I suppose I ought to tear myself away from reading my brand-new copy of The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract for long enough to jot down some thoughts about the World Series before it actually starts, especially given that the team I spend so much time following (and writing about) is one of the participants. But not before I pause to recommend that any baseball fan who spends significant time thinking about the game should avail themselves of a copy of this 1000-page masterwork. As somebody whose own view of baseball was shaped by James' work in the eighties, and who still gets great mileage from that work (the 1985 version of the Historical Abstract is still close at hand and often referred to in my household), I am excited to see the developments in his analytic approach. I look forward to exploring the book in detail in the very near future and sharing my thoughts on it. I think it promises to revolutionize how we view certain aspects of the game and answer some of its Really Big Questions. But I'll get to that another time...
Now then, onto the World Series, or the Buck Showalter Alumni Classic (Showalter is the immediate predecessor of both managers, having been fired by the Yanks before Joe Torre took over the team in the winter of 1995, and by the Diamondbacks after last year in favor of Bob Brenly). The past three days have been an opportunity for me to catch my breath after two solid weeks of exhilirating baseball. I have long held the first weekend of the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament to be the most thrilling concentration of sporting action in all of this great land. This year's baseball postseason, up to this point, has been as heart-stopping as several of those weekends played consecutively, especially if you are a Yankees fan, which I am. Their sustained comeback against the Oakland A's was remarkable, and their upset of the mighty Mariner juggernaut was even more so, even to somebody who, like me, still had every confidence that the Yankees could win.
I don't mean to be smug here. And I don't want anybody reading this who's NOT a Yankees fan to get the idea that we Yankees fans take this for granted. Every year of this dyansty has brought new challenges, and each of their wins has felt like a completely different task from the one before it. The 1998 team had the pressure of validating their 114-win season as a motivator (see Mariners, Recently Departed). The 1999 team, more of a human-interest drama, had to overcome several brushes with mortality--Joe Torre's prostate cancer, Darryl Strawberry's colon cancer, the deaths of three players' fathers, including Paul O'Neill's on the day of the final World Series game--along with the usual pressure to repeat as champions. The 2000 team flopped historically down the stretch, nearly got waxed by the upstart A's, then managed to Turn It On and peak at exactly the right time. This year's run, in the aftermath of September 11, has taken on a symbolic significance to the city of New York that is unlike any other run I've ever witnessed in sports. I've been exhausted by it, at times, but I'm a damn long way from being tired of it.
For all of the Yankees surprising success in the first two rounds of the playoffs, it's very clear to me that facing the Arizona Diamondbacks in the World Series is a completely different type of challenge from those they've conquered. That's primarily due to the presence of two of the best and most dominating pitchers in baseball, Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling. While both the A's and the Mariners threw some very good pitchers at the Yanks, none of them are as overpowering as the Snakes' duo, and none of them are as experienced, either. Both Schilling and Johnson have long histories of pitching in big games to call upon, a significant advantage over the Tim Hudsons and Freddie Garcias at this time of year. Schilling carried the 1993 Phillies on his back through a very competitive World Series against the Toronto Blue Jays. Johnson, who beat the Yanks twice (once out of the bullpen) in the 1995 AL Divisional Series, has had some hard luck in his postseason career, but he's unlikely to wilt beneath the harsh glare of the World Series spotlight.
For a franchise which has been in existence only four seasons, the Diamondbacks have a team which can go toe-to-toe in the Grizzled Veteran sweepstakes; statistically speaking, they're the oldest team in the bigs, with an average age of 31.9 for hitters and 30.9 for pitchers (the Yanks are 30.9 and 30.8, slightly behind both the Snakes and the Mariners' 31.3 and 30.8). Matt Williams, Steve Finley, and NLCS MVP Craig Counsell have all played in the World Series, as have pitchers Schilling and Brian Anderson (the surprise Game 3 starter despite his 4-9, 5.20 ERA season)--not a ton of players who've been there before, but enough of a steadying influence on those who haven't.
Arizona's a very good team all around. Their offense was the third best in the league, scoring 5.05 runs per game, albeit in a hitters' park. Luis Gonzales is the big bopper, with 57 home runs (adherents to the Curse of the Balboni theory, which holds that no team has won the World Series with a player who more than 36 home runs since Balboni's KC Royals in 1985, please take note). Reggie Sanders has good power, and the team has nine players who reached double digits in home runs. The D-Backs get on base--their .341 OBP was 14 points higher than the league average, thanks particularly to Gonzales (.429), but also first baseman Mark Grace (.386) and second baseman Counsell (.359). They have a very strong bench, which will give then an advantage when they get to add a designated hitter (Erubiel Durazo, who should be a regular and is such a darling of statheads that "Free Erubiel Durazo" has become a rallying cry, will likely see most of the ABs here) or have to pinch-hit--Greg Colbrunn is one of the best in that department. Add Danny Bautista, Jay Bell, and David Delucci to the mix, and you've got plenty of options for manager Bob Brenly in the late innings.
