THE CANO YOU DON'T KNOW

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FREE WANG; CURB CASHMAN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DICE-K v. WANG: A STUDY IN CONTRASTS

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

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

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

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

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

THE LIE OF NECESSITY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Total = 6.0 IPs, 34.50 ERA, 4.83 WHIP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wang sinker - 90.0 mph; fb-- 92.3 mph

Webb sinker - 88.9mph; fb-- 88.5 mph

Lowe sinker - 89.7 mph; fb-- 89.2 mph

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

INVESTIGATING THE INVESTIGATORS: Ms. Roberts' Profession

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

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

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

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

Fallow, recently, filed this report.

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MISS HAVISHAM'S PROFESSION
They did, indeed.

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

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

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

“When does the store open?” I asked.

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

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

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

P. and company erupted in laughter.

“Do you guys know when the store opens?”

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

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

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

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

I nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Don’t you get it: I AM SELENA!!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SELENA ROBERTS' POISON PEN: AN INOCULATION

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

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

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

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

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

Selena says. Enquiring minds want to know.

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

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

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

DUKE: A PRIMER IN SELENA’S SPLENETICS

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

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

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

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

She writes,

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE ASSASSINATION OF A “PROM KING"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE MANY LIES” ABOUT ALEX RODRIGUEZ: AN OMEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE CASTLE ON RIVER AVENUE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PART II.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BOSS TURTLENECK: THE LAST YANKEE KING

REVIEW:
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.