isn't easy or evidently, a task at which the Red Sox office excels. Manny, Minky, Pedro, Damon and Lowe: the Red Sox managed to antagonize or to alienate all of them. By contrast, Cashman successfully recruited Sabathia, allaying his misgivings about New York with an escape clause, and seduced Teixiera just as the Red Sox were doing their best to offend him.

Perhaps, the Best and the Brightest necessarily excludes the Obsequious and the Ingratiating.

If so, Cash-Money's Yankees will go only so far as competitive zeal travels between generations; stars gravitate to and shine in the Bronx; and $50 million dollars of payroll separates New York from Boston.

NO WANG, NO WASHBURN, NO WORLD SERIES

2009-08-03T04:53:00.000-07:00

If after two years spent firmly entrenched behind their arch rival, the Yankees abruptly discover the roles reversed as they enter the final third of the 2009 season, perhaps one has to allow for the sudden prevalence of blithe confidence and myopic optimism.

In the deep recesses of our historical consciousness, the Red Sox recent superiority, after all, smacks of transience and aberration, a temporary rift in the cosmic order soon righted by the passage of time. While some eternal contract between the dead Ruth, the living Jeter, and prospects unborn underwrites the Yankees' ascendance with 2009 evoking the fitness, compensatory justice, and return to normalcy of a dynasty restored.

To all ye smug, complacent, and myopic, beware.

Two West Coast road trips beckon. Injury has claimed Chien-Ming Wang. Joba nears his innings limit. The 8th inning void, conscripting Hughes and Aceves, has stripped the farm and exhausted the reserves. And with Kei Igawa manning the barricades, a thin, fragile starting rotation stands an injury from disaster.

Meanwhile, the trade deadline has come and gone. The competiton has improved. The Yankees rested.

In the East, the Red Sox's acquisition of Victor Martinez and Casey Kotchman bolsters a faltering lineup, reinforces corners defense, deepens their bench, offers rest to the aged and infirm Varitek, Lowell, and Ortiz, injects youth into a team beset by injury and age, and secures them a catcher and first-baseman for next year. The Central-leading Tigers-- the team the Yankees' current standing would pit them against in the playoffs' first round-- snared Jarrod Washburn, the very starter the Yankees arguably needed and certainly coveted.

As a consequence, the Yankees now face the prospect of an October rotation, should they make it that far, of Sabathia, Burnett, Pettitte and Mitre. A post-season rotation about as redoubtable as predecessors featuring Shawn Chacon, Jared Wright, Corey Lidle, a dilapidated Unit, a grounded Rocket and leading straight to first-round exits.

THE THREE-ARMED CRAP SHOOT
The media machine's great cliched metaphor for baseball's post-season is the crap shoot, evoking the image of eight teams huddled around a crap table, the outcome hinging on a dice roll, the hottest arm running the table and sheer luck deciding the winner.

Nothing could be further from the truth. This isn't to deny chance its influence, the indiscriminate injury, the fortunate bounce. Nor is to gainsay that the World Series' winner is often less October's best team than the team that plays best in October. Or more accurately, the team that pitches best. Only, in the American League, the past four post-seasons, the team that pitched best happens also to have been the team with the best pitching.

To elaborate, among the four American league teams to have qualified for the playoffs the last four years, the team that ultimately represented the league in the World Series was the same team which possessed the pitching staff with the lowest era entering October.
For each, the staff's preeminence sprang from the depth of their starting rotation. Last year, Shields, Kazmir, and Garza led the Rays. In 2007, Beckett, Schilling, and Dice-K anchored the Red Sox. In 2006, it was Rogers, Verlander, Robertson and Bonderman, the Tigers; and in 2005, Contreras, Buehrle, Garland, and Garcia. Each team, as a consequence, started a pitcher 3 of every 4 post-season games likely to give them a quality outing-- a quality start defined as pitching 6 innings or more, yielding 3 earned runs or less. (In fact, every one of the above pitchers had accumulated ERAs lower than 4.00 for the season, Dice-K excepted.)

2008- ERA	2007- ERA	2006- ERA	2005 - ERA

Tam- 3.82	Bos- 3.87	Det- 3.85	Chi - 3.61
LA- 4.00	Cle - 4.05	Min - 3.95	Bos - 4.74
Bos- 4.28	LA - 4.23	Oak - 4.22	LA - 3.68
Chi - 4.11	NY- 4.50	NY- 4.43	NY- 4.54

The above graphic shouldn't surprise anyone acquainted with the 1996-2003 Yankee championship teams and the fundamental strength that distinguished them from their feeble progeny. Unlike their offense-dependent offspring, pitching underpinned the championship teams. That success, above all, rose from the rotation's depth and extended as far as its 3rd starter and often unto the 4th: Pettitte, the mainstay, then Cone or Mussina, Key or Wells, Clemens and/or El Duque. A succession of arms that fortified them with their best defense against the losing streak that is so fatal in October.[1] By contrast, from 2004 through 2007, disaster arrived in early October once the Yankees first or second starter succumbed because behind him, the infirm, inept, middling, overwrought and ill-equipped followed.

APRES BURNETT, QUI?: CASHMAN'S LOST GAMBLE
The 2009 Yankees haven't sat in first place this late into a baseball season since 2006. The three pivotal Red Sox series to come and the two arduous West Coast road trips that await notwithstanding, the Yankees, thus far, have earned the mantle of genuine contender. They own at 63-42 record through 105 games. Mere average .500 baseball through September then would bring them to 90 wins. A tad better than than and at 31-26, they would total 94 wins and meet the customary threshold for post-season qualification.

So for the moment, let's court bad karma and for argument's sake, envision how the Yankees might fare against their postseason competition as currently constituted. Wang lost. Washburn forsaken. Joba inactive or relegated to the bullpen, his allotted 150-160 innings expended. Cashman's opportunity to acquire a comparable third starter long expired. The Yankees' rotation consisting of Sabathia, Burnett, Pettitte, and X.

Extrapolating from the four-year trend indicated above that AL playoff team with the best ERA crowns its World Series representative, I chart the competition below, listing their current staff ERA and the combined ERAs of their top four starters-- i.e., their playoff rotation. (I've excluded Tampa and Texas on the assumption that if either qualifies for the postseason, the Yankees will not.)

	STAFF - ERA	STR 1-4 ERA
Bos.	4.12	4.07
Det.	4.15	3.16
Chi	4.15	4.11
NYY	4.50	4.22
Ana.	4.75	4.38

In the second column, while I've quanitfied and ranked the AL playoff contenders' likely playoff rotations, I concede, it's not without its inevitable flaws and unavoidable conjecture. In the Yankees' case, for example, their four best starters didn't correspond to their four probable post-season starters, so in prioritizing the latter, willy-nilly, the 4.22 ERA listed above excludes Joba Chamberlain's representative statistics and instead includes Mitre's unrepresentative 13.2 pitched innings and the 12 earned runs he's surrendered while doing so.

Why, you may ask? Because I take the Yankees at their word, trust they will honor Joba's inning cap, and can envision no circumstance under which he would start in the post-season. On his current schedule, he will exhaust his alloted innings by September. They're not likely to enjoy the luxury of skipping his starts, not with Tampa and Texas chasing them, not with enough frequency anyway to spare innings for October. And the scenario, under which they inactivate him for a long period and then kick start him for the post-season would seem to pose a risk as grave, if not more, than ignoring his innings' restrictions altogether.

Despite its provisional value, the chart above nonetheless suggests that if they genuinely harbor championship ambitions, the 2009 Yankees will have to defy history to do so. First, the starting rotation recalls far more the fatal flaw of the 2004-2007 teams than the 1996-2003 teams overriding strength. Second, assuming they play in October, they will have to overcome another recent trend and prove that a staff ERA, ranked no better than third among the AL's four qualifiers, can triumph nonetheless over its rivals. For whomever the Yankees select as their fourth starter-- whether Mitre or some nameless alternative with a fourth starter's league average ERA-- they still would oppose, in Boston, Detroit/Chicago, and/or Anaheim, two teams with more proficient pitching staffs and a third team they can't seem to beat under any circumstances, statistics notwithstanding.

Finally, the chart above illustrates the gravity of Cashman's decision to value the future dividends Austin Jackson could yield over Jarrod Washburn's immediate and tangible return.

(Jackson because among the other four, Joba, Hughes, Montero, and Romine, Cashman deemed untouchable, Austin Jackson, a AAA outfielder whose power either hasn't developed or doesn't exist, his elevation to prized status is the least defensible. I can't argue with hoarding the other four. In the wake of Melky's revival and Gardner's emergence, Jackson no longer is indispensable to the Yankees' future. All three cannot play center, after all, and their power deficits disqualify each from the corners.)

In fact, Washburn represents the margin of difference between boasting the AL's best most playoff rotation and risking association among its least, between winning the World Series and losing again in the first round. For with Washburn replacing Mitre (or a average fourth starter equivalent) the ERA of the Yankees' probable playoff rotation rises to 3.75 and moves them from fourth to first in the ranking above. Conversely, the ERA of Detroits' likely playoff rotation plummets to 3.77 and demotes them to second.

THE NEW WORLD YANKEE

In the Bronx, the new regime's worldview compasses broader horizons than in the past. King George has exited and carried his sentimental, profligate, impatient, win-now, profit-be-damned philosophy with him. Baby Bombers grown on the farm are cherished less for their pedigree, for the affection they earn, or for the solidarity they contribute. No, now, the front-office values home-grown prospects as precious financial assets, as human capital to be hoarded, nursed, husbanded, and ulitmately milked for years to come. Numbers now rule the day- profit and loss, cost-benefit, capital realization, fungible value denominates everything from the price of beer to the worth of Melk. The MBAs have inherited the Crown.

I commend the front-office for irrigating a long neglected, fallow farm, cultivating new talent, injecting youth and bringing the minor league affiliates back to life. The old way of mortgaging the future and plundering the farm augured a slow, suffocating death. Still, Cashman has yet to prove he can identify the focal point in the balance between, at once, capitalizing on his aging, dynastic nucleus' final years of contention while building a new foundation for the future. Instead, the front-office reeks of reaction. Like Russia, the Commissar succeeds the Czar and one extreme follows another. Sure, if peanuts brings you Abreu, eat. Sure if Nady and Marte, fortuitously, exacts spare parts, by all means, floor the engine. But relinquish a single crown jewel for the royal family's last gasp of glory, never.

Cashman serves today at the Steinbrenner's pleasure. Ultimately, he'll have to answer to history and more immediately, the 4 men in the clubhouse, Jeter, Posada, Pettitte, and Rivera responsible for the GM's achievements and to whom he owes one last opportunity.

Pray, Cashman hasn't forsaken it and may the name Jarrod Washburn, otherwise, fade into memory.

[1] In the '96 World Series when Pettitte and Key faltered, Cone rose to the occasion. In the '98 ALCS, when Pettitte wavered, the bullpen unraveled, and the barbarians thronged the gates, El Duque baffled the opposition and held the citadel. In the 2001 ALDS, with the team down 0-2 and the season teetering on the brink, Mussina saved the day and then again, in the 2003 ALCS, staving off ruin, in relief of Clemens.

THE FRONTIER SEPARATING NEW YORK AND BOSTON

2009-07-20T05:32:00.000-07:00

"The woods are...dark and deep... and [there are] miles to go before I sleep."-- Robert Frost

Perhaps, the saving grace of the latest trial Joe G's team had to endure in Disney's House of Hell is that it ended the ceremonial 1st-half of the Yankees season. It enabled his team to beat a hasty retreat, leave the ignominy behind them, rest, recuperate, marshal their stamina and energy, and rejoin the battle. As consequence, the Yankees opened the 2nd half by reeling off four straight victories, the last three via the improbable feat of three consecutive, dramatic 2-1 victories. More improbable still, the streak has lifted the team into first place and drawn them even with the Red Sox.

To lend historical perspective, the Bombers haven't achieved equivalent success through 92 games since 2006. That year, you may recall, the Yankees also stood at 55-27 in late July but nonetheless didn't catch Boston until August 1st, the day they moved into a first-place tie atop the division. A lead they never relinquished. Two weeks later, they travelled to Fenway and over a five-game series, re-staged the '78 "Boston Massacre", sweeping the opening double header on Friday and taking the next three games as well, dealing the Red Sox's 2006 season the death blow from which it never recovered.

(Praise be to autumnal New England color-- gray skies, black mourning dresses, the blues of dejection, and Fenway in jaded green-- green with the bile of envy. To every October its Bucky and every Yom Kippur, Kaddish at the Green Wall. Amen.)

Ah, but I digress. Worse, the nostalgia invites hubris, the expectation that history will repeat itself. Don't count on it. At the risk of sounding like Cassandra, I'd urge you nonetheless to heed the omens.

Leave aside the 2009 Yankees 0-8 record against the Red Sox for a moment, though it suggests malign karma of its own. Just look at the team's respective schedules for August and September. Behind our backs, the Scheduling Gods have contrived to tilt the playing field and to secure Boston the inside track for taking the division.

While the Red Sox finish the 2009 season with series against Baltimore, Kansas City, Toronto, and Cleveland, the Yankees's route to October follows a longer, more treacherous road and pits them against more formidable opponents along the way. Simply fending off Texas and Tampa and holding on to a playoff spot will test the Yankees' mettle, endurance, and capability on its own.

THE PEREMPTORY SCHEDULING GODS
The vagaries, disparities, inaninities, and outright injustices that bedevil the major league baseball schedule is, by now, notorious. In its composition, the irrational is only exceeded by the arbitrary.

The interleague schedule accounts for much of the inequality because it assigns teams in the same division a different set of interleague opponents. In 2009, for example, while the schedule pit the Yankees, Red Sox, and Orioles against each team in the NL East, inexplicably, for the Tampa Rays, it substituted the Rockies for the Braves; for the Blue Jays, the Red for the Mets.

Then, there's the capricious artificiality of the so-called "natural rival," Commissioner-engineered as often as it is organic, against whom a franchise plays 6 games every year. The idea of the Nationals, Pirates, Marlins, Padres, Rockies, Mariners, or Twins serving as any team's "rival," genuine or otherwise, is laughable. It smacks of the hustler's stamp of "genuine imitation leather." Apart from distorting the wild-card race, which the unbalanced intra-league schedule accomplishes anyway, the "natural rival" pretense saddles the Yankees, Mets, White Sox, Cubs, Cardinals, Royals, A's, Giants and perhaps a handful of other franchises, with more arduous and demanding games than those in settings where fans regard the outcome no differently than any other.

Never mind the tedium of two Mariners-Padres' series. Does the taxing urgency and freighted tension of a Phillies-Blue Jays series or for that matter, a Red Sox-Braves series, ever match Yankees-Mets or Cubs-White Sox? What Boston baseball fan seethes or sulks because the Red Sox lose to the Braves. Apart from the Francoeur family, is there a single Bostonian, still alive that is, who roots for the Braves-- better yet, who ever rooted did?

Perhaps, the 16-14 disparity between the National and American leagues in team size makes the interleague schedule's anomalies unavoidable. But how does the league justify the inequities in the intra-league schedule and among teams that play in the very same division?

THE YANKEES' FINAL FRONTIER: THE WILD WEST
More specifically, how does the league justify a schedule that sends the Red Sox to the West Coast twice and the Yankees three times. Just as disproportionate, however, is their respective timing.

The Red Sox completed their final road to the Pacific Time Zone for the 2009 season on May 17. That's right: MAY! The Red Sox traveled to the West Coast the 1st time in April for 6 games in Anaheim and Oakland (April 10-15). They returned in May for their 2nd to face Anaheim and Seattle (May 12th-May 17th.)

The Yankees, meanwhile, don't conclude their third and final odyssey through the Pacific Time Zone until September 23rd. Their 1st trip closed the season's first-half (July 10-12). Their 2nd is Aug 13 to 19 in Seattle and Oakland. (Directly, after which, they happen to play in Boston, August 21-23. Their 3rd trip takes them to Disney's House of Hell via Seattle, as I mention above, from September 18-23.

Like the Red Sox, the Rays, if you're interested, also play only two series in the Pacific Time Zone. Their 1st the Rays completed in April against Oakland and Seattle. The 2nd the Rays play in August from August 7-12th against Seattle and Anaheim. The Rays, however, returned to Tampa to play Boston in April, however; unlike the Yankees, who have to travel to Boston, following a West Coast trip, in August. The Rays also return home immediately after their 2nd West Coast trip in August.

Now, I concede no statistic-- none I've seen anyway--conclusively establishes the hardship exacted of baseball players when sent 3,000 miles away to play games three hours later than accustomed. Consider however the divide between the Yankees home and away record against Anaheim, Oakland, Seattle since 2000.

OPPONENT ('00-'09)	HOME	AWAY	%DIFFERENTIAL
LAA	20-23	18-26	-5.6 %
OAK	26-15	17-19	-16.2 %
SEA	24-20	22-18	0.0 %
TOTAL	70-58	57-63	-7.0%

The difference between a 70-58 team and 57-63 team is about the difference between a team that qualifies for the playoffs and one that doesn't. (Incidentally, from 2000-2009, the Yankees' overall winning percentage on the road is five percent (-5.0%) less than at home.)

Or more perhaps, more illustrative, ask a Boston, New York, or Philadelphia beat reporters what players say privately about West Coast road trips. They'll tell you even the best-conditioned athlete isn't immune to the fatigue, insomnia, dehydration with which bi-coastal travel burden everyone. Why would 6-hour flights, travel delays, late nights, deferred start times, disrupted body clocks, and jet lag exhaust an athlete and diminish his performance any less than you or I.

THE TWILIGHT ROAD AHEAD
The Yankees exit the All-Star break with the Dog Days still ahead of them. Yet through the murky summer haze, flecks of autum color sprinkle the horizon and in the distance, the first dim, faint contours of October have started to emerge.

Disney's Angels have ensconced themselves in the West, while precocious, stout Texas lingers, maturing into a contender faster than anyone anticipated. In the Central, Detroit, Chicago, and Minnesota vie to distinguish themselves amid epidemic heartland mediocrity. Meanwhile, in the East, after a year's pause, Boston and New York have resumed their epic battle. With the Tampa upstarts-- spry, prolific, and with inexhaustible reserves of talent-- proving last year no fluke, injecting themselves into the rivalry and establishing a permanent claim to the throne.

Don't let the AL East's current standings deceive you however. Certainly, at this writing, Boston and New York stand atop the East with an identical 55-37 record. (Although Boston owns the tiebreaker because its 8-0 record with 10 to play all but guarantees them the season series.) While Tampa lags, on the loss side, five games behind them.

Teams' actual records index past performance however. By contrast, the sabermetricians have shown, run differential-- i.e. the difference between teams' Runs Scored (RS) and their Runs Allowed (RA) and the Pythagorean expected record it projects (RS^2/(RS^2+RA^2) -- predicts for more accurately how they will fare in the future. And the three teams' Pythagorean record doesn't bode well for the Yanks. Their (+61) run differential trails behind Tampa and Boston, each at (+79) respectively.

More ominous still for the Yankees' designs on the division is, as explained above, the taxing schedule, including two West Coast road trips, ahead of them. To document the more onerous schedule the Bombers' face, at least vis a vis Boston's, I post two charts below. To dramatize the comparison, the charts below encapsulate the Yankees' remaining schedules in addition to that of their three principal competitors' for the AL East title and/or AL wild-card, Boston, Tampa, and Texas.

"Chart A", below, groups each team's forthcoming opponents by AL division and lists the remaining number of games against each.

"Chart B" (i) list the sum of each team's remaining games home and away (ii) lists their respective winning percentages home and away; and (iii) uses a weighted measure of their opponents' records to quantify the difficulty of the four rivals' remaining schedule. To calculate a schedule's "weighted difficulty," I account for the frequency with which a team plays a forthcoming opponent, instead of treating each one equally. For example, if the Yankees play the Red Sox 10 times more this season and the Rangers only 5, the difficulty of the Yankees remaining schedule reflects the 2:1 ratio, weighting the Red Sox winning percentage twice as much as the Rangers' winning percentage in the final equation. Below, then, WEIGHTED SCHEDULE DIFFICULTY = (Opponents' Winning Percentage) * (Remaining Games versus Opponent ) / Total Games Remaining.