Their pitching, on the strength of their two aces, was second in the league in ERA, and led the league in fewest baserunners per nine innings. But their starters beyond those two are question marks. Anderson and Miguel Battista are scheduled to get three starts between them--a controversial move, given that Brenly could have ordered his rotation such that one of his horses could pitch a Game 7 and the two could combine to start five of the seven games. Their bullpen features some real warhorses--Mike Morgan, Bobby Witt, and Greg Swindell average 19 years apiece in the bigs, with a combined record of 405-462 (I didn't say they were good, necessarily)--the Kingsford Trio, as my pal Nick refers to them. Closer Byung-Hyun Kim is solid, but he's no Mariano Rivera, and here the Yanks appear to have a big edge.
Arizona's defense made the fewest errors of any team in the league, and their D, from what I've seen in the postseason, has been stellar. Counsell, shortstop Tony Womack, and third baseman Matt Willaims have all made some great plays lately. Steve Finley is a four-time Gold Glove winner in centerfield. I don't think the D-backs will self-destruct the way the A's, especially, did in the critical moments of a series when the Yanks applied the pressure.
Whether we're talking about Arizona or the Yankees, it all comes back to Good Pitching beating Good Hitting. Both teams have the benefit of aligning their rotations for the series. The Yanks have a foursome as battle-tested as anybody, with their top starter, Mike Mussina, opposing Schilling in Game 1 on Saturday, and Andy Pettitte, MVP of the ALCS, countering Randy Johnson on Sunday. Roger Clemens, clearly stronger in the ALCS than the previous series, will have had over a week between starts to recharge his ailing body sufficiently. Given that Schilling and Johnson are pitching twice for the Snakes, the Yanks will have to beat one of them at least once in order to take the series. I think they can do that, because I think their primary asset of being able to outlast even the best pitchers will come into play. I also think that the thoroughness of Yankee scouting will have found some small chinks in those pitchers' armor. Look for the revitalized Chuck Knoblauch to set the tone at the top of the order with long at-bats. Look for Randy Velarde, with a .452 career average against the Big Unit, to start at either third base or first base in Game 2. And even though Paul O'Neill is slated to be on the bench in both games, don't think that Torre doesn't remember his 10-pitch at bat against Armando Benitez in Game 1 of last year's Series. He'll likely get a key late-inning at bat somewhere.
These Yanks have beaten the likes of Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, John Smoltz, Kevin Brown, Mike Hampton, and Al Leiter in winning four of the last five World Series. My money says they can get through to the Snakes' best enough to win this one. It won't be easy, by any stretch, but I'm taking the Yanks in six.
I finally managed to find the time to vote in the just-completed Internet Baseball Awards and wanted to put my ballot on record. I did it very quickly, though I'd given a fair amount of consideration to each award in the recent weeks. I'll admit that postseason peformance may have seeped into one or two of these, despite the fact that it's not supposed to (the real votes are done before the end of the regular season to insure this). Anyway...
NL MVP: 1. Barry Bonds 2. Sammy Sosa 3. Luis Gonzalez. 4. Albert Pujols 5. Rich Aurilia 6. Chipper Jones 7. Shawn Green 8. Paul LoDuca 9. Lance Berkman 10. Ryan Klesko. Comment: While I may have been swayed against him at earlier points in the season, Bond's history-making, finally put in perspective, was waaaay too much to ignore.
AL MVP: 1. Jason Giambi 2. Alex Rodriguez 3. Brett Boone 4. Roberto Alomar 5. Derek Jeter 6. Ichiro Suzuki 7. Jim Thome 8. Manny Ramirez 9. Bernie Williams 10. Jorge Posada. Comment: Giambi and A-Rod are pretty much in a dead heat offensively. A-Rod gets more points for his defense. My vote for Giambi was definitely swayed by his role in leading the A's back from the depths of an 8-18 start to become the hottest team in baseball down the stretch. Boone's monster season, though likely a fluke, was too good to ignore. Ichiro definitely made an impact and deserved to be among the top 10, but I think his hype outweighed his numbers. The same can always be said about Derek Jeter, but I watch him play every day and despite his lousy defense (especially the first half of the year), he continues to amaze me.
