"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.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Monday, March 30, 2009
BOSS TURTLENECK: THE LAST YANKEE KING
REVIEW:
The Boss: The Poor Little Rich Boy Who Built The Yankee Empire
by Peter Golenbock
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Boss: The Poor Little Rich Boy Who Built The Yankee Empire
by Peter Golenbock
I.
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.
(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.
Friday, March 6, 2009
DID GOD SMITE A-ROD?
"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.
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.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
THE TRIAL OF ALEX R.
"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.
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.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
WHAT SHOULD HIS SUFFERANCE BE?
“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.
"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.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
THE TRIBE OF RUTH, GEHRIG, AND DIMAGGIO: A FAN'S NOTES
(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.
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.
Thursday, December 4, 2008
CASH AND BURN; RINSE AND REPEAT
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.
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.
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