CHART A

	GAMES LEFT v. AL EAST	GAMES v. AL CENT	GAMESv. AL WEST
NYY	Bal(9), Tor (11),TB (10), Bos (10)	Chi (7), KC (3)	LA(4), Tx (3), A(7), Ms (7)
Red Sox	Bal(11), Tor (9),TB (8), NY (10)	Det(4), Chi (8),KC(4), Cle (4)	LA (3), Tx(6), A's (7)
T. Rays	Bal(11), Tor (12),Bos (8), NY (10)	Det (7), Chi(4), KC (4)	LA (3), Tx(6), Ms (5)
Rangers	Bl(3), Tr (4), Tb (6),Bos (6), NY (3)	Det(3), KC(3), Cle(3), Mn (4)	LA (10), A's (11),Ms (9)

CHART B

#= gms left	#vs. teams +.500	Wght. Sched. Difficulty	Home #/%	Rd #/%
NYY	34 of 71	.515	35/.644	35/.543
Bos	39 of 71	.506	36/.689	34/.522
T.Rays	38 of 70	.525	36/.667	33/.447
Tex	35 of 71	.507	32/.604	39/.476

Apart from two onerous West Coast road trips spared their Boston nemesis, the season's final 10 weeks besets the Yankees with a more competitive schedule, in the aggregate, as well. On the other hand, the more stout competition Tampa has to overcome -- at least, as their opponents' collective winning percentage gauges it-- offers little comfort.

First of all, the Rays complete their final West Coast trip in August-- not during the third week of September after which the Yankees return, by contrast, to battle Boston and Tampa in games likely to determine the fate of their season. Secondly, while the Yankees are running their late September gauntlet through Disney's House of Hell, the Rays will be clicking their heels, echoing Dorothy, and extoling home. 15 of Tampa's last 18 games are in the Orange Juice Can (the last three agains the Yankees) where they've played .690 baseball the last two seasons. Finally, Tampa plays Texas six more times, 3 during the final week in September, meaning that if Texas' less arduous schedule lets them linger in the wild-card race, the Yankees won't be able to gain ground on both.

So savor the Yankees' flirtations with 1st place while it lasts. For the road to October heads West through dark, treacherous, unchartered territory and runs through Disney's House of Hell.

THE CANO YOU DON'T KNOW

2009-06-29T06:35:00.000-07:00

"If you think you're going to hit into a double play, do the right thing and strike out."-- Earl Weaver

Among the more compelling narrative threads woven through Tom Verducci's "The Yankee Years" is the story of the philosophical rift that gradually estranged the former Yankee manager from his erstwhile friend, advocate, and GM and that ultimately ended in an unseemly public and gratuitously acrimonious divorce. The divide, evidently, first opened in 2005. In the off-season that year, Brian Cashman finally received the full prerogatives a GM's title implied and with it, the power to modernize the Yankees' antiquated baseball operations and to rejuvenate the team's decaying farm system. The plan contemplated greater reliance on the advanced statistics and Jamesian sabermetrics that Billy Beane's acolytes in Boston had been using for years to outmaneuver their arch rival. The suden changes cast Torre, the consummate baseball traditionalist, in the role of the skeptic. The seasoned manager warned of the soulless number crunchers who would replace abstract percentages for instinctive judgment and who would err because they didn't, or couldn't, apprehend the living, beating heart that animated the Game.

In one especially telling episode, back in 2007, when the Yankees were sputtering through their 21-29 start because their vaunted offense had foundered for inexplicable reasons, Cashman, explains Torre, suggested an unconventional and seemingly counterintuitive lineup change. The statisticians, it seems, had concluded that the team could produce more runs by placing its two hitters most adept at getting on base at the top of the order. Sounds eminently reasonable. Only it meant hitting Bobby Abreu first, Jason Giambi second, and moving Damon and Jeter God knows where. Torre confides that he scoffed at the idea and that ended the discussion.

Cut to February 2008. Exit King Lear and his Court. (A sixth Act awaits their arrival in the Land of Dreams.) Enter the new viceroy, Joseph Elliot Girardi. Cue the p.r. creation myth.

You may recall the 2008 off season. After a winter of well-deserved villification for their smugly cavalier and ruthlessly passive-aggressive dismissal of the hired help, the Levine Cabal and the Cashman Clique spent the Spring casting the new viceroy in their image. Girardi, we discovered, championed fitness and discipline. Girardi symbolized vigor and stamina. In General Girardi, we trust. That was one part of the new Girari mythology.

However, there was a second element of the Girardi persona touted as well. And this part bears the Cashman Clique's signature and hearkens back to his rift with Torre. Girardi, we discovered, had graduated with an engineering degree from Northwestern. Girardi possessed an acute, incisive intelligence. Girardi trusted the numbers; more importanlty, he excelled at them. He read Baseball Prospectus. He wanted to deploy cutting-edge sabermetric tools. Girardi personified innovation, ingenuity, and acumen. Together, Genius Girardi and Canny Cashman would lead the revolution to modernize the Yankees and to close the gap the Arbitrage Magnate and his Boy Wonder has opened between New York and Boston.

Of course, rarely does the image mirror the reality. And while Girardi regularly shows a greater affinity for numbers and more impressive command of statistics than his predecessor, he has proven himself far more the traditionalist than the myth led us to anticipate. Sure, he counts pitches, records innings, spreads workloads. Witness his bullpen management in '08. Sure, every now and then, he'll invert two players in the batting order. Witness his inspiration (or Cashman's) to switch Jeter and Damon in the order, capitalizing on the latter's power production and alleviating the latter's tendency to first inning double plays.

However, these notable exceptions only illustrate fate's inexorable rules. Like father, Like son. And New Joe is very much Old Joe's ideological son and managerial protege. Instinct, trust, and experience, by and large, not abstract numbers, inform his management style and guide his decisions. When the veteran talks, the manager listens. CC says, "I can get Drew," and so, Girardi believes him. A-Rod says, "I'm not tired," and so, Girardi plays him. Rivera's velocity wanes. No matter, when emergency strikes in the eighth, break glass: Call Mo.

Beyond inheriting Old Joe's habits, Girardi, in addition, subscribes to his orthodoxies. New Joe also believes in the bunt, the sacrifice, the steal-- despite the statistician's skepticism or outright abhorrence. He believes in reserving closers for saves. (Not, for example, leveraging his best relief pitcher when the game's pivotal juncture demands it, inning be damned.) Girardi honors the archaic shibboleth of batting average.

How else to explain the Yankee manager's defiant infatuation with Robinson Cano? How else to explain the baffling strangehold the human GIDP, the walk's consummate antagonist, Plate Indiscipline personified, has gained on the fifth spot in Girardi's batting order? Is there a less ideal candidate for the role of the middle-of-the-order bulwark behind A-Rod than a hitter whose plate profiency actually falls as runners on base increase in number and as they draw closer to home?

WAITING FOR CANO
By now, every Yankee fan, at one time or another, has marvelled at the talent and kindled to the promise of the second baseman, Robinson Jose Cano. We've all foreseen the potential greatness that seemingly looms just over the horizon. The sublime swing, the prodigious opposite-field power, the sweeping plate coverage, the swift hands, the nimble glove, the panoptic range, the impeccable grace and preternatural agility. A noble lineage claimed Cano no less early in life than in his career. The infant named after Jackie Robinson, in just his sophomore year received the title of Rod Carew's twin and Jeter and A-Rod's heir.

The problem, it seems, is that the Yankees' organization, in general, and Joe Girardi, in particular, too often, have rewarded Cano for flourishes of greatness that have proven fleeting. By all means, applaud Girardi his faith and his loyalty. But recognize as well, in few Stadiums outside the Field of Dreams is faith self-realizing, and when it defies reality, it's downright self-destructive.

Although Cano's defense-- as viewed by the naked eye, if not also confirmed by Revised Zone Ratings-- has shown a steady, gradual improves each season, he continues, at the plate, to exhibit the same obdurate vice that has beset him since his rookie year. The shortcoming has stifled the potentially great hitter from germinating-- his impatience in the batter's box. Extraordinary plate coverage has begotten feeble plate discipline. Cano still swings at eye-level pitches because, remarkably, he can. And if he still reaches them, he rarely hits them, not fair and hard anyway.

In fact, by plate discipline's standard measures, pitches per plate appearance and isolated plate discipline[1], Cano's development has stagnated. From 2006 through 2009, the annual average of pitches he sees per plate appearance (P/PA) has levelled at 3.34 and his isolated plate discipline, IsoD (the spread between his batting average and on base percentage) has averaged about .035.

2006 - P/PA = 3.22; IsoD = .023
2007 - P/PA = 3.42; IsoD = .047
2008 - P/PA = 3.35; IsoD = .034
2009 - P/PA = 3.37; IsoD = .035

Cano's overeagerness manifests itself most vividly with runners on base. Witness the precipitous decline Cano's OPS has undergone, throughout his career, as the pressure mounts.

Career OPS- Bases Empty = .860
Career OPS - Runners on Base = .742
Career OPS - RISP (Runners in Scoring Position) = .702
Career OPS - RISP w/ 2 outs = .688
Career OPS - Bases Loaded = .587
TOTAL CAREER = .812

His numbers in 2009 only accentuate the overall trend. I list first, his OPS, and second, his batting average, in classic "situational hitting" opportunities below.

2009 OPS- Bases Empty = .902
2009 OPS - Runners on Base = .710
2009 OPS - RISP (Runners in Scoring Position) = .594
2009 OPS - RISP w/ 2 outs = .552
2009 OPS - Bases Loaded = .367

2009 BA- Bases Empty = .333
2009 BA - Runners on Base = .255
2009 BA - RISP (Runners in Scoring Position) = .215
2009 BA - RISP w/ 2 outs = .190
2009 BA - Bases Loaded = .167

THE ANTI-CANO
Compare, by contrast, the Yankees' most disciplined hitter, Nick Swisher, who, in raw tools, probably possesses a fraction of Cano's talent. The comparison is instructive for multiple reasons. First, the identity in their career OPS statistic; each possesses a .812 career OPS. Second, only a year separates Cano's and Swisher's rookie seasons, 2005 and 2004, respectively. Third, despite their manager's access to the same statistical data, Girardi, in defiance of it, routinely bats Cano 5th (42 of 72 games) in the heart of the order, behind A-Rod, while batting Swisher 6th, 7th or 8th (24, 10, and 10 times respectively, in 72 games)

Swisher's career averages in P/PA of 4.25 and IsoD of .113, in fact, exceed Cano's by almost a full order of magnitude. Swisher averages, then, almost one more full pitch per at-bat than Cano, and the .080 IsoD differential explains why Cano, while amassing anywhere between 20 to 50 more hits each year than Swisher, still reaches base less often. Swisher's career OBA exceeds Cano's (.356 to .335).

It may also account for the seeming paradox that while Cano's career slugging percentage exceeds Swisher's (.470 to .455), his career OPS+ is lower. Despite his relative power deficit, Swisher, then, in his ability to draw walks, makes a more valuable contribution to his team's run production, in the long run, than Cano.

Swisher's plate discipline may also account for the relative constancy his production evinces regardless of the situation.

2009 OPS- Bases Empty = .810
2009 OPS - Runners on Base = .814
2009 OPS - RISP (Runners in Scoring Position) = .781
2009 OPS - RISP w/ 2 outs = .821
2009 OPS - Bases Loaded = .977
TOTAL CAREER OPS = .812

GO AHEAD: WALK A-ROD!
Further contributing to the problem with batting Cano 5th behind A-Rod is that his greatest asset -- the infrequency with which he strikes out -- has abetted the frequency with which he grounds into double plays. Cano currently leads the team with 11 GIDPS.

Throughout his career, Swisher, by contrast, strikes out twice as often as Cano-- an SO/PA of 21.5% to 11.1%-- and yet grounds into one third as many DPs-- GIDP/PA = 2% to 3%. (Although in 2009 Swisher hasn't proven much more immune to the double play than Cano. Swisher's 7 GIDP ranks him third behind Cano and Jeter in aggregate double plays and in GIDP/PA.)

Yet Swisher's relative immunity to the DP during his career-- relative, compared to Cano anyway-- probably stems less from his tendency to strike out than in his tendency to hit fly balls. Observe the difference between the two hitters in their career ratios of ground ball outs to fly ball outs (GO/AO). While Swisher's career GO/AO 0.83, Cano's is 1.36.

Thus far, Cano's GO/AO of 1.27 for 2009, has been about representative. In fact, among the hitters Girardi has chosen to bat 5th this season most frequently-- Cano, Swisher, Posada, amd Matsui-- Cano's 1.27 ground out to fly out ratio (GO/AO) for 2009 ranks highest.

To compare, I list below each one's 2009 statistic in the following categories:
(i) ground out to fly out ratio (GO/AO)
(ii) strike out per plate appearance percentage (SO/PA);
(iii) their on-base percentage (OBA)
(iv) Average with Runners in Scoring Position (RISP)
(v) Overall Productivity (OPS+)

I also include Johnny Damon's for reasons that will become evident below.

2009	GO/AO	SO/PA	OBA/ISOd	RISP	OPS+
Cano	1.27/1	7.5%	.330/.033	.215	111
Swisher	1.06/1	21.7%	.373/.128	.204	127
Matsui	0.97/1	15.5%	.345/.099	.212	110
Posada	0.95/1	19.3%	.359/.087	.273	126
Damon	0.80/1	15.6%	.364/.076	.313	131

From the composite picture the above table paints, it's little surprise to discover that Cano leads the Yankees through 72 games with 11 GIDP's. Only Jeter rivals Cano in this statistic with 8, the harm from which Girardi, at least, has endeavored to contain by moving the captain into the lead off spot. (Despite the plate discipline Jeter developed as he matured, his susceptibility to the double play has stemmed from a GO/AO ratio that only has risen as he's aged. Through 72 games in 2009, it's 3.07.)

IF NOT CANO, WHOM?
Yet if Girardi discerned this frailty in Jeter's game, and compensated for it accordingly by inverting Damon and Jeter, he hasn't acted likewise to contain the damage Cano's susceptibility to the DP, likewise, has inflicted in the middle of the lineup. Now, a double play, it's true, throttles a rally whenever it occurs. But when it regularly stifles rallies ignited by your two best hitters, at 3rd and 4th in the order, respectively, the double play is especially lethal. Worse, it can metastasize and spread. After all, how long will Texieria and A-Rod resist the temptation to expand their strike zones if a double play looms behind them.

The table above suggests that any one of the players Girardi has batted 5th this season-- Swisher, Matsui, or Posada-- would acquit the role of A-Rod's anchor better than Robinson Cano. The second baseman doesn't merit a higher position in the batting order than the seventh or eighth spot he used to occupy until his pitch selection improves, if ever.

Swisher's statistics, on the other hand, bespeak a hitter with the discipline and constancy that follows him regardless of the situation or his spot in the order. His career OPS+ bears this out-- whether batting second or eighth, it varies little. Yet Swisher, perhaps for different reasons than Cano, poses a palpable DP threat as well.

Which is why if Cashman has become so enamored with using statistics to inform the Yankees' lineup Damon suggests such a tempting, if unorthodox, alternative for the spot behind A-Rod. Although long-standing tradition and well-worn practice have come to associate Damon with the upper echelons of the batting order, most of all, the lead off position, in 2009, Damon's statistics just as easily fit the profile of the daunting, middle-of-the-order, power bat.

With an OPS+ of 131, Damon ranks third on the team behind Teixiera and A-Rod. More persuasive still are his peripheral statistics. The plate discipline (P/PA of 4.15 and IsoD of .076). The team-leading 0.80 GO/AO. The knack for clutch hits with runners in scoring position. In 2009, his batting average with runners in scoring position is .313; over his entire career, it's .297.

But most of all, Damon, unlike Cano, Posada, Matsui, or Swisher, has demonstrated a remarkable talent throughout his career for avoiding the double play. That he's hit lead-off for much of his career has played a part, but a small one. After all, for much of his career, Jeter has led off as well. And while the captain has hit into 203 DPs in 9417 Plate Appearances (GIDP/PA 2%) during his career, Damon has only hit into 78 DPs in 9116 Plate Appearances, a GIDP/PA of less than 1%. Wouldn't the Yankees capitalize more on Damon's unique confluence of speed and power, at once, avoiding the DP and slugging for extra base hits, behind Teixiera and A-Rod than in front of them? Meanwhile Swisher's .373 OBA already has identified him as a candidate worthy of the 2-hole. His tendency for the DP, less marked, first of all, than Cano's is second of all, less likely with faster runners like Cabrera/Gardner and Jeter in front of him.

A HOLE IN FIVE
The architects of the Yankees' 2009 roster imagined they'd constructed a roster founded on the strength of their starting rotation. Little did they suspect that architects elsewhere had other ideas. Nostalgia has ill served the Yankees this time. Some aesthete's fetish for an archaic, and largely illegible, scoreboard lowered the walls, shortened their distance, and turned the new Yankee Stadium into modern equivalent of Fenway. If the trend continues, the Yankees will have to rely on producing runs more than they ever bargained. Runs which they won't produce if a deficit in their 5th spot continues to plague their lineup. At the moment, the Yankees have received less production from their five hole (an 80 OPS+) than from any other spot in their batting order. I list below the OPS+ they've received from each position in the order. Only their 5th hitter falls below 100, the benchmark for the league average.

1) 139
2) 140
3) 132
4) 101
5) 80
6) 129
7) 125
8) 111
9) 113

By now, we all know the Yankees define themselves as an organization rooted in a venerable lineage and a consecrated tradition, the immediate question for 2009, however, is how well they can adjust to unplanned contingencies and new circumstances and how much suffocating orthodoxies, outmoded dogma, and deleterious habits, will nonetheless control their manager's thinking.

[1] Isolated Plate Discipline or IsoD consists of the difference between a player’s on-base percentage and his batting average and is calculated as follows: IsoD = OBA (on base %) – BA (batting average). The oft-used metric BB/PA (percentage of walks a player earns per plate appearance) is a virtually identical calculation, just enumerated and expressed differently. The one caveat is that BB/PA statistic excludes two (or three) alternative means, beyond the traditional walk, by which a hitter can reach base, in the absence of a hit, and raise their OBA-- the error, the hit-by-pitch, the strike-out/wild pitch. I prefer the IsoD metric accordingly.

FREE WANG; CURB CASHMAN

2009-05-27T06:01:00.000-07:00

"What's the difference between Theo Epstein and Brian Cashman? When I talk to the Red Sox GM, I know I'm speaking to someone smarter than me; when I talk to his Yankees counterpart, I worry I'm not." --anonymous colleague of Selena Roberts

Brian Cashman, the GM only a Steinbrenner could love or a personality cult, revere. For every conspicuous eclat there corresponds the inexplicable and exasperating folly.

Witness the last year alone. He steals from Pirates but seizes the wrong bounty, returning with Nady and Marte instead of Bay. Meanwhile, the money he saves by replacing Abreu with Nady, he squanders on 3-years for Marte. He nets Swisher with ground bait. Yet to hook AJ Burnett, he goes ice fishing, wearing leaden boots and carrying golden lures. He scavenges amid the dross of Berroa and Tomko but won't spend a farthing for Ty Wigginton or Juan Cruz. He courts and seduces Sabathia and snares Teixiera by outflanking his eternal rival. Yet he relinquishes draft picks he could have retained had he offered Abreu the arbitration the ex-Yankee later confessed he would have refused. In 2006, his first two draft picks yield Ian Kennedy and Joba Chamberlain; in 2008, they yield, quite literally, nothing-- Cole, a pitcher he can't sign and Bittle, a pitcher he doesn't want to.

The contradictions, half-measures, and lapses proliferate. To begin the 2009 season, Cashman's roster includes not a single long-reliever. 6 weeks later, it boasts three. One of whom just so happens to have been the orangization's best starter the previous three seasons. Raising, as such, the question: how do either the Yankees or Chien Ming Wang gain by interning him in the bullpen?

The team, certainly, doesn't. Because just as using Joba as a reliever wastes his talent -- and Cashman, despite the critics, is right; you don't waste pitchers with Chamberlain's potential and repertoire in the bullpen -- Chien Ming-Wang, by the same logic, doesn't belong there either. In fact, because Wang averages 4.0 K's/9 and 1.3 WHIP, in any role beyond mop-up, he may even pose a liability.

Yet Wang doesn't stand to benefit much from the role either. Again, witness the contradiction. If, as Girardi contends, pitching more, following his surgery, is necessary to strengthen Mariano's arm and bolster his velocity, then why would Chien Ming-Wang, recuperating from an injury that, likewise, has sapped his fastball and attenuated his sinker, profit from a long-reliever's role that, by definiton, consigns him to pitch less, to appear more sporadically if not also less frequently, and to compete for innings with two other pitchers who fulfill the identical role, Aceves and Tomko?

Why? Because in August 2007, when 39-year-old Mike Mussina was reeling, having suffered three consecutive batterings to the tune of a 19.00 ERA, a month's mental and physical respite partially restored him? Of course, a major injury and 9-month hiatus didn't account for Mussina's woes either. Moreover, Mussina never regained his velocity. He simply learned to pitch without it, slowing his breaking pitches and changeup to compensate. If the Yankees think Wang can emulate him, remake himself, and morph into a finesse pitcher, they're seriously deluding themselves.

DICE-K v. WANG: A STUDY IN CONTRASTS

Observe what the Red Sox did with Dice-K, by contrast, under circumstances similar, if not identical, to those the Yankees confronted with Wang. The difference, as usual, is instructive.