NL Cy Young: 1. Randy Johnson 2. Curt Schilling 3. Matt Morris 4. Greg Maddux 5. Wade Miller. Comment: This one was easy. As good as Schilling has been, Johnson was better--an ERA half a run lower, more strikeouts, fewer baserunners, fewer home runs. Morris was a strong third.
AL Cy Young: 1. Freddy Garcia 2. Mike Mussina 3. Roger Clemens 4. Tim Hudson 5. Mark Mulder. Comment: Much less clear cut than the NL. Clemens was impressive for going 20-1, but he lost twice to the Devil Rays at the end, and his ERA started to inflate. Mike Mussina, on the other hand, got better as the season went on, and his September showing put him right in the mix. The fine trio of A's pitchers was impossible to ignore, and I'm not even sure I voted for the right ones. Jamie Moyer, Joe Mays, and Mark Buehrle deserved consideration as well. In the end, Garcia's low ERA and high winning percentage won out.
NL Rookie of the Year: 1. Albert Pujols 2. Roy Oswalt 3. Adam Dunn. Comment: Pujols had an amazing season, hitting .329 with 37 HR, 130 RBI and an OPS of 1013. Oswalt was fantastic as well, 14-3 with a 2.73 ERA despite the Enron Field factor. Dunn looks like he's going to be a good one.
AL Rookie of the Year: 1. Ichiro Suzuki 2. Alfonso Soriano 3. C.C. Sabathia. Comment: I don't like the rule that gives the experienced Japanese players eligibility--this guy won eight batting titles in his career already--but the precedent has been in place for a long time, and it's impossible to deny his impact. Soriano showed vast improvement as the season wore on--who could have forseen him going from a walkless wonder to drawing key bases on balls in both playoff series thus far? In a normal year, I'd have taken him. Sabathia looks to be a good one if he cuts down his walks. The Angels' David Eckstein probably deserved a mention as well.
NL Manager of the Year: 1. Bob Brenly 2. Jim Tracy 3. Tony LaRussa. Comment: Probably swayed by the postseason. I don't like Brenly, not after his tantrum over the bunt that broke up Schilling's perfect game. But it's tough to deny what he's accomplished in his first season as a manager, taking the well-aged D-Backs into the World Series. Tracy kept the ailing Dodgers in the race for much longer than he had any right to, but batting Tom Goodwin or Marquis Grissom in the leadoff spot when your team is starving for runs is just plain stupid. Tony LaRussa is here because I couldn't bring myself to vote for the red-assed Larry Bowa, who kept the Phils in it right to the final week. I can probably find a reason to vote against every single NL manager, now that I think about it.
AL Manager of the Year: 1. Lou Piniella 2. Art Howe 3. Jimy Williams. Comment: Much more palatable and competitive lot than the NL. Piniella deserves a hell of a lot of credit for the Mariners' season, and though they came up short, he showed a lot of class. Howe never let his team quit; despite his bulletin-board fodder for the Yanks, I've always liked him as a manager. Jimy Williams had the Red Sox 12 games above .500 for no good reason when Dan Duquette fired him; the Red Sox went straight down the shithole thanks to that maneuver, which just goes to show how good a job Jimy was doing. Joe Torre continues to amaze me with his calm ability to keep the Yanks focused on the things that matter.
Those were my votes. I'll dole out some awards of my own, including the coveted Futility Infielder of the Year Award, in the coming weeks.
The Yanks' just-completed AL Championship Series with the Mariners found my friends and I searching for new combinations of the right stuff. At the same time, we were on the lookout for objects and habits to act as scapegoats. On Saturday, my girlfriend innocently bought a bag of unsalted peanuts from the downstairs deli. When all hell broke loose and the Mariners exploded for nine runs over the next two innings, I began having my doubts about the peanuts. And when the score went from 9-2 to 14-3 after we turned the game off, I knew that the peanuts, not the suddenly awakened Mariner bats, were the cause of the Yanks' defeat. So the nuts went. My poor, puzzled girlfriend, a rookie in our October gatherings, endured a very curt explanation about the hard facts of autumn in relation to her chosen snack. Fortunately, she understood.
