This ship has been off course for three seasons, not because of a lack of resources, but because of a lack of judgment. The Mets began the year with a payroll of about $120 million, which is second only to the Yankees' roughly $180 million. They have nothing to show for it but a clubhouse of aging stars with big names, big contracts and big injuries. It's all Steve Phillips's fault.
He sold Wilpon on the notion that you had to win with big names in New York, that the fans weren't patient enough to wait for rebuilding, that you had to do it now. Forget the farm system.
Rhoden suggests that Giants GM Brian Sabean, Braves GM John Schuerholz and Expos GM (and former Met assistant GM) Omar Minaya would be the best choices to replace Phillips, but obviously, all three are currently employed. Jim Duquette, cousin of the Boston Red Sox General Pariah Dan Duquette, was named the interim GM until the end of the season and will be a candidate for the permanent job, as if any high-level New York sports executive can consider his job "permanent."
New Kid on the Blog: The Minnesota Twins are already well-represented in the blogosphere by a couple of great pages, John Bonnes' The Twins Geek and Aaron Gleeman's Baseball Blog. Now comes a new blog from another Twins fan called Seth Speaks. Recent topics include the playing careers of the Twins coaches and manager (ahem), an evaluation of Latroy Hawkins' career, and the callup of Justin Morneau. Good luck, Seth.
The Yanks became a part of baseball history in a most undignifed manner on Wednesday night. Not only did they have a no-hitter pitched against them, they had a no-hitter pitched against them by a sextet of Houston Astros hurlers. While four pitchers had combined on a no-hitter before (twice, actually), no team had ever used so many in a no-no. The Astros' situation came about when starter Roy Oswalt pulled up lame with a groin injury two pitches into the second inning. Manager Jimy Williams deftly scotch-taped his way through the ballgame until he could get to his two relief aces, Octavio Dotel and Billy Wagner, to close the deal.
I saw the second half of the ballgame, but I have to admit I was mostly half-watching. I had dinner on Wednesday night with Greg Spira of Baseball Prospectus, and afterwards we went to a bar to watch the Yankee game and shoot the breeze. I took him to Manitoba's, an East Village bar owned by Handsome Dick Manitoba, the former lead singer of the '70s New York punk band the Dictators. Handsome Dick (real name Richard Blum) is a big Yanks fan and the bar's a decent place to watch a ballgame if you don't mind closed-captioning and a punk-heavy jukebox. So the Dead Boys classic "Sonic Reducer" blared while the 'Stros pitchers reduced the Yankee bats to splinters, the Yankee lineup underwent its own "Personality Crisis" in tandem with the New York Dolls chestnut, and Joe Torre looked like he wanna be sedated.
We joined the game right as Lance Berkman made his diving catch on Alfonso Soriano's blooper to end the fifth. At that point the score was 4-0, but that's all we knew. It wasn't until the end of the sixth that I saw a shot of the scoreboard and that trio of zeroes in the Yankee R H E columns. That piqued our interest. We started talked no-hitters. Greg's been to Jose Jiminez's in Arizona in 1999, along with an entire SABR convention. The closest I've come was Bartolo Colon taking one into the eighth against the Yanks on September 18, 2000. Greg asked if I had been rooting for Colon at that point, to which I replied that I would have if the no-no had survived until the ninth inning. That was in the midst of that infamous Yankee slide at the end of the 2000 season, and I wasn't in any mood for concessions then.
But it's not as though I'd never seen a no-no. I've watched two in full (Nolan Ryan's fifth, in 1981, against the Dodgers -- now there was a guy who could turn me against my own team -- and Jack Morris' 1984 gem agains the White Sox) and seen the last few innings of several (Kevin Gross and Bud Smith come to mind). I missed both David Wells' and David Cone's perfectos for various reasons, and came one agonizing strike away when Mike Mussina nearly pulled it off.