If you recall, Dice-K returned from the WBC with a "dead arm" after the Japanese team abused him. As a consequence, after his first two starts in April, he'd posted a 12.79 ERA and his fastball, which had averaged between 92mph and 94mph a start in '07 and '08, fell below 90. So, the Red Sox disabled him in mid-April and sent him for rehabilitation in AAA Pawtucket. In the meantime, they returned Masterson to the rotation and called up another starter, Michael Bowden, to replace Masterson's spot in the bullpen.

Then, they waited. They waited, patiently, for Dice-K's arm to recover, intent on exhausting every one of the 30 days available to them (the limit for major league players on minor league rehabilitation assignments.) After 3 starts in Pawtucket, Dice-K's velocity returned to its customary range in the mid-low 90's and the Red Sox activated him. He hardly has dominated since returning, but in his two starts since he certainly has fared better than he did in April. More importantly, his arm has recovered, and he's returned to the Red Sox rotation, where he only stands to improve.

Compare Wang's trajectory. Like the Red Sox, the Yankees disable their pitcher after hitters bludgeon him in consecutive outing. On April 18th, they send Wang to the DL and dispatch him to Tampa for medical testing and rehabilitation. Three weeks later, they start him in Scranton. Yet in neither of his two starts, on May 12 and May 17, according to Chad Jennings, beat reporter for the Scranton Yankees did Wang's fastball or his sinker match their traditional speed, break, or potency. (Cashman's subsequent report concurred with Jennings' observation.)

Yet the Yankees, in a rash, myopic, and inexplicable blunder, promote Wang anyway before determining whether or not they need him. Scheduled to start in Scranton on May 21st, the Yankees cancel his start in AAA, recall him to New York, sqaunder the 10-15 days and 2-3 more starts the rehabilitation clock allowed, and assign him to the Yankees bullpen to wait for an emergency start that never materializes.

THE LIE OF NECESSITY

The Yankees Front-Office insists, nonetheless, that they didn't want to foreclose Wang from starting in Scranton. Cashman claims circumstance left no alternative. That after a blow to the knee sidelined Chamberlain in the 1st inning on May 21st and Aceves pitched 3.3 innings in relief, the organization had to cancel Wang's scheduled May 22nd start in Scranton, to activate him from the disabled list, and to prepare him to start on May 26th in case Chamberlain couldn't.

The Front-Office's logic here is so tortured, their reasoning, so porous, I don't know what's worse: asking us to believe their cant or entertaining the possibility that they do. Who, you ask, would start on May 26th then if Chamberlain could not? Is not the answer obvious? Aceves. He was a starter, after all, in Scranton. Moreover, after pitching 3.3 innings on May 21st in relief of Joba, Aceves wasn't available anyway until May 25th (when Girardi wasted him in the 9th inning of a blow out.) Ironically, Aceves ended up pitching on May 26th anyway, as a reliever, true, but in a game he just as easily could have started.

The Yankees didn't need Wang in the interim. Against the Phillies, Tomko already offered the Yankees the security of a long-reliever for outings like May 22nd, where Girardi used Wang for three innings instead. Once recalled, Robertson or Melancon, meanwhile, could have filled Tomko's role. (The other Bruney, once they disabled him.)

Alternatively, if the Yankees concluded over the weekend that Joba couldn't start on May 26th, they could have enlisted any number of starters from Scranton or Trenton-- Igawa, Fossum, Johnson, McCallister, or Kontos--for an single, isolated start. Instead, they've activated Wang, consuming a roster spot and consigning their fallen ace to languish and to atrophy in the bullpen-- of help neither to his team nor to himself.

WANG: THE LITTLE BOY WHO PLAYS COY
To recap Wang's season thus far. In his first three outings, the Yankees' erstwhile ace surrendered 23 earned runs and lasted a sum total of 6 innings.

April 8th vs. Baltimore -- 3.67 innings, 7 earned runs

April 13th vs. Tampa -- 1 inning, 8 earned runs

April 18th vs. Cleveland- 1.33 innings, 8 earned runs

Total = 6.0 IPs, 34.50 ERA, 4.83 WHIP

The woeful performance speaks for itself. Rarely does an established major league pitcher falter so abjectly, let alone a starter of Wang's caliber and accomplishments. What's especially remarkable about Wang unraveling is that while even great major league pitchers suffer the occasional beating or struggle through a period of the season, Wang, throughout his career, seemed immune from both the wretched outing or the prolonged rut.

Whatever cliched stereotype captures the exact opposite of the "little-girl with the curl" personified Wang instead. Not when she's bad, she's very bad; when he's bad, he apologizes and quickly atones.

Indeed, from 2005 and 2008, Wang made 95 starts for the Yankees. He yielded 7 or more runs in a sum total of 5 outings. FIVE! To compare, over the identical period, the Great Halliday yielded seven or more runs in THREE starts and Josh Beckett faltered as badly EIGHT times.

Wang also rebounded each time in the next start. Not did he repeat the ignominy in consecutive outings. (The sole exception, of course, occurred when Cashman and Torre decided to pitch Wang on three days rest in Game 4 of the 2007 ALDS.)

THE NEED FOR SPEED
Wang has accrued a chorus of detractors over the years, nonetheless, because unlike the traditional ace, his career strikeout ratio per 9 innings is 4.0, on the low side. Furthermore, Wang stirs the doubters because he relies so greatly on a single, above average pitch, his sinker, otherwise known as the two-seam fastball (although minor variations differentiate the two).

True, Wang probably qualifies as a sinkerball pitcher. Nonethless, Wang differs from the traditional prototype because his velocity exceeds theirs-- a distinction (in both senses) that explains much of the success he's enjoyed.

Compare Wang's to the classic sinkerball pitcher, for example. As defined by the league's best Groundball to Flyball ratio from 2005 to 2008, Brandon Webb (3.24) and Derek Lowe (2.99) probably rank as the league's two foremost sinkerball specialists. (Wang's GO/AO ratio over the same period, by contrast, is 2.54 and has fallen, progressively, each season.)

Wang throws considerably harder than both of them. Albeit, not in the manner you might expect. It's the speed of Wang's four-seam fastball, oddly, where the Yankee pitcher excels. To illustrate, I compare below the average velocity for Wang, Webb, and Lowe's sinker and their four-seam (regular) fastball, as Fangraph reports the figures for 2007 through 2009.

Wang sinker - 90.0 mph; fb-- 92.3 mph

Webb sinker - 88.9mph; fb-- 88.5 mph

Lowe sinker - 89.7 mph; fb-- 89.2 mph

The additional 3-4 mph on Wang's four-seamer makes a big difference, especially when opposing hitters have to contend with his sinker as well. Which may explain, in addition, why Wang also throws his four-seam fastball with much greater frequency than either Webb or Lowe. According to fangraphs, between '07-'09, four-seamers account for 71% of Wang's total. By contrast, Webb and Lowe, respectively, throw their four-seamers 60% and 57% of the time.

EXIT VELOCITY
From the figures cited above, one would surmise that if the velocity of Wang's four-seam fastball-- i.e., 71% of the pitches he throws-- fell precipitously it would impact his performance adversely. And as fate would have it, through Wang's first 3 starts in 2009, this is precisely what transpired. Below is a velocity graph from Fangraph.com which charts both the velocity range and average speed of Wang's four-seam fastball during given starts over the last three years.

(Note: the graphic below only depicts starts for which Pitch Fx readings were available. Each gray line indicates a distinct start; its end points marks the velocity range; the dot in the middle shows the average speed for all four-seamers thrown.)

The chart illustrates both (i) the prominent deficit in velocity in the pitcher's first three starts and (ii) the marked contrast it counterposes to Wang's starts in 2oo7 and 2008.

Three distinct indices underscore the shortfall. In those first three gray lines of 2009, the velocity range narrows, its high point falls, and in each, his average velocity hovers at the low point to which it had dropped in any discrete, isolated start over the previous two seasons.

Of course, the good news is the fourth line. It registers Wang's relief outing on May 22, 2008 against the Phillies. Here, the nadir to which his fastball's velocity plunges actuallly exceeds the average registered in each of his three 2009 starts.

The flip side to which is an obvious caveat and a tacit qualification. Though Wang's three innings in relief almost match, in duration, his longest outing, thus far, as a starter, he entered in the 6th inning and consciously, in the role of reliever. Perhaps, his velocity rose merely because entering the game in the 7th inning, he could "air it out", as they say, knowing his appearance wouldn't exceed 3 innings. (A tie game would have enlisted Mo.)

The qualification, actually, is two-fold. First, in his outing in relief, Wang yielded 2 earned runs, while his WHIP was a woeful 2.33, and only a remarkable Cano play behind 2nd base in the 8th inning to start a double play prevented Wang from yielidng more than a run. Second, and more ominous, is the danger that the improved velocity and performance will prompt the GM to conclude that Wang somehow stands to improve as his innings in relief rise. Not likely. If he's not used with greater frequency than twice a week, the likelihood only diminishes.

All of which only further serves to remind me how much I'd like to trust in Brian Cashman's judgment but don't.

THE PAST THAT NEVER DIES: 2009's FIRST QUARTER REPORT:

2009-05-15T06:25:00.000-07:00

"Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale Her infinite variety..." Anthony and Cleopatra
"As full of grief as age; wretched in both..."-- King Lear

The season dies an ignominious death. An august, hallowed Stadium closes. Autopsies ensue.

Management confers; the Front-Office re-evaluates. A new regimen looms.

Coaches are dismissed. Old players depart, without ceremony. New players enter, with fanfare. Fans gush. Rivals complain. Critics hector and whine. Suddenly, yesterday's disappointment evaporates and tomorrow's expectations soar.

Finally, Spring arrives, and hope abounds as a grand new Coliseum opens. Columnists evoke the Golden Age. Pundits foresee a dynasty resurrected. Executives congratulate their own triumph.

Only then, they play the games. And the results? The results, inexplicably, exasperate and disappoint. Despite the dramatic changes, Despite the lavish expenditures, Despite the giddy confidence, the outcome on the Diamond somehow doesn't differ from last year or for that matter, the year before.

On May 15, 2009, the Yankees stand at 17-17. If you hear an eerily familiar ring in it, you haven't succumbed deja vu, just the recurrence of an unpleasant memory. For something like it has happened before-- twice in fact. Last year, through 34 games, the Yankees were 17-17, and in '07, the team was a nearly identical 16-18.

What explains the Sisyphean fortune of an organization that with all its financial might, pushed the Rock of Fate up the hill only to see it return whence it came.

New York Post columnist Joel Sherman attributes it "to beautiful karmic justice," the fruits of building a "$1.5 billion temple to exclusion and greed." (New York Post, May 14, 2009). Sherman, it seems, fantasizes a Jobian world in which God visits injury on the prosperous for the sin of having too much money. In March, Sherman wrote of Alex Rodriguez after doctors diagnosed his hip injury, "“His insatiable needs and greeds... Phil Helmuth at his side, Warren Buffet involved in his contract negotiations, Madonna in his bed... has blown up [on him].”-- "Alex Has Time to Get Hip" Sherman, NY Post, March 6, 2009. (To which one might add an author's note, "And, conversely, Mike Lupica in my columns." Albeit, with comparatively more coherent and lucid prose-- hardly the most dazzling accomplishment considering the prototype.)

(The irony, of course, is that for all his criticism of Yankee elitism, Sherman's theodicy bespeaks the ressentiment of the Boston Brahmin. From Yawkey to Henry, Red Sox ownership has sought to impose upon baseball the manner and ethos of the Mayflower Yacht Club-- turning it into some patrician clique where modesty, forbearance, and genteel bon homie prevails and the brash upstart and impudent noveau-riche know their place. May the Landsdowne Gentry kindly eat cake. )

No, the Yankees' recurring lackluster starts isn't owed to supernatural causes, karmic or Calvinist. What links the 2007, 2008, and 2009 Yankees and largely explains their lackluster starts is the common trait between them-- the frailty that has endured notwithstanding the brand new free-agents, the revamped and replenished roster, the deeper, fortified rotation. In a word, their age.

In 2007, the Yankee roster averaged 30.7 years of age. In 2008, it was 31.4. In 2009, it's 3o.4. The average age of their lineup has varied even less: 30.6, 31.3, 30.3, respectively. And age's greatest handicap, as the Yankees Disabled List for the months of April and May the last three seasons dramatically illustrates, is its vulnerability to injury.

In 2008, injuries disabled A-Rod, Jeter, Posada, Bruney, and the Yankees' prospective third starter, Phil Hughes, in April and May. (Matsui joined the walking wounded in late June.)

In 2009, injuries, again, have sidelined A-Rod, Jeter, Posada, Bruney, and the Yankees' prospective third starter, Wang, in April and May. (Nady, Molina, Marte, Matsui, and Coke have joined this year's walking wounded besides.)

Sure, the bizarre parallels invites superstitious associations. But the stark truth is that three of the four players on whose health the Yankees' fortune depends because the organization cannot replace their production -- Rivera, Posada, and A-Rod-- will be 34 or older by season's end. And all the conditioning in the world can't arrest the aging process nor can it immunize them from injury. Indeed, barring the sudden emergence in the organization of worthy successors, this Achilles Heel will imperil their championship aspirations for the foreseeable future.

IGNORE THAT INJURED HITTER BEHIND THE CURTAIN
Wait, the skeptic demurs, the 2009 Yankees, through 33 games, have scored 181 runs (5.48 per game) which is 4th in the AL. Meanwhile, they've allowed 200 runs (6.6 per game) which places them at 14th, dead last in the AL. How then can injuries to A-Rod and Posada, among other less critical players, inform why the Yankees have languished in April and May of 2009?

Well, the two American league teams who rank 1st and 2nd in Runs Scored happen to be the two teams leading the Yankees in AL East standings at present, the Toronto Blue Jays and Boston Red Sox.

Leave aside Toronto for a moment however. Indeed, truth be told, what distinguishes the Red Sox and Yankees at the moment isn't Runs Scored but Runs Allowed. (Boston ranks third in the AL in runs scored and excels the Yankees 5.68 to 5.48 in average runs per game.) Nonetheless, the 3.5 games that separates them is owed largely to the full less run per game their pitching has allowed-- the Red Sox's average 5.2 RA (10th in the AL) to the Yankees' 6.06 RA (14th, dead last).

This returns us, however, to the 4th indispensable Yankee, I alluded to above. The appreciation due him notwithstanding, the Yankee season no longer rises and falls on Derek Jeter, not anymore. No, the 4th indispensable Yankee is the one easiest to take for granted-- Chien Ming-Wang.

What, you say, Heresy! Get Thee to the Stake and Await Thy Doom: Wang isn't even the team's Number #1 starter! CC Sabbathia now is.

Sure, every available index-- from the inning totals Sabathia has averaged, to the ERA he has posted in Cleveland, to the Cy Young Award he won--suggests he can be the Yankees' premiere starter, their pillar, their ace. But he hasn't fulfilled that role just yet, not entirely and only the gauntlet of the full season will determine, definitively, whether CC can claim the mantle.

Regardless, the AL East is not the NL Central. CC alone, accordingly, is not enough. For their duel with Boston, the Yankees will require a second.

IF WANG BE DONE, THE HEAVENS MAY FALL
Recall the enigma with which we began-- why the Yankees stand 17-17-- and where it led-- to the 14th and last place the Yankees occupy in the AL in Runs Allowed. To appreciate the importance of Wang, consider the following hypothetical. How would the Yankees have fared thus far had Wang been Wang?

That is, replace Wang's three wretched 2009 outings and Hughes' checkered three with the average performance Wang's career statistics would lead one to extrapolate over six starts. Suddenly, the gap between New York and Boston narrows considerably.

In 6 combined starts in 2009, Hughes and Wang pitched 17.67 innings and surrendered 34 earned runs, totalling an ERA of 17.32.

By contrast Wang's historical statistics would project him throwing 38.76 innings over 6 starts (6.48 IP per start) and yielding 18 earned runs, the total his 4.09 ERA would predict.

This significance for the Yankees' Runs Allowed is two-fold.

1) First, over the 17.67 innings Injured Wang and Phil Hughes actually pitched, a hypothetical Healthy Wang would have cost the Yankees 16 less runs. The saving doesn't end there however.

2) For over the 21.1 of the innings-- see above 38.76 IPs [Hypothetical Wang]- 17.67 IPs[Injured Wang+Hughes]-- that the Yankees bullpen had to absorb after Girardi removed Injured Wang and Phil Hughes (approximately the next 3.5 innings per game afterward)-- during those 21.1 innings a healthy Wang would have pitched instead, the Yankees bullpen yielded another 20 runs.

Accordingly, in 2009, had a healthy Wang pitched and merely matched his career averages in ERA and in Inning Pitched, the Yankees, through 33 games, would have surrendered no more than 184 runs and perhaps, as few as 170 runs.

Using James' Pythagorean Theorem expectation (Rs^2/RS^2 + RA^2= Win %), we can deduce that with a healthy Wang pitched the Yankees would have won between 1.5 and 3 more games, the difference between undifferentiated mediocrity (.485 baseball) and post-season contention (.560 baseball) and at present, the distance between Boston and New York in the standings.

Or consider Wang's importance this way. Assume for the sake of argument, for a moment, that Sabathia realizes his full potential in Pinstripes, and in 2009, CC manages to duplicate Mike Mussina's performance in 2008, amassing a 3.37 ERA over 200+ innings. One ace merely would have replaced another. Then what? Remember what derailed the Yankees in 2008? Once injuries claimed, in succession, the two best starters behind Mussina, Wang and Chamberlain, the Yankees season, effectively, ended. On August 4, 2008, Chamberlain's final start in Texas, the Yankees were 5.5 games behind the Rays and 2.5 games behind the Red Sox. By months end, they'd fallen to 12 games out of 1st, and 7 behind the Red Sox.

And if not Wang, whom? Would any Yankee fan care to bet that A.J. Burnett can replace the innings totals, the consistent quality starts, the reprieve for the bullpen and ballast for the rotation that Wang reliably conferred. As for Andy Pettitte, was last year the aberration or the omen? Meanwhile, the Yankees, wisely, have excluded Joba from the second's role, a priori. On his current pace, his inning cap is likely to expire sometime in August.

At this writing, Wang is poised to start on Sunday, May 17th for AAA Scranton and rumors abound that it will be his last in the minors. I hope not-- not if Wang's velocity continues to stall at 90-92 mph, 3-5 mph lower than he typically throws. To appreciate how precipitous the decline in Wang's velocity, witness the following chart I copied from Fangraph.Com. By plotting his fastball's velocity through 2007, 2008, and 2009, the graph dramatically illustrates 2009's deviation from his prior two years-- the range contracts, the apex and nadir fall.

Nothing could harm Wang's confidence, recovery, and season-- and with it, the Yankees' fortunes-- more than his returning prematurely only to endure another battering.

Wang's velocity compensates for his sinker's occasional habit of moving laterally instead of dropping vertically; it also enables his slider and change up to deceive hitter by changing speeds. Without it, Wang is no more formidable or reliable than Sidney Ponson. And without Wang, the 2009 Yankees are no more formidable than the 2008 incarnation and no less liable to recapitulate the latter's fate through its first 34 games as through its final 128.

INVESTIGATING THE INVESTIGATORS: Ms. Roberts' Profession

2009-05-03T16:58:00.000-07:00

“Tell them that God bids us do good for evil: And thus I clothe my naked villainy with old odd ends stolen out of holy writ; and seem a saint, when most I play the devil.” – Richard, III

So who is Selena Roberts? With Joel Sherman of the New York Post and John Heyman of Sports Illustrated extolling the New York Times’ former sports columnist, respectively, as an “excellent reporter” and the “best [in fact], I’ve ever worked with,” curiosity mounted. I felt compelled to observe first-hand-- well, almost first-hand anyway-- the "Many Lives" of the reporter who can reduce her notoriously cynical colleagues to "hero-worship" (to borrow one of the tropes Heyman himself employs to describe fans indifferent to players' steroid use).

I’d already read and scrutinized her work (See “Selena’s Poison Pen,” April 21, 2009). But still, I wondered, who was the real woman behind it? And how did she become the veritable A-Rod of the New York press? Why does she inspire such fierce loyalty? Where do all the rapt acolytes come from?

So to find out, The Yankees Republic dispatched its own investigative reporter, Peter Fallow, to Westport Connecticut, where the Hall of Fame journalist resides, to answer these questions and to capture Selena Roberts in her multiple guises and manifold lives.

Fallow, recently, filed this report.

SELENA KEEPS STORE
Beneath the facade of the muckraking journalism, Selena Roberts conceals her lust for vengeance and will to power. In the name of exposing the sports world’s misogyny and corruption, she channels her inner Dickens -- a personality comprised of two parts Miss Havisham and one part Fagin.