Sometimes, thinkgs get silly. On Sunday night, amid the world's sloppiest pitching duel ever, between Roger Clemens and Paul Abbott, Nick reached an absurd and spectacular level of desperation. He spent two innings wearing a black plastic bag (the very same one from my just-procured Rally Beer, actually) tied around his head as an ad-hoc rally cap. When that didn't work, he resorted--I shit you not--to an attempted headstand which lasted all of one minute. Skeptics may guffaw (I know several of us in the apartment did so). But it's worth noting that the next time the batter for whom Nick stood on his head, Bernie Williams, came to bat, Williams tied the game with a solo home run. Coincidence? I think not. Even my brother, decidely not a Yankees fan, refused to cast aspersion on such a ridiculous display: "You gotta do what you gotta do," he said.
In the afterglow of Alfonso Soriano's game-winning home run on Sunday night, I issued a decree that had as much to do with the Yanks closing out the series the next night as did Lou Piniella's choice of starting pitchers. With the chance of victory imminent, tomorrow night's dinner, I announced, would be grilled pork chops from our favorite Vietnamese takeout joint, New Saigon. Laugh all you want, but the pork chops have history on their side. Last year, during the first-round series against Oakland, with the Yanks having lost Game 1, we ordered the very same pork chops and were rewarded with a 4-0 shutout, courtesy of Andy Pettitte and Mariano Rivera. When that series came back to a do-or-die Game 5, the Yanks' starting pitcher and our choice of meals were the same. The Yanks scored six runs in the first inning, and though Pettitte faltered in the fourth, the Yankee bullpen, inspired by our choice of cuisine, held off the A's to take the series.
When an ailing Roger Clemens took the mound for Game 5 in this year's series with Oakland, we knew the Yanks would need all the help they could get. Once again, pork chops were in order. End result? Yanks win. So it made sense that we would again be dining on New Saigon's finest grilled meats when the appropriate time presented itself, and in the jubilation of Sunday night, Monday's menu seemed obvious. It worked yet again, as the Yanks trounced the Mariners 9-3 to take the series, four games to one.
Now, I'm sure some of you out there are snickering. Why would someone (like myself, and to some extent my friends as well) who spends so much time trying to rationally analyze a baseball game resort to such superstitions? There's no simple answer. The human tendency to resort to myth and superstition in the face of powers we don't understand is older than organized religion, so ten thousand years of human culture obviously plays a part. As does the near-interminable length of playoff games--with thirty-second pauses every time Chuck Knoblauch steps out of the box to undo and redo the velcro on his batting gloves, we have plenty of time to tend to our oral and manual fixations. And occasionally, like with Nick's headstands, those of us who spend so many tense hours huddled together throughout these games simply need something to break the tension and get us laughing again, reminding us that this is all supposed to be FUN.
Even the Boss, Yankee owner George Steinbrenner, gets into the act. During Sunday's game. Steinbrenner excused himself from the company of Reggie Jackson, Mr. October himself, to return to his lucky spot, where he was standing when Reggie hit three home runs against the Dodgers in the 1977 World Series. The results--Williams' and Soriano's home runs--speak for themselves. And that's not even exploring the superstition behind Steinbrenner's chosen attire of turtleneck and blazer for such affairs.
The Yankees recent playoff success, to some extent, defies rational analysis anyway. Facing two teams which were supposedly superior on paper--the brash A's with their 102 wins, and the Seattle Mariners with their record-setting 116 wins--the Yanks dismantled their opposition with conviction, and the aid of little extra mojo as well. Sojo Mojo, to be exact--what else could explain the reason for Joe Torre including the veteran futility infielder Luis Sojo on his postseason roster at the expense of an extra pinch-hitter like Nick Johnson. Opposing managers Art Howe and Lou Piniella made bold predictions of Yankee doom, but it was Sojo's brash prediction of Yankee victory that held up (an aside: my favorite scene from the Seattle series was Sojo and fellow Yankee subs Clay Bellinger, Enrique Wilson, and Shane Spencer singing along to "Y.M.C.A"--the song played over the P.A. at Yankee Stadium during the fifth inning of Game 5 while the grounds crew raked the infield--complete with hand gestures. Priceless).
Twenty-three seasons of watching baseball have proven to me that even with fancy formulas and expert analyses at hand, we simply can't explain everything that happens on the baseball diamond. Some of it--Mariano Rivera's postseason prowess, Tony Battista's batting stance, Leo Mazzone's rocking motion on the Atlanta Braves' bench, and the perpetual presence of not one but two pathologically mediocre players named Brian Hunter, for example--simply defies both logic and random chance. There's more between home plate and deepest centerfield than is dreamt of in our philosophies. Drama, magic, clutch performance. And the seeds.