*

Past the Wine Cellar, Cohen’s Fashion Optics, Starbucks and the picturesque shops arrayed along Westport Connecticut’s Post Rd., a lone shabby, ramshackle sign, painted in mottled white, obtrudes. Its discolored, eroding typeface; its cracked, weather-beaten awninb; and the seedy shop inside is the one blight amid the posh décor otherwise characteristic of Main Street in one of New England’s affluent, late-sipping suburbs.

The name of the store is “Selena’s Sportswear”. But the motto inscribed on the awning perhaps describes, more precisely, what its owner sells. It reads: “Enter and Ye Shall See the High and Mighty Fall… and Rejoice.”

Yet the ravaged storefront and the tattered and stained bridal dress visible through the front window tell only half the story. The missing details neighboring proprietors, nonetheless, are all too eager to add. They speak of broken sewage pipes, of roach and vermin infestations, and of the faint stench of sulfur. More ominous still, they allude to moral transgressions, grave and sinister.

“Selena’s Sewer, I call it,” said Murray Rosen, the owner of Westport Kosher Meat. “You know, we been trying to get rid of that farschtinkener hovel for years. But we can’t because our alta cocker mayor kisses Miss New York Times’ rear. Yeah, they think she’s a big deal up here. Like one rag is better than the next. What, Charmin wipes your ass cleaner than Scott.”

Across the street the Palace of Panache’s chief interior designer Hayden Brown echoed Rosen’s distaste for the Post Rd.’s notorious blemish. “Look, what the woman does inside her store is her business. But outside affects everyone. And worse than the dirty storefront is that disgusting, old dress she displays in the window. It’s Sporting Goods store; what’s it doing there?”

"She must have lost her virginity in it,” Ms. Brown’s young male assistant snickered. “And cheap, too— with that big book advance, she can’t spring for a cleaning woman? Uch.”

Yet when Ms. Brown was asked to clarify what she meant by “what the woman does inside,” she refused to elaborate. All she’d allow was, “Let’s put it this way. My husband played football at Auburn. I know a thing or two about Selena Roberts that it wouldn’t be lady-like for me to repeat.”

One of Ms. Brown’s customers harbored fewer reservations. “Come on, everybody knows what goes on inside that store,” she said, “Ask any of those kids outside with the hoodies and dirt bikes; they’ll tell you.”

MISS HAVISHAM'S PROFESSION
They did, indeed.

An examination of Selena’s business creates the portrait of an author driven to publish a book on Alex Rodriguez as a “branding tool” to enlarge her public profile and to advance her social mission. No, she doesn’t exactly bear the singularly vindictive motive of a woman scorned, but the Miss Havisham caricature holds sway in Westport’s business community for a reason.

Two weeks later, on a balmy, resplendent Saturday afternoon in April, Post Street bustled with young couples running errands, taking kids out for lunch, or indulging in a little idle window-shopping while basking in the sunshine.

Selena’s Sportswear, oddly, hadn’t opened as yet for business. At one-thirty p.m. steel security gates fixed with padlocks still curtained the door and windows and veiled the interior from view. A motley group of prepubescent boys, along with a single slightly younger, androgynous girl, nonetheless circled the store continuously on BMX racing bikes, as though waiting for a parent to arrive.

“When does the store open?” I asked.

“Who wanna know?” the shortest among them replied.

“Oh, just a customer looking for some new golf clothes.”

“Yo, P., he look in a white dress, yo.”

P. and company erupted in laughter.

“Do you guys know when the store opens?”

“When Momma feel like, yo. You feel me?” Apparently, Roberts had nurtured her brood in the art of loyalty.

In ten years of available public documents, Selena’s Sportswear reported no less than a $50,000 loss every year. Accounting for depreciation and a one-time, paltry charitable contribution of $5.00 in 2006, paid to the Duke University chapter of “Take Back the Night,” Selena’s Sportswear has lost just shy of a million dollars over the last decade.

For evident reasons, Selena doesn’t talk “biz” because Selena’s Sportswear doesn’t sell goods for profit. Commerce isn't its purpose at all. To the contrary, Selena’s Sportswear is a store “front,” quite literally. The commodity it trades is ideology; The service it peddles is indoctrination.

“That yo phat ride, man?” the short white kid called P. Honey asked.

I nodded.

“Yo, that pretty far driving for golf shirts. They run out in New York,” he snickered. The bicycles came to an abrupt halt as P. Honey gestured toward the Empire State plates.

“Yo, this a reporter or some shit, 'mon, boys, we outtie,” P. Honey announced and the troops fell in line with one notable exception.

Incredulous, she rode over to examine the car in its entirety and within seconds, to her consternation and outrage, glimpsed the incriminating bumper sticker—the telltale interlocking N.Y.

“You’re… You’re a Yankee fan,” she spluttered, her eyes welling with tears. “Can’t you people leave her alone? Why don’t you stop persecuting her?”

“Sister Souljah,” P. Honey shouted, “Give it a rest. We outta here.”

“You don’t understand. You don’t know how great Selena is. You don’t care. You want to destroy her.

“Ever since I was little, my parents forced me to play tennis, to practice six hours every day. All they ever talked about was how I had this gift I had to use to become a professional tennis player. Tennis this, and Tennis that. They never asked whether I liked the sport, whether I wanted to play professional tennis, whether I could handle the sacrifice. I wasn’t even allowed to question it. They turned me into a nine-year-old freak, no friends, no education, no interests-- nothing but tennis.

Then one day, I lost this match and couldn’t leave the Court afterward. I sat there, catatonic, for three hours. My parents, they didn’t care. They left me there to stew. But Selena saw me; she comforted me; she rescued me. She told me how stupid sports are. How it's just a game; it doesn't mean anything. She told me how selfish and vain and shallow athletes are.”

“Enough,” P.Honey persisted, trying to stop her.

“Selena told us all about her years covering professional sports in New York, the Yankees, in particular. She let us know how crass and stupid baseball players are. She told us all the dirty, vile things they say in the locker room. How they cheat on their wives and then abandon them. How they really hate women, all women. She taught us how athletes like A-Rod care only about money and fame and success. And she told us how deluded and psychotic you fans are that cheer for and defend them. How you act like animals in ballparks. How…”

“Estelle, shut the FUCK UP, now!!!” P.Honey yelled, threw down his bike, grabbed her handlebars, and pulled her and her bicycle away, but not before this pitiable, precocious, tormented little girl vented her last, eloquent gasp of rage.

“Don’t you get it: I AM SELENA!!”

Indeed, few experiences compare to the humbling meted out by a nine-year-old girl when she illuminates the truth staring you in the face but couldn't see.

Yes, poor Estelle, fated to nurse the vicarious grudges of a woman kept from the altar who longs, above all, to be on stage.

For Ms. Roberts’ question of Alex Rodriguez “Will A-Rod ever worry about what’s beneath the moneymaking veneer? Or will he forever be Mr. Potter in pinstripes?” begs the converse, as well.

That is, Will Selena Havisham ever probe beneath her veil of resentment? Will the spotlight she steals from A-Rod requite old grievances and bind ancient wounds; will the fifteen minutes of fame Miss Selena Havisham gains by destroying A-Rod's already battered reputation enable her, finally, to shed the soiled dress, to exhaust the poison pen and to leave her vindictive scorn behind.

**********************************

Whatever truth the foregoing story reveals, it, of course, contains not a kernel of fact (not unlike Selena Roberts’ columns.) As I understand it, Fallows' purpose, instead, was two-fold (i) to parody the agitprop the “excellent reporter” published in the New York Times on December 7, 2007, titled “A-Rod’s Properties and Charity Suggest Some Stinginess” and (ii) to mirror the facile and reductive caricature that informs Roberts' work and by all indications, her Manichean worldview. (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/07/sports/baseball/07roberts.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Potter&st=nyt)

As such, the story you have read above consists solely of an exercise in imaginative speculation. Any resemblance it bears to reality is purely coincidental.

SELENA ROBERTS' POISON PEN: AN INOCULATION

2009-04-21T13:37:00.001-07:00

How low will Selena go? If history is any guide, she’ll dredge the very bottom.

Ever since the former New York Times sports columnist reported in a story written for Sports Illustrated that Alex Rodriguez tested positive for steroids in 2003, the media-entertainment complex has been practically salivating with anticipation over what new, scandalous revelations Roberts’ forthcoming book, "A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez", holds in store.

Set for release on May 12, the book’s product description on Amazon.com intimates it will contain enough salacious and tawdry material to feed the tabloids’ vulgar appetite and to flood the airwaves with toxic static through October. The caption reads as follows:

“Rumored to be on the verge of a personal and professional collapse so profound it would rate as one of the most dramatic falls in major league history. Through exhaustive reporting and interviews, Roberts will detail A-Rod as a plunge-in-progress, a once-in-a-generation baseball talent tortured by an internal struggle between the polished family man he wants to be and the unabashed hedonist he has become. The storyline will include his dalliances with strippers, infatuation with Madonna, details of his record-breaking $315-million contract, shady real estate empire and further evidence of steroid use, but will also tunnel deeper into his behavior. Roberts will reveal the root of Alex's identity crisis - the night his father abandoned him - and, in so doing, answer the question: who is the real A-Rod?”

The vultures already have begun to circle, astir with the stench of blood and the drool of speculation. Has Roberts discovered further evidence of steroid use? Will "Many Live" disclose sordid details of A-Rod's divorce, of his trysts with Madonna, of sinister financial improprieties, of an ambivalent sexuality? Will Roberts answer every loyal Yankee fans' eternal question: where does Alex Rodriguez get those purple lips?

Selena says. Enquiring minds want to know.

In the meantime, don’t let all the reporter and pundits eager to vouch for Roberts' "impeccable credentials" and "irreproachable reputation" fool you. The esteemed New York Times and meretricious Sports Illustrated very well may distinguish her resume. The pen she wields nonetheless drips with poison.

In fact, had A-Rod’s $100,000 crisis management team armed their client for his Gammons interview with Roberts’ columns, A-Rod might not have sabotaged his own cause by turning his nemesis into a sympathetic victim. After all, he didn’t need to smear Selena. He didn't need to embroider allegations of breaking and entering. He didn't need to accuse her of invading his privacy. (Although why Roberts felt compelled to confront A-Rod in person prior to publishing her story still warrants scrutiny. Wouldn't a call either to A-Rod, his agents, or his lawyers have sufficed? Does anyone believe that, with four independent sources to confirm the test results, SI would have withheld a story of such magnitude without its subject's comment?)

No, the zeal with which Roberts has stalked Rodriguez in her columns for the New York Times incriminates her alone. All A-Rod had to do was read a few choice excerpts. The persistent malice they bear him, the tendentious exaggeration her columns indulge and the relentless platitudes the author belabors not only belie her "eminent" reputation, they impugn her motives, impeach her professionalism, and above all, discredit the portrait of him she draws. Indeed, Roberts' A-Rod no more captures the real Alex Rodriguez than Captain Ahab's Moby Dick does the white whale.

DUKE: A PRIMER IN SELENA’S SPLENETICS

Although unlike Ahab, Roberts doesn’t confine her resentment and rancor to a single Leviathan.

Considered beside the onslaught of pious bombast, crude generalization, wanton censure and savage recrimination with which Selena Roberts assails Duke University between March ‘06 and March ’07, her forensic technique suggests something of a method-- the logic of ad hominem argument, of reason via stereotype and of deduction by accusation.

In this instance, the now infamous Duke Lacrosse case that arraigned three players on trumped up charges of rape, sexual assault, and kidnapping provoked Roberts’ fusillade. Less significant than what ignited her outrage however was the span of her assault. Her wrath spared no one, whether accountable or not. Dubious allegations, as it turned out, occasioned categorical denunciations of an “irrefutable [‘jock’] culture” of “misogyny, racial animus and athlete entitlement;” of primitive, derogatory locker-room codes; of vulgar, savage, mob-like fans; of the “khaki pants crowd of SAT wonder kids;” of the Cameron Crazies, Coach K. [the basketball, not the lacrosse, coach no less], and Duke’s entire student body.

In fact, this ostensibly epidemic jock culture is so “irrefutable” Selena doesn’t bother to cite any evidence of it. Articles like “When Peer Pressure, Not a Conscience, Is Your Guide” (03/31/2006) to “Closing a Case Will Not Mean Closure at Duke” (03/25/2007) rely not on adduced facts, deductive logic, and reasoned conclusions but on ad hominem argument—that is, the logic of denigration and denunciation. The anathemas fly in every direction.

She writes,

“At the intersection of entitlement and enablement, there is Duke University, virtuous on the outside, debauched on the inside. This is the home of Coach K’s white-glove morality and the Cameron Crazies’ celebrated vulgarity. The season is over, but the paradox lives on in Duke’s lacrosse team, a group of privileged players of fine pedigree entangled in a night that threatens to belie their social standing as human beings” (03/31/06).

What qualifies a campus of 6,000 undergraduates, you ask, as the nexus of “enablement”— complicit if not in the rape itself, then in a supposed “code of silence” that abets its perpetrators? What evidence establishes Duke, collectively, as an institution that is “virtuous on the outside, debauched on the inside?” Well, precisely nothing. Nothing, beyond the accused lacrosse players and Roberts’ insinuation that the Lacrosse team-- in conjunction with Coach K’s “white-glove morality” and the Cameron Crazies’ “celebrated vulgarity”-- indict an entire University.

Leave aside the obvious synecdochic fallacy for a moment—none of her culprits embodies all of Duke. Never mind, besides, the contradictory images of white gloves and vulgar rabble or their ascription without illustration. More importantly, what does Coach K., the basketball coach, have to do with the Lacrosse team? (Hey, I don’t like Republicans much either. Nevertheless, there’s a vast difference between fucking the country and abetting the rape of its citizens.)

Likewise, do the Cameron Crazies even attend lacrosse games? Selena doesn’t say, of course. The vulgarity she deduces, however, from the legend that the Crazies have “derided opponents accused of sex crimes with a sign that reads, ‘Did you send her flowers?’” But again, the logical inconsistency. Their bawdy ridicule hardly sounds like either an apology for rape or an enabling “code of silence.” Quite the contrary, it smacks of a public shaming. If John Demanjanjuk, for example, played for the Tarheels, the Cameron fans probably would skewer him about the soap he uses.

Is it in poor taste? Perhaps. Certainly, if the judge possesses the “white-glove morality” for which she condemns Coach K.? Regardless, when is “vulgarity” tantamount to “debauchery” or taste the arbiter of virtue? Coarse impudence doesn’t signal a taste for violence. Nor are decadence and vulgarity the moral equivalent of rape, whether in committing it or condoning it.

Finally, why is any of this moral hand-wringing apropos for the New York Times’ Sports section? One doesn’t expect any better from the sports world’s equivalent of People magazine. But how did an editor at the “paper of record” decide such sanctimonious drivel qualified as “news fit to print?”

THE ASSASSINATION OF A “PROM KING"

Yet the standard of deliberate, reasoned opinion, one expects from journalism’s polestar, whether on the Op-Ed page or in the Sports section, doesn’t seem to apply to Selena Roberts’ work. And in this regard, A-Rod fares no better than Duke. Her columns, in fact, charge Rodriguez with a similar litany of sins and shower him, likewise, with incessant derision and rebuke in the guise of considered judgment.

If she can’t brand the famously disciplined athlete with the violence, “misogyny”, or “debauchery” of rowdy Lacrosse players—not until her book arrives anyway-- she, certainly, can tar him with the “khaki pants crowds’” ostensible wealth, privilege, and entitlement. And so she does.

Not a column about A-Rod appears with Selena Roberts’ by-line from 2005 to 2007 that his $252 million contract doesn’t figure as the definitive, incriminating proof in an otherwise facile indictment of his character. As with Duke, the money, ipso facto, evidences the crime.

Only with this obvious caveat—the terms of abuse change to accommodate the appropriate class stereotype. A Duke blue-blood’s degenerate “white-glove morality” won’t fit Hispanic A-Rod. Alex Rodriguez, after all, didn’t inherit money or status. Talent and performance won it for him. Roberts tailors the smear accordingly. In her caricature, A-Rod instead embodies all the vices, offenses, and unseemliness we associate with the nouveau-riche—greed, vanity, ambition, self-consciousness, duplicity, pretension, ruthlessness, and naturally, the now prescribed slur ascribed him, fraudulence.

I excerpt a selection of her columns about A-Rod below. The gratuitous malice and rank caricature manifest in 2005 only grows more ugly and contorted with each year.

1) “Rodriguez is a star increasingly strapped with authenticity issues.” [Guess why?] “Contract is at the root of Rodriguez’s plunge from perfect. It’s not how other handled his $252 million deal, but how A-Rod responded to his riches… Rodriguez started to treat his deal as a stamp of superiority.” (‘Rodriguez is Getting Hits’, 02/17/05)

And to illustrate how A-Rod flaunted his status, what evidence does Roberts offer? Well, as you might have suspected, by now, nothing. Zero. She resorts to the banal, tiresome A-Rod-Jeter comparison: in the clutch, Jeter thrives, A-Rod falters. And then adverts, again, to the contract and its perks. In other words, premise proves conclusion. The contract condemns him now and forever.

2) It’s [A-Rod’s] tireless effort at image control that seems to consume him to the point of talent debilitation.” [If the 35 home runs he hit in 2004 qualify as “talent debilitation,” every Yankees should so suffer.] “Rodriguez equated the size of his contract with his self-worth when… the Rangers anointed him the richest athlete in history… He had no idea he’d lose his prom king’s crown [in New York].” (‘No longer the “Prom King,”’ 04/15/05)

Freud would call this a textbook example of projection. Roberts decries A-Rod for a fixation with the very contract she is obsessed about.

3) “There was the shirtless A-Rod, perfectly coiffed, leaning back on a rock in Central Park, flaunting pecs and abs as if awaiting an Abercrombie & Fitch talent scout.” [By this standard, Selena should fancy herself lucky. Preening one’s sex appeal isn’t a sin likely to tempt her much anytime soon.] “A-Rod is polarizing…To lose sight of his contract is to lose sight of his money’s context.” [There’s the contract bugaboo again. So what is the “context” then?] “David Wright is an equal to his teammates. And this has nothing—and everything—to do with contracts.” [Read: strike nothing]. “He is one of the guys, in pay and demeanor. From the moment Rodriguez signed with the Rangers, he wasn’t like any other guy. He has been a misfit ever since, but an outcast of his own making.” ('Splendor in the Park,' 07/19/06)

Why is he an outcast? Well, not the contract, per se: enter subtlety’s empty shell. Alex is pariah, in Selena’s estimation, because he commits the unforgivable transgression of wanting to be a “marketable mainstream icon…[W]ith A-Rod, every graceful movement seems lies a pose, every innocent dip in the sun seems plotted.”

What about Jordan, LeBron, Manning, or Agassi? They don’t cultivate their images? The face they present the world is pure and authentic? Yeah, right. Gambling allegations played no role in Jordan’s first retirement, and Agassi fell down at Wimbledon in exhaustion. More than a year later, the poser charge, nonetheless, recurs.

4) He doesn’t swing for the cameras anymore, yet Alex Rodriguez is still posing, even when he’s not trying to be a poser…Only A-Rod could turn being contrived into a virtue… He has [only] changed the veneer, but the psyches [is] still the same.” (‘Alex Positions Himself for Success,’ 10/05/07)

Selena, perhaps, doesn’t appreciate the irony here. Caricature is as much a pose, and as much a deceit as is false modesty. The difference is that Alex’s MVP season in 2005 justifies his pose. What's Roberts' excuse?

5) “But apparently, salary records are more important than history’s snapshots to Alex. Apparently, Alex’s wife had put signing for ego dough on his honey-do list.” (‘Rodriguez is a Bauble,’ October 29, 2007)

Hmmn, who would thunk that Cynthia Rodriguez and Selena Roberts were on such good terms? Actually, the pettiness speaks for itself; taking a swipe at Alex’s wife descends to a low of contemptibility, if possible, beneath contempt.

THE MANY LIES” ABOUT ALEX RODRIGUEZ: AN OMEN

Selena’s poison pen delivers its coup de grace, however, in the article, titled “A-Rod’s Properties and Charity Suggest Some Stinginess,” dated December 7, 2007. If the feature’s pat judgments, baseless assertions, ad hominem asides and undisguised animus foreshadow “The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez,” then a “hatchet job” of exquisite mendacity awaits.

Evidently, where A-Rod is the subject, the New York Times suspends protocol. Because our shining exemplar of journalism actually printed Roberts’ tract on its front-page. In the guise of a sensational expose revealing the superstar’s alleged greed, callousness, and frugality off-the-field—as illustrated by the squalid apartment dwellings he owns and the charitable foundation he stints— we read yet more venomous, plangent editorial about A-Rod and the evils of his money.

This time, Roberts merely dresses the caricature in a few anecdotal facts-- facts neither telling nor even incriminating-- and embellishes it with more of the same unsupported inflammatory rhetoric. The very first sentence encapsulates what follows:

“The veneer of Alex Rodriguez’s real estate empire of working-class housing is staged to disguise his inner Mr. Potter.”

The evidence then of this so-called “apartment tycoon’s” rapacity and avarice?

Title to Newport Riverside Apartments, a rickety and dilapidated housing complex, is registered to Newport Property Ventures, a real estate holding company that lists Rodriguez as its owner, operator, and chief executive. (Sure, in between his off-season’s daily, ten to twelve hour workouts, A-Rod likes to play Donald Trump besides.)

The flagrant dishonesty resides, however, in what the article conveniently omits. That is, it never addresses whether Newport Apartment’s disrepair typifies the Newport holding company’s other properties or how Newport Apartments compare to the rest of the real estate A-Rod owns. Is the Newport complex the exception or the rule? Oddly, Roberts, instead, cites a minor detail that belies the comparison to Mr. Potter. Since 2004, Newport Holdings, evidently, underwent a $12 million dollar drop in its assets' value-- a loss hardly indicative of a shrewd and cunning “apartment tycoon.”

Which may account for why, throughout a supposed, objective news article, Roberts feels constrained to inject discursive commentary to bolster an invidious profile her facts don’t support,

“An examination of his high-rolling corporate side… reveals a portrait of Rodriguez as a player about to enter Yankee Take II [] primarily as a branding tool. He emerges as an obsessive pursuer of cold, hard numbers on and off the bases, with serially disingenuous nods to his ever-challenged image.”

Yet for all the ruthlessness charged him, A-Rod’s real estate holdings and charity donations-- donating that include a $2.9 million gift to the University of Miami-- simply never add up to the nefarious image Roberts’ assertion promises. No more do all of the trite and catty observations Roberts has made about A-Rod over the years illuminate the enigmatic man.

One is left to conclude that the prosaic journalistic mind cannot imagine or grasp a life or a personality so unlike its own and so, willy-nilly, to render the man, it debunks the image he contrives and substitutes, for it, a fictitious caricature of its own, reproducing the distortion often until it acquires the currency of received opinion.

But ah, here’s the rub. It’s a phenomenon our astute, contemplative President realized long ago.

(And before dismissing the comparison to A-Rod, consider the parallels between two prodigiously successful, talented bi-racial men whose fathers abandoned them.)

President Obama discovered the power of his own inscrutability, the value of the mask. By concealing his real self—if such a thing exists— he could turn himself into blank projection screen. (The more public the figure, of course, the more receptive the screen.)

As such, what the public makes of the masked man's identity-- from his fiercest detractor to his most adoring enthusiasts-- is a reflection of their own fantasies-- fantasies that represent not the fantasized but, pace Freud, actually project their own personality and character. "What one's imagination makes of other people is dictated, of course, by the laws of one's own personality," in the words of the immortal James Baldwin.

By accusing A-Rod of greed for money and a lust for fame, then, by conceiving of his personality as calculated affectation and cultivated imposture, Roberts, accordingly, less A-Rod than the woman called Selena.

About her forthcoming book’s merit, accordingly, I cannot judge. Of this, however, I know, “The Many Lives of Selena Roberts” is not a title I’d envy reading anytime soon.

THE CASTLE ON RIVER AVENUE

2009-04-09T08:31:00.000-07:00

"Just at the place, where according to my calculations, the Castle Keep should be, the soil...had to be literally hammered and pounded into a firm state to serve as a wall for the beautifully vaulted chamber. But for such tasks, the only tool I possess is my forehead...I richly paid for my Castle Keep."-- The Burrow, Kafka

Alas, it was not what I expected, unnerving in its excesses and regrettable in its deficiencies.

No, my inaugural visit to the new Yankee Stadium didn't disappoint me exactly. But then, I don't ask much either. Bathrooms and concession stands without prolonged lines. Beer that's cold. Food that's hot. Seats that don't leave me with either sore knees or an aching back. Toilet stalls not steeped in urine. And an arena where whiskey is less rare than filet mignon.

Yet for all its majesty and grandeur, the new Stadium sacrifices to extravagance and luxury simple ease and comfort. If the old ballpark is the House that Ruth Built, the new one is the House Built For Jeter. The rest of us are just visiting.

Athough in moments of whimsy, I'd called the Old Stadium "my synagogue"-- perhaps having heard the YES Network's Michael Kay refer to the 161st and River Ave., once too often as the "Cathedral of Baseball," and having spent more Friday evenings there, over the years, than in temple. Still, I'd always cherished the arena less than the Game played there. But whatever illusions of faith, reverence, and belonging the old Stadium nonetheless awakened, the new Stadium quickly disabuses.

The facade notwithstanding, this is not your Father's ballpark. Neither, I regret to write, is it mine.

Exclusion communicated itself from the moment I entered. Everything from restrictive bars (of drink and metal), to gated areas, to omni-present guards on patrol, to the shameless, obtrusive disparities in amenity and service that pervade the arena make for a setting neither hallowed nor ecumenical, notwithstanding the wall-to-wall pageantry, from old photographs to legendary memorabilia, designed to invoke the Yankees' sacred, collective memory.

The ostentatious luxury and privileged exclusivity instead evoked the sense of alienness and estrangement I experience inside the Medieval Cathedrals of Europe-- my admiration and awe for their ornate beauty always eclipsed by symbols and imagery that mark me a tolerated stranger, at best or at worst, an undesirable outsider.

And herein lies a perverse irony. As we all know, the New York Yankees love to wrap themselves in the pomp and ceremony of American patriotism. Flag-Raisings. Military displays. State visits. The, now, de rigeur, 7th Inning Anthem. (Unfortunately, no one explained to them the unseemly irony here as well. Conscripting an audience's participation in "God Bless America" by forbidding their movement during the song, actually mocks the very grace with which Providence blessed the nation to begin with-- its freedom.)

Yet the new Yankee Stadium's hierarchy in accommodation doesn't just disregard the nation, and its pastime's, democratic pretense-- it flouts it unabashedly.

The new Stadium brings to mind, rather, something European, conjuring the Royal Opera House or Elizabethan theatre's caste system and echoing the heedlessness of its display. Americans tend to minimize or to deny the significance of class privilege, equating it with decadence. Their monuments, memorials, and public fora tend, likewise, to reflect starkness, modesty, and democratic norms.

In the House For Jeter, architecture and appuretenance don't conceal class distinction; they parade it. Compared to Ruth's House, the tiers rise higher; the bleachers start farther away. The crack of the bat recedes. The smell of the eyepaint fades. The commoner and the groundling gaze upon a remote and distant stage.

The Bleacher's Outdoor Cafe-- a solicitous and impressive sop were it not so far away-- may very well placate the Stadium's most loyal groundling, the Bleacher Creature, or at least, sufficiently distract him from the bullpen now separating him from right-field. The Commoner, on the other hand, can't ignore the hierarchy. Ruth's House, at least, offered the consolation that the interminable lines, the oppressive crowding, the rancid bathrooms afflicted everyone. Here, in contrast, with each tier he must climb, the Commoner can't help but sense the amenities, service, and vantage diminish and the barriers forbidding access slacken-- his income and social status a badge he carries everywhere.

He enters at the Concourse Level, which abounds in space, television screens, and varieties of food (albeit with far less diversity than one might imagine, no Californian salad eateries or outdoor Texan barbecues as in Camden Yard.)

On the Main Level, the television screens contract in number and size, fewer guards patrol seats for unauthorized arrivistes trying to move down, and the concession stands revert to the ordinary Stadium fare of hot dogs, sausage, chicken tenders, and beer.

Go up one tier to the Terrace Level, on the other hand, and the televisions virtually disappear.

From the 30 to 50'' screens, hanging in plain sight, anchored at eye level, that surround the Concourse and Main Level, the Tier television dwindle to small, remote, intermittent screens set above, and at either end of, each concession stand-- only there, in fact, and nowhere else on the Terrace Level-- televisions that vanish from sight, in fact, once you reach the cashier and place your order. Unlike the old Stadium, no televisions occupy the concession stands' interiors.

Meanwhile, the Terrace Level grease pits feed both the Terrace seats and the Grandstand. The few guards, there, moreover, don't check tickets to enforce the distinction between them.

The remote placement, diminished number, and compressed size of the televisions on the Terrace Level-- accommodating, in the Grandstand and Terrace tiers, the very fans most preoccupied by the Game -- is either callous, myopic, or both. (On Friday night, half of them weren't even operative.) On the two levels below, one or more tv screens occupy practically every open space. Why no one saw fit to install them on the Tier Level between the vast blind stretches that often separate the concession stands is utterly baffling.

Of course, we plebeians can stand, eat, mingle and congregate on the Concourse level. Just don't succumb to the very temptation presence amid the trappings of wealth and proximity to the stage invite -- a view from the seats below. The Grandstand Commoner may pass himself off as a Commoner from the Terrace. Otherwise, the days when scattered empty seats enabled an eager fan to move down a section and steal a closer look have ended however. No longer are gates, chains, and cordons confined to the Field Boxes' first twenty-odd rows. Security now jealously guards access to the royalty's estate (Sections 15-25, $500-$2625); to the nobility's manor (Sections 115-125, $325-$375); and to the haute bourgeoisie's house as well (Sections 215-225, $100).

PART II.

Witness my experience in the Castle last Friday night. While it hardly proves the Steinbrenner's new manse has a class system, it certainly dramatizes aspects of it.

As it happens, I entered Gate 4, about ninety minutes before game time, in desperate need of a scotch and soda. Make that a double.

For as much as I'd tried to resist the media hype, I'd succumbed to all the anticipation of Opening Night. No doubt, the considerable financial burden I'd assumed to upgrade from $25 Tier seats to $115 Terrace Premium Suite accounted for the anxiousness as well.

(My obsession with remaining behind home plate cost me about $15,000 more than I would have paid had I simply acquiesced to re-locating above third base, mid-way up the Grandstand, about as close as my five-years of seniority as a season ticket-holder granted.)

Whatever the reason for my abraded nerves-- an overexcitement reminiscent, at once, of the impatient eagerness I used to experience before trips to the Stadium as a child and the adrenaline deluge that engulfs me even in adulthood prior to a pivotal post-season game-- I needed a drink and badly.

Unfortunately, the first place I alighted was a commodious, but hardly opulent, half-filled bar. Here was the vaunted convenience I'd heard so much about, I thought: a bar situated the most obvious and proximate location possible. Well, not exactly. What I'd stumbled upon was the Legends Suite: the minimum to enter, a $500 ticket. (Rarely can a man purchase legendry at so meager a price.)

No sooner did I arrive at the Legends Suite then than did its two Janissaries outside explain the lay of the land and adumbrate what I'd encounter throughout the evening-- transparent but impervious glass, tantalizing me with perks, comforts and convenience I could gaze upon but never touch.

Seldom does privilege in an open American forum display itself so blatantly.

Of course, no New York City resident is foreign to class distinction-- to Gotham's incongruous blend of teeming pluralism and rigid economic hierarchy, of racial, religious, and ethnic diversity amid indelible disparities of status, power, and wealth. Rarely however are advantage and disabilities the Castle assigns its entrants so glaring, ubiquitous, and flagrant.

More often, geography, custom, and insurmountable barriers veil their appearance or bar our entry. How many of us, for example, are acquainted with the splendors of space a 5th Avenue triplex affords, savored the spectacular views from atop a Trump penthouse, or eaten dinner at The Supper Club? The new Yankee Stadium, by contrast, flaunts the luxuries all but its elite enjoy, begetting a kind of inverted feudal world in microcosm. Peasants enter at the bottom of the pyramid to witness the entitlements denied them before the Praetorian Guard march them up the causeways to where they belong.

Of course, when I asked the Yankee Guard where a redskin like me, with his paltry $115 Terrace wampum, actually could get some fire water, they had no reply. Neither knew. Nor did the next ten Stadium employees with whom I likewise inquired, including three of them whose shirts read "Ask Me a Question." No longer was I so disoriented. A little of the old Stadium, I thought, had lingered after all.

Twenty minutes later, an eleventh Stadium guide finally brought me to The Hard Rock Cafe. Only again, however, to be denied admissions. Having exceeded its capacity, the Cafe wasn't admitting anyone. There, the Guard, at least, recommended an alternative-- Mohegan Sun.

Ah, how could I have forgotten? Where better for a redskin to slake his thirst? But no, ten more minutes lapping the Concourse only interposed yet another barrier. This time, the sixty to one hundred people standing in line, the Guard estimated, posed a 30 to 40 minute wait. Mohegan Sun's interminable line and Mohegan Sun's overcapacity, I soon discovered was emblematic. Protracted lines and overcrowding plagued the entire Concourse level from the concession stands, to the access routes, to the food court's common areas. In conjunction with the cold fries I ate; the warm, flat beer I drank; and the sodden pizza and desiccated burgers I saw but mercifully forsook, I almost could entertain the illusion that the Yankees had never even moved. It was, of course, a fleeting one.

As it turns out, the saving grace of the $115 seat, that is, also contains its most diabolical peril.

The tiny Jim Bean Suite (more bar than suite, really), the one place to which my ticket actually admitted me was, mercifully, empty as late as 7:00pm. I received a double with alacrity, paid the same $10.00 it typically costs me at the bowling alley annex, drank it in relative peace, and watched the YES pregame simultaneously on four TVs. (I saw almost as many inside the bar as throughout the entire Terrace.) The rub, I discovered later, leaving in the private elevator. It, too, offers efficiency and convenience, conveying you to and from your seat quickly and directly. Only it opens, along the way, on the two suites below, which, unlike Jim Bean's Bar are genuine Suites and luxurious, opulent ones at that. They dwarf Whiskey Jim in size, offer catered food, and look directly on the field.

So, ye who suffer status anxiety, beware. The Castle on River Avenue will be a forbidding and unsettling place. Best to stay in your seat and keep your eyes fixed firmly on the game. Which, at a ballpark, is, perhaps, as it should be.

BOSS TURTLENECK: THE LAST YANKEE KING

2009-03-30T09:00:00.000-07:00

REVIEW:
The Boss: The Poor Little Rich Boy Who Built The Yankee Empire
by Peter Golenbock

July 30, 1990. It’s a day I once might have celebrated as Yankee Independence Day. Today, I’m not so sure.

At the time, I was a college student, living at home in Central Jersey from May through August, husbanding the $7.50 an hour First Fidelity Bank paid college students to work as summer bank tellers.

The job was dull, tedious, and mind-numbing beyond description. Yet I’d returned to it each May, foremost, because few local businesses offered summer employment. But also, the bank’s branch manager and I, so different in temperament, outlook, and background, nonetheless shared a common passion that bound us across the great pluralistic divide-- our unstinting love for the New York Yankees.

Back in the 70s and 80s before the Yankees started drawing 50,000 people every night; back before 19-year-old girls with fluorescent lipstick and tight-fitting Jeter shirts thronged the ballpark; back before Giuliani turned 161st and River Ave. into a maximum security fortress, Kevin O’Brien, second generation Irishman, Bronx-born and Bronx-bred, typified the Stadium faithful. With his silver hair, red bulbous nose, and the cragged face of the 12 oz. curler, Kevin was the guy suburban kids like me-- attending our two Saturday day games each season, escorted by anxious, reluctant fathers wary of the Bronx-- saw everywhere. He personified the season-ticket holder, the true believer, fan core and corps, the keeper of the flame.

Men like Kevin, unlike our upwardly mobile parents and grandparents, had never stopped attending Yankee games because they hadn’t left the Bronx. And in all likelihood, they never would.

Kevin O’Brien, in fact, was the first middle-age man I’d met whose passion for the New York Yankees matched, or perhaps even exceeded, my own.

Indeed, every morning, before the branch opened, Kevin and I dissected the previous evening’s game, puzzled over managerial moves—which, depending on the month and year, meant those of Billy Martin, Lou Pinella, Dallas Green, or Bucky Dent—and then during lunch in the kitchen downstairs, ruminated over the latest trade rumors gleaned from one or more of the three newspapers, The New York Post, The Daily News, and The Star Ledger that Kevin purchased during, and only during, the baseball season.

(And I, much to his droll amusement, added the NY Times. “Come on,” he’d say, “that’s Sports for country clubbers and bull dykes.”)

The late 80’s, you will recall, were the last summers a Yankee fan could entertain the illusion of post-season baseball before the Dark Ages arrived. Mattingly, Winfield, Henderson, Clark, Tommy John, Guidry, Rags and Rhoden, et. al., in fact, often led the AL East through July and remained in striking distance of first-place through September. So there in the break-room, we played armchair GM—tinkering here, fortifying there, conspiring to acquire the one additional impact starter that separated the Yankees from October. Or rather, I played; and my wiser elder indulged.

For as Kevin O’Brien saw it, I was the anachronism, the devout fan living in a bygone era, refusing to recognize his allegiance for the tragic loyalty it swore. The curse of the Bambino?” he scoffed. Superstitious malarkey, Calvinist self-pity, the Irishman said. The Yankees were the Damned ones. They suffered under a real tyrant’s yolk, and until they got rid of King George, nothing would change. Until then, the Yankees would never win another Championship.

Among the Stadium faithful, it was a widely shared sentiment.

II.

To those whose age, memory, or allegiance stretches no farther back than the Torre era, it is nearly impossible to convey-- or perhaps for them, even to conceive-- the depth of sheer, unadulterated hatred George Steinbrenner once inspired among Yankee fans.

Sure, in recent times, The Boss has pulled his share of stunts: haranguing players in the press (chiding even Jeter once for “late hours”); making ill-informed, rash personnel decisions; and threatening to fire Torre, on multiple occasions, including in 1998, six games into the season.

But none of these indignities compares to the cruel pettiness, oppressive meddling, self-destructive folly and often stark raving madness that characterized King George’s reign through the period that ended July 30, 1990.

The grotesque managerial carnival— Dick Howser’s release in 1980 after winning 103 games, Yogi’s dismissal in ‘85 after a 6-10 start, Lou Pinella’s re-hiring 60 games after his firing— the circus act with the revolving door which opened and closed on Billy Martin five times in twelve years, a sixth only death forestalled—tells only half the story.

Another part includes a roster churned as quickly as assembled. The shibboleth of power one year, turning into the paramountcy of speed the next, returning the year after again to power. Enter Winfield; exit Reggie. Enter Rickey Henderson; exit Ken Griffey, Sr. Enter Jack Clarke; Exit Jack Clark; Enter Steve Sax. Money wasted, prospects discarded, the future mortgaged, the farm decimated and the elusive, indispensable pitcher, the Guidry to succeed Guidry, forever out of reach. Why? Because the mad King, years before, had sold his thoroughbred foal for magic beans, two nags, and a mess of porridge. Goodbye Jose Rijo, Doug Drabek, Al Leiter. Hello Ed Whitson, Britt Burns, Andy Hawkins.

And with each season, the roster’s talent contracted. The team’s deficiencies spread. Memories of ’78 dimmed. The farm grew more barren. And the King’s largesse compensated less and less, as the losing and the craziness repelled free agents when collusion didn’t bar them outright. Meanwhile, devout, sophisticated Yankees fans, watching the slow descent unfold before their eyes that they were powerless to arrest—Yankee fans went from hungry and disgruntled to livid and nauseated. “Steinbrenner Sucks” chants echoed nightly through the stands. “Free the Yankees” banners hung from the rafters (that is, until the crown had them removed.) And outside the Stadium, rebellion stirred.

I don't exaggerate: A “Fire the Boss” movement sprouted. Fans leafleted, circulated petitions, staged boycotts, and hatched crackpot schemes to expel Steinbrenner from the Bronx.

In fact, one night in the late 80's, I can recall a very drunk Bronx public defender telling me outside Stan's how the City could invoke its eminent domain power to expropriate the Yankees from Steinbrenner. Fans, he contended, just needed to raise the capital so the City could pay him “just compensation.” (Later in law school, I discovered both Baltimore and Oakland had attempted to do precisely this to prevent the Colts and Raiders from moving.)

Worse, as King George’s desperate manic drive to win burrowed the Yankees further into a black hole and the fans turned on him-- fans whose approbation and gratitude he craved almost as much as winning—he started to unravel. The bitterness of defeat. The exasperating shackles on free agency. The anguish and bafflement that he’d aroused animosity of such virulence.

Most of all, the impotent rage of discovering that Dave Winfield – the nemesis who had come to represent in Steinbrenner’s imagination the cause and symbol of his franchise’s decade-long futility; the exorbitantly paid free-agent the Boss derided for his 1 for 22 performance in the 1981 World Series; the scapegoat nonpareil to presage A-Rod—“Mr. May” had a cost-of-living clause in his contract his agent had inserted and that the Boss hadn’t known about. To compound the humiliation, the press uncovered it first, learned Steinbrenner hadn't known about it, and ridiculed him for it. Claiming fraud, the Boss refused to pay. Winfield sued. The feud went public. And suddenly, the crowds were cheering “Mr. May” for defying the man they despised.

At long last, Steinbrenner had met his match. A player he couldn’t intimidate, bully, discredit, humilitate, demean or more infuriating still, trade--Winfield’s contract also contained a no-trade clause-- and the impotence, I imagine, must have sent him over the edge.

The demons of old resurfaced, and his old enemy, Richard Milhouse Nixon closed in on him. The Hunted had introjected the Hunter. And in some perverse act of unconscious imitation, Steinbrenner embarked upon the very self-destructive scheme of character assassination, illegal payoffs, abuses of power, and enlistment of dubious characters that had victimized him two decades earlier and eventually drove the perpetrator from the Oval Office.

The particular Watergate conspiracy which embroiled George Steinbrenner and led M.L.B.’s Commissioner to ban him from baseball in November 1974 is a story much rehearsed, but invariably half-told.

In the 70’s, Nixon’s Committee to Re-elect (CREEP, as it happens, aptly named) extorted campaign contributions from many high profile business men, the Boss, among them, by threatening their companies with IRS audits. As a consequence, Steinbrenner, though a lifelong Democrat, donated $50,000 in cash to CREEP in addition to funneling an additional $25,000 through six employees of American Ship Building Co., the family's shipbuilding concern.

While many other prominent titans of industry succumbed to CREEP Incorporated, The Boss numbered among the very few prosecuted because by the time prosecutor’s discovered his role, his purchase of the Yankees had elevated him into a public figure.

The plea bargain struck allowed King George to retain the Yankees but resulted in an eighteen month suspension from baseball.

Now, fifteen years later, the Yankee King, as embattled, paranoid, and contorted by rage and self-pity as the former Yankee President, undertook a bizarrely similar plan of criminal intrigue that would backfire and nearly destroy him in the bargain.

As Nixon engaged unscrupulous, outlaw Plumbers to smear Daniel Ellsburg; Steinbrenner hired a convicted gambler, Howard Spira, to besmirch Dave Winfield. Yet instead of harming their adversaries, the treacherous agent they’d hired turned around and blackmailed them. The Boss fell victim, once again, to an extortion scheme, yet this time to one of his own devising. What’s more, on this occasion, the second time King George had run afoul of baseball's strictures, he faced King Richard’s punishment-- forced abdication and permanent exile.

And so, on July 30, 1990, with the Yankees suffering through as ignominious a season as I, in my then fourteen years of sworn allegiance, had ever witnessed or even imagined possible -- mired in last place in the AL East and at 39-61, bearing the worst record in all of baseball—I was elated. Racing home from work that evening, I brimmed with an eagerness and buoyancy the Yankees hadn’t excited since my father took me eleven years earlier to Game Four of the 1978 ALCS.

Although this time, it wasn’t a baseball game that aroused the giddy child in me. It was, of all things, a press conference. The Commissioner of baseball, Fay Vincent, reportedly, was set to announce, that with the stroke of a pen, he would realize every Yankee fan’s most fanciful, deeply nurtured dream—a dream that seemed to us then as quixotic and utopian and elusive as winning a World Series. Not since August 9, 1974, Kevin O’Brien said, had he awaited a news conference with anticipation. The date, fittingly, Steinbrenner’s doppelganger and nemesis resigned the Presidency.

The Commissioner announced as follows: after August 20, 1990, ''George M. Steinbrenner will have no further involvement in the management of the New York Yankees or in the day-to-day operations of that club… His ownership interest has changed from general partner to limited partner indefinitely.”

Indefinitely? I pinched myself, so incredulous was I that the pall had lifted, that the despotic reign of a man who, for me, had come to personify the Yankees had ended in a whimper. As bizarre and as inexplicable as third-rate burglars saving a Presidency, a convicted gambler had liberated the Bronx.

I wasn’t the only one to exult. When news of Fay Vincent’s decision spread through Yankee Stadium during that night’s game, a sound seldom heard that season echoed from the rafters. Kevin O’Brien’s men, the Bronx faithful, erupted in applause.

For the first time in a decade, Yankee fans looked into the horizon and glimpsed the Sun.

III.

Peter Golenbock’s forthcoming book, George: The Poor Little Rich Boy Who Built The Yankee Empire, recounts much of the sordid history summarized above. Author of Sparky Lyle’s The Bronx Zoo in addition to collaborations with Graig Nettles and Billy Martin (as well as the controversial Mickey Mantle novel, styled as an invented memoir), Golenbock knows whence he speaks. The author witnessed the first years of King George’s reign first-hand while camped out in the Stadium’s archives researching his first book, Dynasty about the Yankee teams from 1949 through 1964.

In the interest of full disclosure, Golenbock is also a recurring guest of the Sportstalkny show (http://www.sportstalknylive.com/) for which I’ve covered the Yankees the last year in addition to being a loyal friend to its two hosts, Mark Rosenman and A.J. Carter. (Mark, in fact, receives mention in Golenbock’s acknowledgment section.) During which, Peter has always demonstrated himself a knowledgeable and informative guest and an entertaining raconteur.

George, not surprisingly, then, is an able and thorough account of the life of George M. Steinbrenner, III. It describes his full biography, beginning with the Boss’ upbringing in the Cleveland suburb of Lakeland, Ohio as the obedient, driven son desperate to please his strict, autocratic, withholding father.

Henry G. Steinbrenner, II presided over Kinsman Marine Transit Company, the Steinbrenner family’s shipbuilding company, and expected his son, George, to join him. As in the classical saga, George, playing the prodigal son who rejects his patrimony, pursues a brief, wayward, angst-ridden flirtation in his 20s with a career coaching collegiate athletics, highlighted by a one-year stint as the Head Coach of Purdue’s freshman football team. In the end, naturally, he returns home, takes his place beside his father, engages Henry in a battle of wills, and ultimately, both defeats his father and sends him into exile -- the upstart Prince usurping the aging Patriarch's throne.

George condenses King George III's creation story into the book’s first third, however, and from there, moves to its primary focus. Which, as its subtitle indicates, is the history of the ascent of an obscure magnate of the Midwest’s shipbuilding gentry into the monarch of a forsaken Bronx kingdom and ultimately, to imperial sovereign of The Yankee Empire.

(The political symbolism to which this blog’s title, The Yankees Republic, stands in opposition—resting, as it does, on my premise that as any professional sports franchise, the New York Yankees, despite private ownership, nonetheless, embody, in part, a public trust between New York City fans and citizens, on the one hand, and the Yankees corporation, on the other, as the hybrid pedigree its name signifies. The team name, i.e., is not The "Steinbrenner" Yankees but rather "The New York" Yankees. )

George: The Poor Little Rich Boy Who Built The Yankee Empire, in this regard, is a thorough and able biography of both the New York Yankees’ acting general partner from 1973-1974, 1976-1990, and 1993-2008 in addition to an accomplished history of the Yankees’ franchise from 1973 through 2008.

IV.

I regret to write that it is not a complete one however.

And what accounts for the flaw, in no way, should slight the author or his accomplishment. My reservation amounts to only a quibble anyway; what’s more, one, perhaps, more personal than objective. Still, it is, I submit, a telling imperfection nonetheless. For the picture Golenbock's book paints of the Yankee owner is as that of King George, the vindictive, peremptory, ruthless, volcanic, deranged despot whose downfall I effusively cheered, in 1990, as recounted above.

But the Mad King, the Boss Tyrant, is, I submit, also a caricature. From the Yankee fan’s perspective, more importantly, the image, even if accurate, ignores the virtue of the motive that drives his madness and scants the spoils and luxuries, when not squandered, his rule confers upon us-- graces, we, Yankee fans, dare not take for granted.

Sometime, you see, since Kevin O’Brien issued his clairvoyant prophecy, my perception of King George evolved. It hasn’t softened in the ensuing years so much as it has deepened. Somewhere along the line, I guess I realized that the newspaper writers who cover baseball, by and large, possess the moral vision of a Walt Disney movie; their profiles, the subtlety and verisimilitude of a Seinfeld episode. That, as a consequence, the infamous tabloid King George, III I’d reviled throughout childhood no more captured the actual man than the Sage of Saddle River did Richard Millhouse Nixon.

Of course, I cannot discount entirely that four World Series championships, six pennants, and thirteen consecutive playoff appearances since the King regained his crown colors the reassessment. Neither can I dismiss the soothing and stabilizing normalcy Joe Torre alone brought, the inimitable departure it may represent, and the indiscriminate goodwill the former manager reflected upon the entire organization. Nor, finally, should I minimize the distress of seeing the once nefarious, oppressive, all-powerful monarch appear now an infirm, benignly impotent sovereign, more King Lear than King George.

Still, I’d like to believe sentiment, or certainly, sentimentality, has contributed but a bit part.

(Lord knows, I learned, first-hand, that the Boss reinstated in 1993, despite his lower profile and burnished image, hadn’t mellowed much at all. During my years at the law firm that represented Steinbrenner and the Yankees, the Boss’ edicts, grudges, rants, in addition to the endless spate of frivolous lawsuits he proposed supplied many an overworked associate a steady diet of comic relief.)

No, between 1990 and today what has changed and has transformed my antipathy into something more like ambivalence, I'd like to believe, is rather the perspective time and age bestow.

The conventional wisdom, more conventional than wise, tells us that George Steinbrenner forever changed professional sports. That his insatiable desire to win and his frenzied intolerance of any result that fell short has debased the sheer beauty of athletic excellence, has perverted competition’s code of sportsmanship, and has depleted victory of its joy.

George Steinbrenner, they say, injected Darwin’s law into gentleman’s games. Yet King George’s iron rule over his Bronx fiefdom notwithstanding, he was never so powerful or influential as to control all the ills attributed him. And if he is responsible for these so-called corruptions, than I, for one, wish to absolve him.

More accurately, as a Yankee fan, I applaud them. If keeping baseball a gentleman’s club means sanctioning the sports franchise as some tycoon's glamour asset; if it means abiding millionaires and billionaires, like Carl Pohlad and Jeffery Loria, who place profits above rings, their pocket above their product, and their vanity and renown over their fans and their city than may George Steinbrenner’s Zoo rule forever. Let money rain down on talent and victory flow like a mighty stream.

In retropsect, I wonder if Kevin O’Brien, in his prophecy, was only half-right then. For the moral of George's story has another half as well that betrays a truth just as stark.

Yes, the New York Yankees wouldn’t, and didn’t, win another championship until the Commissioner ousted King George.

However, neither did the franchise win another championship until the Yankees' patrimonial sovereign returned and King George resumed re-distribution of the crown.

DID GOD SMITE A-ROD?

2009-03-06T05:24:00.000-08:00

"Cotton Mather... the representative of all the hateful features of his time...the one blood-thirsty man sufficed to madden the whole surrounding multitude." Hawthorne, "Alice Doan's Appeal."

Yes, ladies and gentleman, the mainstream media's coverage of A-Rod's ongoing saga has sunk to a new abject low.

A-Rod doesn't simply sustain the inevitable injury that one time or another afflicts every athlete. No, A-Rod, evidently, has begotten God's wrath. For his injury occasions not sympathy or lament but rancorous innuendo and moral indignation.

Not a day elapsed after the Yankees announced that A-Rod was flying to Colorado to have a cyst examined by a hip specialist before the the press suspended the rules of logic and the wild speculation and primitive thinking began. Did steroids cause it?

Well, of course, don't the effects of steroids somehow lie dormant for four years and then suddenly and magically manifest themselves three weeks after the user comes forward and offers his confession? Or has the media succumbed to the delusion that it controls events? That when two successive media furors follow each other the first presages the second like acts in a tragedy, first the oracle's prophecy, then the divine retribution, and finally the hero's ruin. Through the looking glass, post hoc is propter hoc.

How else to account for the thin-lipped, punitive rebukes, the hysterical denunciations, the anathemas of imminent doom the Diamond Clerics have visited upon both A-Rod and the Yankees since Brian Cashman announced his MRI's results?

So High Priest Joel Sherman of the New York Post perorates: "We see all the worst, long-term possibilities clearer... This is A-Rod's body at age 33. [This is your brain on bombast.] What will he look like at 38 or 40 or 42, when his contract finally ends. Hip injuries turned Albert Belle and Bo Jackson from freaks of nature into ex-baseball players... All assumptions are off, including the idea that A-Rod will one day be the homerun champ." -- Joel Sherman, NY Post

Never mind that Bo Jackson and Albert Belle suffered from chronic degenerative arthritic hips and that A-rod suffered nothing more than a tear of hip's labrum that athletes from Greg Norman to Mario Lemieux to Tara Lipniski to Priest Holmes all have experienced-- to say nothing of Mike Lowell and Chase Utley, just this year-- and with surgery, resumed their careers, regained their strength and dexterity, and quickly returned to athletic form.

Would CC Sabathia's tearing his rotator cuff-- God forbid-- or Mark Teixiera's ripping his anterior cruciate ligament suddenly provoke questions about the wisdom of their contracts' length or doubts about the player's durability? Or are baseball players who have admitted to steroid use destined to Jason Giambi's physical deterioration but for some reason not Barry Bonds' and Roger Clemens' longevity and health? Or is Joel Sherman just indulging in wish-fulfillment, assuming a moral universe where everyone who transgresses his idea of right and wrong suffer punishment, if not by their own bodies than by the scourge of his pen.

Don't the facts of A-Rod's durability speak for themselves. A-Rod has played 150 or more games 7 of the last eight seasons and since joining the Yankees has averaged almost 154 games a season. How many more players in baseball have proven more durable than that? Doesn't every players' susceptibility to injuries and the disabled list increase after he turns 30 years of age?

And if the Yankees had refrained from re-signing A-Rod, how would they have replaced his production with a farm system devoid of position players and right-handed power bats with two free agent classes sparse in talent immediately on the horizon? Would signing Matt Holiday next year, when he turns 30, to the 7 or 8 year contract Boras, no doubt, will insist upon a better option? And to fill the hole A-Rod departure would have created at 3B, where would the Yankees have turned? To Joe Crede? To Scott Rolen? To Troy Glaus? Each has a history of back, shoulder, and foot injuries that present a more grievous risk of recurrence and permanent debility than anything A-Rod's injury history, even considering the torn hip labrum, ever has shown.

Here's Sherman, the Diamond Cleric, again, at his sanctimonious worst, "Rodriguez has lost his way. He has forgotten that baseball makes everything else in his life possible. His insatiable needs and greed have led him to a more complicated life: Phil Hellmuth by his side at 4 a.m. in illegal Manhattan poker clubs, Warren Buffet involved in his contract negotiations, Madonna in his bed." -- New York Post, March 9, 2009

Is there any clearer and more odious example of repressed envy projecting itself as moral indignation or more accurately, a narrow, claustrophobic worldview reflecting more about the writer than his subject. Perhaps it hasn't occurred to Sherman that a little late-night gambling while on vacation or consultation with the country's foremost financial advisor or sexual intercourse [hey, Joel, you mean to tell me you've never fantasized about fucking a celebrity?] doesn't exactly qualify as "insatiable needs and greeds." But if it's "insatiable needs and greeds" you're eager to inveigh against look no farther than the bankers down the block who awarded themselves 4 billion dollars in bonuses after losing 27 billion dollars for the year. Compared to them, A-Rod's after-hour diversions look like exercises in moderation and self-restraint.

Or how about the ominous and self-fulfilling prophecy of Sherman's colleague, The Daily News' Diamond Cleric, Bill Madden: "By now, everyone should be fully resigned to the fact that, with Alex Rodriguez there's always going to be something. And, in most cases, something big... Now it's the cyst heard round the world."

Well of course, if you and your colleagues persist in parsing A-Rod's every comment as though he were a diplomat instead of a baseball player, scrutinizing it for the inadvertent slights it might imply about Derek Jeter or some other Yankee player. Indeed, it "will always be something" if you take every opportunity to lambaste, upbraid, condemn, revile, and deplore him as a "steroid cheat" every other day because you need to fill column space between advertisements and evidently can't fathom a more relevant or compelling subject to write about. What's more, it always will be something "big" if your own paper continues to exploit his celebrity to sell papers by splashing him across the back page 27 times a month. But then again, that's like stabbing a man and then denouncing him for the provocation he arouses by shedding blood.

Why should a customary injury for baseball player's provoke indignation, still less earn the victim sanction? Did A-Rod invite his hip injury because he spends late nights carousing in bars and neglecting his training program? NO, quite the contrary, A-Rod is possibly the most compulsively regimented athlete since Ivan Drago. Well, then, did his steroid use cause his labrum tear or are the two, in anyway, related other than as figment of the Diamond Clergy's imagination? No, not according to the five doctors Bill Madden's own paper interviewed who attributed A-Rod's labrum tear to the rotational hip torsion inherent to the batting motion or perhaps even to the aberrant hip anatomy he was born with.

So if tears of the hip labrum constitute a inherent occupational hazard to playing professional baseball players that any one in the league is likely to sustain-- two of whom, Mike Lowell and Chase Utley just recently, in fact, did-- why does A-Rod's injury justify either condemnation of the Yankees for signing him or more baffling still, merit reproach of A-Rod himself for having suffered it and for the nuisance and blight it supposedly has caused? Are athletes somehow culpable for their aches, pains, injuries, and afflictions or rather is the opportunity for moral recrimination and censure when the $27 Million Dollar Man is the target too seductive to resist?

Blaming people for their misfortune is, alas, one of those pernicious vestiges of Puritanism, a moral order where good fortune testified to one's virtue and election and where adversity signaled one's wickedness and led to opprobrium.

Apparently, Cotton Mather is alive and well and dwelling amid the tabloids of Gotham.

Perhaps the distance between Boston and New York isn't nearly as great as we Yankees fans like to assume.

THE TRIAL OF ALEX R.

2009-02-10T14:10:00.000-08:00

"In Congress, in the press, and on the networks, the righteous grandstanding creeps, crazy to blame, deplore, and punish were out moralizing to beat the band: all of them in a calculated frenzy with what Hawthorne identified in the incipient country of long ago as "the persecuting spirit."--- The Human Stain, Philip Roth

Hear ye, Hear ye. The Court of Diamond Virtue is back in session. The Self-Anointed Pontificate of Baseball presides.

The Pontificate has convened this Inquisition in the Court of Public Resentment to judge the moral virtue and blood purity of one Alex R., a.k.a. A-Rod.

This Inquisitorial Tribunal is vested with the unlimited authority of the People's Right to Know.

As such, all public figures who whet the People's prurience -- whether Captain or Congressman, whether celebrated athlete or democratic representative, whether acting in the People's name or representing themselves as moral authorities --will be indiscriminately deemed "role models." As "role models," they forfeit the rights Americans otherwise cherish: the right to private medical records, the right to confront their accusers, the right to exclude unconstitutionally seized evidence or to suppress leaks that contravene a grand jury’s seal.

This Tribunal, accordingly, will scrutinize every facet of their professional and private lives and will release any salacious material uncovered. Indeed, should the Tribunal discover ethical lapses, personal trangressions, human failings, and illegal behavior however minor, the public figures will be publicly shamed, disgraced, and brought low. Let them that err be warned.

Would the Reprobate, Alex R., please rise?

Alex R., The Pontificate accuses, convicts, and sentences you for the following High Crimes:

High Crime Count 1: You, the Greatest Player in the Game, took illegal steroids six years ago. Even though the Game didn’t enforce a prohibition against said substances at the time, the Tribunal, nonethless, finds you guilty of cheating. Your offense against the spirit of sportsmanship, furthermore, deserves more draconian punishment than all the other forms of cheating the Game excused, overlooked, and/or condoned over the last century-- to wit, throwing spit balls, doctoring its seams, corking bats, stealing signs, using pinetar, ingesting "greenies" or snorting cocaine-- because the Pontificate says so.

High Crime-- Count 2: You, the Current Active Home zrun Leader, have desecrated the holy numbers 714, 755, and *61 and profaned the myth of the eternal, age-independent home run. (The Pontificate guards these numbers' sanctity notwithstanding the dramatic reduction in ballparks' dimensions over the last two decades or the profound changes the games has undergone since We canonized them. )

High Crime-- Count 3: By hitting 48 and 54 home runs in 2005 and 2007-- years you, Alex R., allegedly, did not use steroids-- and hitting 47 and 52 home runs in 2003 and 2001-- years you did use steroids-- You have vitiated our unproven-- but we nonetheless know to be incontrovertible-- assumption that performance enhancing drugs, however endemic to the era, inflate statistics, compromise the game’s outcome, and constitute the moral equivalent of the Black Sox scandal. (Moreover, Alex R., you are guilty now and forever. Once a steroid user, always a steroid user. No matter then how often you test negative over the next 10 years, the Pontificate will dismiss all negative urine tests' validity because they don't identify HGH or "designer drugs" and instead will accuse you of cheating or insinuate as much forever after.)

High Crime-- Count 4: Your crimes of moral turpitude, and your acts of grievous illegality, have sullied the reputation of all the honorable Saints and model Citizens who have consecrated the Diamond from time immemorial: (i) exalted symbols of racial brotherhood like Ty Cobb, Jake Powell, and Steve Carlton; (ii) shining beacons of sportsmanship like Gaylord Perry, Norm Cash, and the ’51 Giants; and (iii) paragons of good, clean athletic living like Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, Fergie Jenkins and the ’86 Mets.

HIGH CRIME-- Count 5: You have exhibited a cavalier disregard for the scrupulous, double standard to which the Pontificate-- and the Game whose pure, sanctified tradition we presume to guard-- hold the baseball player. While musicians, actor and actresses, artists, writers and novelist may have used legal and illegal drugs for centuries, whether it was speed, sleeping pills, heroin, cocaine, or marijuana to enhance their performance, to fertilize their creativity, and to stimulate their imaginations-- to say nothing of the steroids epidemic use in football-- baseball players are not permitted an indulgence that would erode this Pontificate's authority to decide those worthy of honor, esteem, and reverence.

HIGH CRIME-- Count 6: You, the highest-paid player in baseball, in the largest media market, on the most hated/loved sports franchise in history, (i) have consorted with a known “Material Girl” of dubious morals who is nearly twice your age; (ii) have escorted strippers around Toronto after the New York Post paid a restaurateur to entrap you; (iii) have committed adultery and cheated on your loyal and fashion-conscious wife; (iv) have exposed yourself, to the waist, in Central Park at High Noon; and (v) have enjoyed yourself during the off-season in sundry place of ill-repute from strip clubs, gambling parlors, exclusive Bahaman casinos to charity golf tournaments.

High Crime-- Count 7: You have dared to challenge the motives and the zeal of the Pontificate’s most noble, selfless, upright member since Joseph Pulitzer originated yellow journalism-- Selena “the Impeccable” Roberts-- and derivatively, have impugned the unimpeachable propriety and integrity of the most venerable sports tabloid in world history, Sports Illustrated..

High Crime-- Count 8: You have failed to confess fully or to mortify yourself sufficiently (i) by refusing to confess that you used Primobolan and by refusing thereby to subject yourself to criminal penalties for the purchase, possession and/or ingestion of illegal drugs; (ii) by refusing to incriminate the trainers from whom you likely obtained said illegal drugs; (iii) by refusing, thereby, to reprise a Clemens-McNamee saga for our titillation; and (iv) by refusing to break down and grovel for forgiveness.

High Crime Count 9: You have dramatized the plague of performance enhancement that has swept the nation from its sub-prime mortgaged boardrooms to its Ritalin-fueled classrooms to its Viagra-augmented bedrooms when we would prefer to ignore said widespread illicit performance enhancement and the social context that would mitigate your crime.

High Crime Count 10: By failing to abstain from illegal drugs or from burnishing your credentials, you have failed to meet the exacting standard of moral purity and virtue the Diamond demands and that we, like many Americans, would fail but nonetheless apply to you.

Alex R., The Pontificate accuses, convicts, and sentences you, as well, for the following Misdemeanors:

Misdemeanor Count 1: Over the past fifteen years, you have responded to our questions like a canny and guarded politician instead of an indiscreet and hostile athlete and have refrained from furnishing inflammatory, bulletin board fodder. You are therefore guilty of insincerity and fraudulence.

Misdemeanor Count 2: You are better looking, more gifted, earn more money, and quite possibly, are more intelligent than most of us and certainly, more than many of us.

Misdemeanor Count 3: Worse, you confirmed your immodesty and had the gall to attribute our fixation with you to your being “good-looking and biracial" and "to making the most money and playing on the most popular team.”

Misdemeanor Count 4: You can hobnob and fornicate with C-list celebrities and fading stars in the teeth of our jealousy.

Misdemeanor Count 5: You don’t eat dinner with Derek Jeter anymore or emulate his superior taste in celebrities.

Misdemeanor Count 6: You upstaged the Red Sox’s dramatic 4-0 World Series sweep because your agent leaked news of your opt-out.

Misdemeanor Count 7: By opting out, you defied the ultimatum issued by the Pontificate’s second favorite GM and then by appealing over his head with ownership, you undermined his authority, and thwarted his desire to shun you.

Misdemeanor Count 8: You study kabbalah even though you’re not Jewish.

Misdemeanor Count 9: You somehow escaped the Mitchell report.

Misdemeanor Count 10: Your playoff statistics as a Seattle Mariner, and during your first seven post-season games as a Yankee, belie the impression we’ve otherwise created that you choke in the post-season and don’t deserve all that money.

On all the foregoing charges, Alex R., this Tribunal accuses, convicts, and finds you guilty, irrevocably and irredeemably, and sentences you as follows:

PUNISHMENT # 1 -- You are barred, now and forever, from entering the Hall of Purity, Virtue, and Fame no matter how many homeruns you amass over multiple seasons rigorous steroid-testing has purged, or will purge, from the insidious specter of performance enhancement, and no matter how many of your tainted inferiors we vote into the Hall of Purity, Virtue, and Fame because they have skirted positive tests or because we haven’t exposed them.

PUNISHMENT # 2 -- You must suffer the casuistry of our arbitrary and capricious, but nonetheless categorical, exclusion of you from the Hall of Purity, Virtue, and Fame, because we will never know how many players used steroids before 2004, how it distorted the league’s statistics, or even how it affects player’s performance, but someone has to pay for the Crime and to sate the public outrage the Pontificate has stoked.

PUNISHMENT # 3 -- Because we know how important your historical legacy is to you, every time any member of the Pontificate is queried about how your guilt affects it, the Pontificate will assert, repeatedly and dogmatically, that your legacy is irremediably tarnished until the prophecy fulfills itself and the magnanimous, hero-worshipping fans finally accept our dictate that all evildoing steroid-users should be shamed, disgraced, and ostracized for all eternity.

PUNISHMENT # 4 -- For the nine or more years you play and no matter how often the league examines your urine, we always will cast doubt upon, contest, depreciate or outright belittle every record you break or superb season you post by reminding the public that because the league refuses to draw your blood, because no test exist for HGH and “designer drugs,” we, the Pontificate, will forever presume you are guilty. Nothing you ever do will dissuade us.

PUNISHMENT # 5 -- You will suffer the Pontificate’s pious sermonizing, punitive anathemas, and sententious tirades until we find a more desirable scapegoat to revile.

PUNISHMENT # 6 -- You will be constrained to read, and will be interrogated upon, the book written by the Pontificate’s greatest Diamond theologian and metaphysician, Cardinal Tom Verducci because in the Holy Bible, The Yankee Years, he declares that because of steroids, (i) “the game became twisted into a perversion… and reduced to the lowest common denominator” (p. 89) and (ii) the “Steroid Era was baseball’s Watergate, a colossal breach of trust for which the institution is forever tainted” (p.119) even though all the ignorant laity continue to express their faith in it with their hard-earned dollar.

PUNISHMENT # 7 -- You will be consigned to Dante’s 10th Circle of Hell in which you will subjected to 24-hours, 7-days-a-week of Mad Dog Radio.

PUNISHMENT # 8 -- None of the above forecloses this Pontificate's authority to mete out greater punishment, ad nauseum and ad infinitum, if circumstances reveal that the Alex R. has eluded a Sysiphean fate.

WHAT SHOULD HIS SUFFERANCE BE?

2009-01-29T09:27:00.000-08:00

“Olaf… does almost ceaselessly repeat ‘there is some shit I will not eat’.”-- E.E. Cummings.

"Why did he write that book?”

Why? Is it really that difficult to understand? Money? No, only the shallow and the envious cannot divine more complex motives than the banality of their own. Only the petty and the malicious cannot abide a man who refuses to dignify them. They accused Torre of pious Sainthood. Torre, meanwhile, never pretended to be anything other than exactly what he was, Human. And it is for this reason that many of us forgive him the sin of pride and whatever the book-- the book that no one has read and about which everyone has an opinion-- whatever that book may reveal, we will continue to cherish him.

Why did he write that book? Well, just imagine, if only for 1,000 words or so, that You are Joe Torre.

*****************

You have three kids, two ex-wives, a sick older brother, and a third wife who’s pregnant. You have alimony and child support, mortgages and credit card bills. You grew up dirt poor, so whatever extra you’ve earned you’ve frittered away instead of saving. So at 55-years-old, you have no money, and you’ve just been fired from what looks like your final job in the only profession you’ve ever known.

But then suddenly the revolving managerial door in the Bronx opens for the 8th time in ten years. Sure, you know the risks. You’ve been around the game long enough to understand what working for the notorious, overbearing, meddlesome owner entails or anyway, you think you do. The man even warns you when you meet, “rent; don’t buy.” But hey, it’s job, right? And you’re desperate—desperate to return to the game, desperate to provide for your family, desperate for the elusive ring, desperate for one last chance before it’s too late, to prove the detractors wrong.

Thirteen years? HA! Try thirteen hundred.

“Overbearing?” “Vindictive?” “Meddlesome?” Buddy, you have no idea. He’s not a tyrant to work for; he’s much, much worse. He’s Machiavelli and Mephistopheles, all in one. First, he beguiles you. Then he subdues you. Finally, he steals your self-respect. And then, you’re powerless either to walk away or to resist him. He owns you. He calls you in the middle of games. He browbeats you during every losing streak. He interferes with your every decision and pries into your personal life. He disparages your players and then blames you when they wilt because of it. If you get too popular or too secure, he cuts you down to size. He dismisses your closest coaches to punish and to intimidate you. He leaks his plans to fire you, twice, to watch you squirm. He fixes the Damoclean sword above your head and thrives on your fear of it falling.

As for Gratitude, well, that’s impossible for a man you can never please. And nothing you accomplish—not 13 consecutive playoff appearances, not 6 AL pennants, not 4 World Series victories in six years-- is ever adequate to satisfy him. In fact, the only greater crime than frequent losing is winning once too often. For then you gain popularity and esteem that he resents because it erodes his control. It infuriates him to know he can no longer dispose of you at whim and that the fans may revolt.

Meanwhile, when the aging tyrant finally mellows, the assorted lackeys, courtiers, and sycophants whose counsel he keeps rush in to fill the vacuum. And, believe it or not, they’re more malicious, more petty, more ruthless, more vengeful, more insidious. More insidious and lethal because they’re totally incompetent. And for their ineptitude, guess who pays? The manager.

The Old Man, at least, lavished money on premiere talent. His cronies, on the other hand, signed players like Jared Wright, Tony Wommack, and Kenny Lofton. They pillaged and desolated Gene Michael’s farm system. Between 1995 and 2006, one starting pitcher they drafted made the major league roster. One! Andy Pettitte and him, they drove away, and Roger with him.

Why the difference between 1996 to 2003 and 2004 to 2007, you ask? Oh, they want you to believe because I didn’t work hard. I didn’t want to win. That’s deceitful, self-serving nonsense. The front-office never learned how to evaluate pitching, pure and simple (by the looks of that five-year contract for AJ Burnett that still haven’t.) Before 2004, my rotation was Cone, Wells, Duque, Clemens, and Pettitte. And in the bullpen, I had Mendoza, Nelson, Stanton, Lloyd and Wetteland. After 2004, my rotation consisted of Brown, Vasquez, Pavano, Wright, Unit, Irabu, and Igawa; the bullpen, of Karsay, White, Heredia, Quantril, and Farnsworth. Who’s to blame? The dim-witted cronies? No. The inept scouting director? No. The erratic and mediocre GM? No, for the organization’s failure to win a fifth World Series in 13 years, I’m tasked.

All the while my sworn enemy, the viceroy President has spent the last four years, harboring his delusions of grandeur, nursing his puny grievances, sharpening his dagger and waiting--- waiting for the day when the Mayor has been ingratiated, the Stadium deal has closed, and the scepter has passed—waiting to seize the opportunity and bury his knife in the small of my back.

But the bastard didn’t even have the mercy to be quick and honest about it. Giuliani’s men stab you slowly, grin, and call it a suicide. You want to fire me. Look me in the face and be done with it. But they wanted to see me beg and scrape and crawl. They wanted me to confess to their incompetence and sign my own death warrant.

I need incentive clauses and bonus options now to drive me? I’m not motivated? How dare you! How dare you reduce me to the baseness of your aims! Money is the currency of your regard. Not mine. Don’t confuse my price with my passion. Remember: I played the Game. I’ve given it my body, my soul, my heart, every second that it beats. My devotion to the Game, my respect for the Game -- my compulsion to win, at any price, because the game demands no less—my motivation, sir, exceeds your comprehension. It’s inalienable.

Not motivated? After losses, I don’t sleep. I don’t eat. I pace the room till 5:00am, tossing and turning in bed re-hashing every out, every decision, the cancer of self-doubt ravishing my insides. Not motivated? You think it’s easy to massage the titanic, all-consuming egos of celebrity athletes, assuage their imagined grievances, shower them with constant validation, and guard their fragile psyches so they perform. Leading men is always arduous, but of course, no follower would ever know that it. Not motivated? How dare you! Just wait, I’ll show you motivation.

Et tu Brian? Thirteen years together and you can’t level with me? You couldn’t summon the courage, or hell, the professionalism, to tell me I’d lost your endorsement. You didn’t have the decency to let me know before I, once again, had to grovel like some insubordinate vassal. Et tu Brian? You didn’t have the compassion to spare me the abasement and humiliation. Are you duplicitous or spineless or just plain selfish? I wouldn’t have asked for your patronage, or asked you to jeopardize your job to save mine. All I asked for was the Truth but after ten years clinging to the title of GM, perhaps that’s something you’re no longer equipped to provide. I sure as hell hope the title is worth what it has made of you.

Still, I’d planned to forbear. No, I wasn’t going to allow King’s George Court to reduce me to retaliate. Sure, the intrigues, the blood lust, the ingratitude and callousness, the conniving subterfuge and the low, petty spite, sure it wounded. The humiliating ultimatum before 07’s Game 4. The ensuing weeks left dangling. The incentive-laden one-year farcical offer that only would have deferred the deathwatch, burdened the players, and enlisted me as an accomplice in surrendering my last shred of pride. Yes, that hurt. That after thirteen years of dutiful, loyal, proud, discreet, self-effacing service to the Yankees; after four World Series rings, 6 AL pennants, 10 division titles; after lending some dignity and class to the organization and restoring an image tarnished by decades of public recriminations, the revolving managerial door, a banished owner, a decimated neighborhood, and failure’s rancid stench-- after all of this, I merited no more than Michael Kay and a handshake.

Even still I could have forgiven the indignities, the affronts, the bluster, the innuendo, the bile, the scapegoating, the constant terror of losing a game, a job, a life, even the scurrilous campaign waged in the press not two minutes after I exited. I could have forgiven and forgotten. I would have forgiven and forgotten, but for the final blow.

This final obscenity even I could not abide. To delete me from the Stadium’s past, to elide my thirteen years, to efface me from the history of the Game I cherish, the Game that saved my life, the Game that I idolize more than you can ever know. NO! NO! NO! No, I’ve played the loyal, discrete, magnanimous Zookeeper one time too many. THIS SHIT, I WILL NOT EAT!

Not any more, no, this time, I’m writing the history. And if I break the code along the way and the fans finally see the Shit behind the curtain, so be it.

Let justice be done though the Bronx fall. This time, I will be vindicated.

THE TRIBE OF RUTH, GEHRIG, AND DIMAGGIO: A FAN'S NOTES

2009-01-06T07:33:00.000-08:00

(I wrote the following entry for Peter Abraham's Lohud Blog site, http://yankees.lhblogs.com. It appeared on January 6, 2009)

I’m a Jew, New-Jersey born.

To this day, however, the only religion I’ve ever believed in doesn’t enshrine a Wall in Jerusalem but a Park in the Bronx. The New York Yankees—my religion, my faith, my salvation… my folly and my cross.

Yes, suffering yet another October of dull heartache and desolating withdrawal, shorn of the day’s ritual and consolation, I can succumb to doubt. Isn’t there something pathetic, perverse, even ill, I fret, in an ostensibly grown man surrendering his emotions to the fate of 25 Olympian jocks on a ball field? Isn’t it just a game?

To the rational skeptic, my fervor, no doubt, conjures the stereotype of a David Puddy, Seinfeld’s raving shirtless buffoon decked in team-colored face paint or worse, I evoke a jackbooted, banner-waving, English soccer hooligan. Or maybe, with the glasses, I appear just another pencil-necked, athletically-frustrated, stat geek who worships a sport he can’t play.
More charitably, perhaps, like Fever Pitch’s neurotic, lovable, overgrown adolescent, Ben Wrightman, I simply await the respectable, forbearing girlfriend to save me-- to become a man and put away childish things.

“You’ve always loved the Yankees. But have they ever loved you back?” She’d inquire, and suddenly, epiphany would descend.

“My god, honey, you’re right. Heck, forget the Yankees. Let’s go pick china patterns.”

Of course mocking a Hollywood romantic comedy for its facile sentimentality is a bit like chiding John Henry his vain battle with his Steam Drill, 200 miles to the south.

That is, whether the Yankees requite my love-- or pace Sonny Lo Sprecchio’s related insinuation in A Bronx Tale, whether A-Rod’s concern for my career rivals mine for his-- isn’t, after all, the relevant question. Undoubtedly, they don’t. No more, for that matter, than does Chazz Palminteri reciprocate my admiration for A Bronx’s Tale.

Ah, but they repay it, as any Art worthy of the name rewards its disciple.

True, a fan’s allegiance may not win him love and nurture, still less honor, glory, or riches, save vicariously. Still, beyond the casual spectator’s entertainment or the professional’s expertise and remuneration, the devoted fan receives what Aristotle once recognized as classical drama’s great satisfaction—emotional catharsis. Or, as the Yankee fan who has been delivered from prolonged agony, resigned despair, or nervous apoplexy by the shocking, momentous, eleventh-hour miracle of a Chris Chambliss or Aaron Boone home run to touch near celestial ecstasy—as he might call it, in other words, a more acutely felt, profoundly rewarded engagement with life.

Whether this emotional investment in an agency beyond my control qualifies as godly, I can’t say. One thing I can swear to however. The Yankees have brought me as close to Divinity as I’ve ever reached.

Indeed, first love comes and goes. Passion and desire flag and fade. Youth and adulthood yield to middle age and dotage, and birth hurtles toward death.

But the Yankees—the tribe of Ruth, Gehrig, and DiMaggio, like the descendants of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob—the Yankees are forever.

CASH AND BURN; RINSE AND REPEAT

2008-12-04T11:07:00.000-08:00

F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that the hallmark of a “first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Well then, by Fitzgerald’s measure, Brian Cashman belongs among the great geniuses of modern baseball. Witness the contradictions.

In 2007’s off-season, deprecating costly, long-term contracts for pitchers, Cashman spurns a deal for Johan Santana, champions young, farm-grown starters, and entrusts 40% of his rotation to two rookies. In 2008’s, the GM offers CC Sabathia a 6-year contract commensurate to Santana’s, pursues two more 30-plus free-agent starters demanding 4-year deal besides, and announces that his two rookie prodigies, Hughes and Kennedy, now have to prove themselves in AAA.

Just this September, the GM can conclude an anemic lineup, down 180 runs scored from one year ago, bedevils the Yankees. By November, the GM can jettison two of his most productive hitters, Abreu and Giambi, and forswear Mark Teixeira, the one free-agent most equipped to compensate.

One April Cashman can risk his rotation to youth, inexperience, and innings caps because the offense is supposed to compensate. The next April, Cashman can risk his lineup to age, skill regression, and two 35-year old veterans rebounding from major injuries (Posada and Matsui) because the formidable high-priced, re-engineered rotation he envisions supposedly will ensure success.

One minute the Yankees GM is lavishing $6 million more dollars and committing two more years to Damaso Marte, a middle-reliever, a notoriously unreliable commodity. The next minute the Yankees GM won’t offer arbitration to one of his most consistent, durable, and productive hitters in Bobby Abreu because he fears having to pay him over one year $6 million more dollars than he’s worth. Yet the contradictions continue. For he’s, at once, binding the organization to rebuilding its farm system all the while, in forsaking compensatory draft picks, squandering his most fertile opportunity for doing so.

Is there a method to Cashman’s madness, a key to the apparent contradiction, a long-range plan? Not one, evidently, to which he’s either willing or seemingly able to adhere. To the contrary, the impression the Yankees Front-Office creates is of frantic, ad hoc, remedial reaction. Each off-season the Front-Office adopts a new recipe but without first learning the lesson the prior year’s failure exposed. A recipe best described as follows: Trial. Error. Abandonment…. Reaction. Overcompensation. Failure…. Rinse and Repeat.

2008 FOLLIES REVISITED: YOUNG PITCHING
Of course, consistency in the face of error constitutes its own kind of madness. And to Cashman’s credit, he’s currently trying to rectify the critical error in judgment he made last year by forgoing Santana and exposing 40% of his rotation to the inconsistency, innings caps, and injury-risks of rookie starters—an error that derailed the Yankees 2008 season.

Last year, to recall, Cashman calculated that the team’s prolific lineup would hedge against a rotation anchored by two rookies under 23. A hypothesis more sound in theory than practice. The Twins, after all, followed this very formula. In ’08, they finished 3rd in the AL in Runs Scored and their rotation of Blackburn, Slowey, and Perkins, all in their first full season, accounted for over 50% of the team’s starts. And the team found itself in September playing a one game playoff for the division title.

However, Minnesota isn’t New York. The Twins pitchers benefited from low expectations. In contrast, the clamor in the Bronx to demote Hughes started in April, even before he disclosed the rib injury. And the Scranton bus arrived for Kennedy soon thereafter. Not without cause, however. By May 1st, in the 12 games Hughes and Kennedy had started, they’d combined for a 9.16 ERA in 46 innings, and the Yankees went 2-10. The Yankees were 12-5 otherwise in April, and 14-15 in total. And from this middling performance, over the easy part of their schedule, the team never recovered.

THE OFF-SEASON: THE ERROR OF OVERCOMPENSATION
Last year’s error, however, has instigated this off-season’s ill-considered knee-jerk reflex. Overcompensating for one deficiency now risks incurring its inverse. A rotation constituted of youth, inexperience, and fragility in 2008 will have wrought in 2009 a lineup composed of diminished power, infirm veterans, and fading stars.

The plan for 2009, reportedly, contemplates as follows. Cashman hopes to leverage $80 million dollars in expiring contracts by signing two among Sabathia, Burnett, and Lowe, and re-signing Pettitte at a lower salary. If successful, his rotation would consist of Wang, Pettitte, two free agents, and Joba, the 5th starter, confined to approximately 130 innings. As such, Scranton would provide in Hughes, Aceves, and Kennedy a ready stable of arms to bolster the Bronx rotation when fatigue, injuries, or innings limits exact their toll, as they invariably will, and require reinforcements.

All well and good, except for the caveat. Signing two of Sabathia, Burnett, and Lowe, according to Cashman, would preclude a third for Teixeira. And with the departure of Abreu now all but certain, the Yankees need Teixeira as badly as they do Sabathia.

For as Cashman himself conceded just two months ago, the lineup’s regression in Runs Scored, On-Base Percentage, and RISP average in 2008 accounted as much for the Yankees’ finishing in 3rd place as did their injury-decimated rotation. But thus far rather than remedying the problem, Cashman has seen fit to exacerbate it.

He’s disposed of two of his most productive and patient hitters. Giambi and Abreu ranked 2nd and 3rd in OPS+ at 128 and 120, respectively, and led the team in pitches per plate appearance at 4.3. Meanwhile, the acquisition of Nick Swisher mitigates their loss but hardly compensates for it. For all Swisher’s youth, proficiency in drawing walks and pitches per plate, his career OPS+ is only 112. And in the 3 of his 5 major league season, his OPS+ didn’t exceed 101; that is, the league average.

THE MIRROR IMAGE FALLACY: 2009’s INADEQUATE LINEUP

For some reason, Cashman imagines that without Abreu, Giambi, or hitter of Teixeira’s caliber, his lineup nonetheless will be sufficiently formidable to contend in the AL East. His projection ostensibly depends on (i) Matsui and Posada fully recuperating and recapturing their 2007 seasons; (ii) Cano, A-Rod, and Swisher, all rebounding from sub-par 2008s; (iii) Damon and Nady reproducing their prolific 2008 stats and not reverting to their mediocre 2007 numbers; and finally, (iv) his revamped pitching rotation affecting a dramatic improvement over its last two incarnations in performance and stability.

The irony is that the GM’s plan for 2009 rests on assumptions no less tenuous or speculative than his plan for 2008. Actually, the associated risks of depending on Hughes and Kennedy’s in 2008 mirror the associated risks of relying on Posada and Matsui in 2009. The one is the converse of the other. The youth, inexperience, and fragility of Hughes and Kennedy made their performances as impossible to predict as age, injury, and skill regression now cloud the futures of Posada’s and Matsui’s.

Posada, after all, will be a 38-year-old catcher in August, a position notorious for the precipitous fall in productivity its players undergo as they age. (Mike Piazza, recall, didn’t last beyond the age of 38.) More problematic still, Posada is recuperating from a torn labrum, about as dire an injury to catchers’ and pitchers’ career as exists in the age of modern medicine. To compound the unknown, this is the second time in Posada’s career has had surgery for the injury. How can the Yankees expect Posada, at 38, and recovering from injury no less, to equal his career averages, let alone reprise the unprecedentedly productive season he had in 2007?

Expecting Matsui to reproduce his 123 OPS+ suffers from the same willfully blind optimism. Matsui is no youngster either. He turns 35 in March, and among the Yankees’ cohort of over-33 players, Matsui has aged least gracefully. Perhaps, his consecutive game streak in Japan has worn him down. Whatever the reason, the chronically arthritic knees he suffers from has robbed him of mobility, precipitated two separate operations on them last year, and subjects him to an ongoing risk of swelling. (His two operations last year only addressed its effect; the arthritis itself is incurable.) Matsui was a notorious streaky hitter to begin with. It’s doubtful he can go an entire season without the pain or swelling impairing his swing.

Now, Cashman, it’s true, can project greater productivity from A-Rod and Cano in 2009. But that’s only half the picture. The other half assumes what they add, Damon, Nady and perhaps, even Jeter won’t subtract by contributing less than last year. Damon’s OPS+ was 118 last year. His career average is 103; and in 2007, it was 97. The Yankees should expect a regression accordingly. Same applies to Nady, whose OPS + was 128 last year (105 with the Yankees), 107 in 2007, and 108 for his career.

As for Jeter, his OPS+ in 2008 dropped 18 points below his career average, 120 (career), 102 (2008). But then again, how much offensive improvement can the Yankees expect from a 35 year old short-stop?

Then too, as their roster is currently constituted, the Yankees don’t have a genuine three hitter. The three-hole is a critical position in any lineup, but especially in the Yankees’ because the player precedes A-Rod, a guess hitter, who depends on disciplined hitters like Abreu and Teixeira in front of him to work counts and to expose a pitcher’s full repertoire.

TREADING WATER IN THE AL EAST

Of course, Cashman’s new model stresses pitching and defense. Never mind that the above lineup only upgrades his outfield’s defense and Posada’s return may diminish it behind the plate. Never mind because signing two premiere starters, Cashman contends, supposedly will buy in runs allowed what he sacrifices in runs scored.

Once again, though, the Yankee GM’s model excludes too many unseemly details that qualify it. First it scants the competition. In past off-seasons, merely keeping pace with the Red Sox was enough because the Yankees still could make the playoffs finishing behind them. The emergence of the Rays, however, means that the Yankees, by keeping pace, fall behind. It isn’t merely six wins—the six wins separating Boston and the Bronx last year-- the Yankees have to gain. It is six wins over and above their constantly improving competition.

The addition of David Price to the Rays rotation, even under innings caps, and a left-handed bat either to DH—possibly, Jason Giambi-- or to play right-field will only further strengthen a team that was 8-wins better than the Yankees last year. And the Red Sox will do likewise by signing Mark Teixeira and trading Lowell, as they hope, and/or by fortifying their bullpen, with Ramon Ramirez’s acquisition and/or that of another free-agent reliever.

Unfortunately, the current Yankees’ lineup for 2009, listed below, examined through the prism of age and injury, pales before any the team has fielded in recent memory. Compare it, by contrast, to their two AL East rivals’ projected lineups.

To excel the Rays and Sox, the Yankees need to improve in every facet then, not just their starting pitching. In fact improving the pitching while neglecting the offense—a lineup that now has to contend with either Gardner or Melky in CF-- offers a prescription less for surpassing the Rays and Red Sox than for emulating the Blue Jays or for worse, disaster.

Recall: the Blue Jays finished 1st and 2nd, respectively, in the entire AL the last two seasons in Runs Allowed, 610 in 2008, 699 in 2007. However, they won 83 games in ’07 and 86 games in ’08, largely because of a deficient lineup. They scored 753 in ’07 (10th in the AL) and 714 in ’08 (11th in the AL). Below, I list the Yankees totals, for comparison, and their league rank.

The table illustrates, first of all, that the Yankees sustained the greatest change either team experienced over the last two seasons in both aggregate numbers and rank, and their lineup accounted for it, not their pitching staff.

Secondly, the Jays’ failure to improve by more than 3 wins from ’07 to ’08 despite yielding 90 less runs illustrates the peril of neglecting your offense. The Jays’ static lineup, ranking about the same over the two seasons, vitiated whatever comparative advantage in the AL East their pitching gained them.

Do the Yankees really want to emulate the Jays in this regard? That’s the risk they run by letting their lineup founder, however dramatically they augment their pitching staff.

Then, too, would signing Sabathia and Burnett automatically improve the rotation as much as we’d like to believe? Don't forget, replacing Mussina's season last year won't be easy. Wang can only hope to duplicate Mussina’s 2008. Innings caps, moreover, will again confine Joba to about 130 innings. And, finally, consider, too, which incarnation of Andy Pettite, if he returns, would the Yankees receive in 2009, the 2007 or the 2008 version. All of which reinforces why the Yankees need to improve their offense, along with their pitching. Bolstering the latter alone is fraught with too much risk, and in and of itself is unlikely to gain them another 6-7 wins.

Cashman's recent intimation that they can't afford to do both-- in the year they open a Stadium recent figures estimate will garner them, at minimun, an additional $200 million in revenue-- is risible. Actually, with $80 million dollars in contracts expiring, were the team to sign Sabathia ($25 million) and Teixeira ($21 million) and re-sign Pettitte at ($10-12) the total still wouldn't consume the windfall. What's more, after 2009, Damon’s, Matsui’s, and Nady’s contracts, totaling another $35 million, expire as well.

Finally, if the Yankees are committed to re-allocating some portion of that $80 million anyway, isn’t a $21 million a year investment in a 28-year-old first baseman a sounder investment than $15 or $16 million for a fragile 32-year old Burnett or an aging 36-year-old Lowe?

All of which begs the question: in Brian Cashman, do the Yankees have a first-rate intelligence and a second-rate General Manager.

SHOW ME THE MONEY

2008-11-13T04:28:00.000-08:00

Money can't buy you love perhaps. Recent history, in fact, indicates it can't even guarantee a playoff appearance, let alone a championship. However as Congress' recent bailout of the banking sector demonstrates, cash certainly can assuage anxiety, restore confidence, and renew hope.

So for all us Yankee fans who recently watched the Red Sox and Rays, fortified by seemingly endless reserves of young talent, march through the playoffs and have wallowed in resentment, despair, and self-pity ever since-- well, have faith, and remember Scarlett O'Hara's credo. For tomorrow is indeed another day. This time, quite literally.

For tomorrow the Yankees can begin to offer contracts to free agents. Tomorrow, the Yankees can begin to leverage their financial might to compensate for a farm system, that while beginning to show the first signs of growth after a decade of neglect and plunder, will not yield the likes of a Dustin Pedroia, Kevin Youklis, or Jacoby Ellsbury; Evan Longoria, Carl Crawford, or BJ Upton for years to come.

No, it won't earn the Yankees many admirers in the industry or among the games' self-appointed moral guardians in the media. Before the Steinbrenners have spent so much as a penny, in fact, baseball's Reds have already launched their annual jeremiad about the gluttunous Yankee payroll and have accused the Bronx robber barons of cornering the market and destroying baseball's competitive integrity. The irony is how many of these same media hacks would impose on the Yankees a financial tax they themselves would bridle at paying. The New York Daily News, for example, recently quoted one of the most consistently strident and dogmatic advocates for a salary cap in baseball, The Million Dollar Mad Dog, Christopher Russo, as follows, "I voted for McCain. I think there is an element of people sitting on their fannies. 'Lets go tax the wealthy up and down to make sure the guy on Main Street can sleep until 10 o'clock in the morning.' That kind of thing... steered me to McCain." Let them all eat Yankee Franks, says the Mad Dog.

The truth is that in the NBA and NFL, salary caps, actually, enshrines an aritocracy of talent, crowning dynasties like the Spurs and Patriots and perpetuating losing franchises by preventing them from spending enough money to re-arm. This is why NFL and NBA teams, to improve, depend so heavily on their drafts.

Baseball, in contrast, more readily approximates the liberal democratic ideal. In many ways, in fact, it mirrors the U.S.'s own system of liberal welfare state capitalism. No law prohibits Microsoft, for example, from mustering its $21 billion in cash reserves to throttle and ravage would-be competitors. They just have to pay taxes. So too with the Yankees.

In 2005, Forbes reported that the Yankees earned $354 million in revenue, $77 million of which baseball exacted and redistributed to 16 small-market teams through revenue-sharing, another $34 million of which the Yankees paid in luxury taxes. (Steinbrenner's Tax Shelter, Forbes, 05/08/06) Together, the two levies constitute the equivalent of a 31% tax, about as high the 35% rate both Microsoft and Chris Russo probably paid last year.

Accordingly, the Yankees will have no reason to apologize for if in the forthcoming weeks they spend prodigious sums of money and sign multiple players from among, perhaps, the most talented free-agent class in baseball. After all, the Red Sox responded likewise after failing to qualify for the playoffs in 2006, going on a $210 million off-season spending spree that netted them Dice-K, J.D. Drew, and Julio Lugo. What's more, with the 2008 season's end, $80+ million in Yankees player contracts have expired which they now can re-allocate to address their most pressing needs. Onward, Cash.

WHOM TO SIGN AND WHY

PRIORITY #1: The Ace
That the Yankees foremost priority should be to marshal every last resource to sign CC Sabathia strikes me as so self-evident it's not worth arguing. Rare is it for a team to rectify the mistake they made one year the next.

The 2008 season, as such, could best be called Cashman's Folly. For it demonstrated the hubris of constructing a rotation in the New York crucible that hinges so greatly on the performance of rookie pitchers confined by innings caps. It's one thing to cultivate starting pitchers and to integrate them slowly into the rotation. Quite another, to bear the risk of injury and inconsistency that comes with assigning 40% of the rotation to two untested, under-25 pitcher with innings limitations to boot and still to expect the team to thrive and qualify for post-season. The risk only intensifies, in fact, when two 35+ starters comprise another 40%.

Apart then from the quality start a pitcher like Sabathia can offer every fifth day, he, in anchoring the rotation and providing 200+ innings, also alleviates the pressure on the starters who follow him. He would allow the Yankees, then, to exercise more patience with, and thereby assist in, the ongoing development of Joba Chamberlain or Phil Hughes, Ian Kennedy, Alfredo Aceves, or whomever else earns a Bronx audition in 2009.

Priority #2: The Three Hole
According to SI's John Heyman and other reporters privy to the Yankees thinking, the front-office's second priority is to sign one of the other two or three other premiere free-agent pitchers-- A.J. Burnett, Derek Lowe, or perhaps, Ben Sheets. With this decision, I admantly disagree.

Let's begin by assuming the Yankees sign Sabathia (if they cannot, then in this eventuality, I can't argue with signing Burnett or Lowe or both). Andy Pettite already has indicated he wishes to return and would accept a one-year deal to do so. Should the Yankees oblige Pettitte, then, they'd begin with a rotation of Sabathia, Wang, and Pettitte. I'll address the 4th and 5th spots below in Priority #3.

To my mind, the Yankees' lineup last year was almost as deficient as their starting rotation, if not more so. They scored 179 less runs than in 2007. Their on-base average declined from .366 to .344; their slugging percentage dropped from .463 to .427; their batting average with runners in scoring position fell from .293 to .261.

Nonetheless, the Yankees would compound the regression the lineup already has shown. That is, the Front-Office intends not to re-sign their 3rd and 5th hitters, Bobby Abreu and Jason Giambi, two of their lineup's most proficient hitters last year in two of the three statistical groups above which accrued a shortfall from the previous year -- on-base percentage and slugging. Only Alex Rodriguez exceeded Abreu and Giambi in OPS (on-base + slugging percentage). Giambi and Abreu also led the team in the number of pitches they saw per plate appearance, each with 4.3 P/PA.

Yes, Posada and Matsui may return next year, but relying on either player to recuperate fully at their advanced age, to reproduce their 2007 totals, and to stay healthy for the season's duration is as presumptuous and reckless as Cashman's decision last off-season to entrust 40% of the rotation to rookies. Perhaps, the Yankees can assume Posada and/or Matsui could fill the five hole and compensate for Giambi's loss. Neither however is a genuine 3 hole hitter even when fully realizing his potential.

The only two players available via free-agency who promise the Yankees sufficient production as three hitters in (i) their ability to get on base, (ii) work counts, and (iii) amass extra-base hits are Mark Teixiera, Manny Ramirez or Abreu himself. (It is impossible to project how Adam Dunn-- a career NL player, with a low average and high strike out totals and a questionable passion for the game-- would perform in New York. But each caveat presents its own risk.)

Ramirez is limited to LF or DH and will command a $100 million contract besides. He's the least desirable option as such. Teixiera and Abreu, to be sure, present risks as well. Teixiera is a younger than Abreu, a better hitter and fielder, but nonetheless will commit the Yankees to at least a seven year obligation, if not more. Abreu, on the other hand, only desires a 3-year contract and might even acquiesce to two years with a vesting option, if the Yankees offer it because he wants to return to New York. I concede his speed has diminished and he's lost some range in RF but he's not nearly as much a defensive liability as his critics insist. Nor for that matter does his anointed succesor, Xavier Nady, represent a dramatic improvement.

Re-signing Abreu has the added virtue of enabling the Yankees to play Nady at 1B or to trade him for first-baseman while Nady still has value. (Nady is a Boras client and will accompany Damon and Matsui on the free-agent market at next season' conclusion.) Alternatively, after re-signing Abreu, they Yankees could trade Matsui, freeing the DH position for Damon, Abreu, Nady, and Posada to rotate through, and could audition Juan Miranda at 1B or perhaps even sign Giambi for one-year.

Either way, with Brett Gardner expected to play CF in 2009, Jorge Posada returning from labrum surgery, Matsui suffering from chronically arthritic knees, Derek Jeter reverting to his free-swinging ways and his GDP numbers increasing annually, and A-Rod always prone to press, the Yankees need a sure-fire, prolific bat in the three hole almost as much as they do Sabathia. Only two free agents fit the bill, Teixiera and Abreu. The Yankees would err greatly in not signing one or the other.

Priority #3: The Innings-Eater

Another reason why a 3-hole hitter should take precedence to a second starter is cost efficiency. Mark Teixiera is a young elite talent and one of the best players in baseball at his position, and probably will remain so for the lion share of his contact. Abreu, similarly, joins Pujols and A-Rod as one of only three players in the game to amass 6 consecutive seasons of 100 RBI's. He also happens to be one of the game's most durable players as well, playing 150 games or more every year since he became a starter in 1998. Plate discipline, his great asset, what's more, is one of the more age-resistant player skills. The Yankees, accordingly, can expect to receive production roughly commensurate to their outlay by signing either.

The same cannot be said of AJ Burnett certainly, and perhaps not of Derek Lowe either. Burnett lives on the disabled list, having thrown 200 innings or more in only 3 of the last 7 seasons. (No Maas.org, cleverly, refers to him as the baseball market's equivalent to a sub-prime mortgage.) Lowe, on the other hand, while more durable, will turn 36 next year, wants a 3-4 year contract at $15+ million, despite not qualifying as one of the best pitchers in the game, and finally, hasn't pitched in the AL since 2004.

The Yankees would profit more accordingly from signing one or more less prestigious, second or third-tier pitchers who would cost them less and necessitate a shorter contractual commitment, but upon whom they can rely alone, or in tandem, to pitch 200 innings: John Garland, Paul Byrd, Randy Wolf, Mike Mussina (if for a year, two at most) or perhaps, some combination of one-year contracts for Brad Penny, Carl Pavano, and Eric Milton.

The Yankees rotation would then consist of Sabathia, Wang, Pettite, Innings-Eater, and Joba. Then as injuries mount and innings caps are reached, the organization could integrate Hughes, Aceves, Kennedy, Coke, Brackman, etc., as their performances and health warrant.

What the Yankees actually do is anybody's guess. The marketplace unfolds according to a logic of its own that can upend even the best laid plans. Count on it, for this reason, to dictate one or more choices the Front-Office otherwise wouldn't make.

Still, should the Yankees somehow achieve a reasonable facsimile of the three priorities above, I'm confidence they'll resume their role as perennial contender in the AL East.