When the Astros' Brad Lidge got through the Yanks in the seventh, I smelled toast. They were about to face the best setup man in the game in Dotel, a fireballer who strikes out 1.5 batters per inning pitched, followed by Wagner, who... well, ditto. The two lived up to their billing. Thanks to a passed ball on a third strike that allowed Soriano to reach first, Dotel actually tied the major leauge record with four strikeouts in one inning. Wagner struck out the first two batters in the ninth, giving the Yanks an ignominious eight strikeouts in a row, tying an AL record. Hideki Matsui mercifully ended both that string and the game by doing what he apparently does best, grounding out.
I have to admit I wasn't even finicky this time. I figure to see the Yanks lose about 60 times this year, and this was already going to be one of them. The no-no would be a neat little catch, but it might also serve the larger purpose of showing the Yanks that they'd reached the nadir of their season.
Joe Torre certainly treated it that way, reading the Yanks the riot act. According to the Times:
Manager Joe Torre kept the clubhouse closed for several minutes and held a meeting in which players said he called the game embarrassing. Torre, bothered by how the Yankees played, looked and acted, told them this sort of play would not be tolerated.
"Whatever kind of history it was, it was terrible," Torre said. "It was one of the worst games I've ever been involved with."
Echoes of Tommy Lasorda I've-never-been-so-sick take on Reggie Jackson's 3-homer World Series game in 1977. Elsewhere, phrases like "embarassment," "totally inexcusable," and "rock bottom" were used by players and management. Not suprisingly, the Steinbrenner Watch is on Full Alert in all of the New York area papers today, with hitting coach Rick Down assumed to be the one wearing the tightest noose. It must be a great time to be a Yankee hater.
Against this backdrop, I headed to Yankee Stadium on Thursday afternoon, fairly certain that the sequel would have a different ending than the night before. After all, only once in baseball history have two no-hitters been thrown in the same park on back-to-back days. I was joined by Greg, the second ballgame we've taken in together this past week (we went to last Friday's Mets-Mariners ballgame at Shea, along with Sean Forman of Baseball-Reference and frequent Baseball Primer poster David Nieporent -- an experience I haven't had much chance to write about).
I arrived a bit late due to subway difficulties, and thus missed the Astros scoring two runs off of David Wells in the top of the first. Greg filled me in with a flawless play-by-play, rescuing my scorecard from oblivion. The Yanks got a run back in the bottom of the inning against Jeriome Robertson, a rookie lefty I'd never seen before. Soriano led off the first with a walk (something he does fewer times a year than hit a leadoff homer, I'll wager) and then Derek Jeter beat out a bunt to third, the newly-annointed captain getting the monkey off of the Yanks' back in short order. Sori ended up scoring on a sac fly by cleanup hitter (and Torre pet) Todd Zeile. Gulp.
Wells settled down, and the Yanks took a lead in the fourth. Raul Mondesi laced a ground-rule double down the leftfield line and over the wall, and Hideki Matsui followed with a sharp RBI single to right. A John Flaherty single took Godzilla to third, where he scored from on a sac fly by Juan Rivera.
The Astro hitters kept finding holes, racking up six hits through five innings. But some timely defense, especially by Zeile, kept the Yanks in front. Zeile made good plays on a couple of slow rollers and started an inning-ending 5-4-3 DP on Jeff Bagwell in the fifth. My presence seems to be bringing out the best in him.
But in the sixth, Wells ran out of whatever combination of luck and gas had carried him through the first five frames. Three straight singles loaded the bases with none out, and Brian (the speedy one, right?) Hunter followed with a sac fly (the fourth of the ballgame). Number nine hitter and defensive specialist Adam Everett nearly took Wells over the wall, then socked a ground-rule double that scored two, at which point nearly 40,000 Yankee fans sighed in unison, "Uh-oh, here we go again." During this May-June swoon, one stat that hasn't been overlooked is that the Yanks had yet to come from behind to win a ballgame in which they'd trailed after six innings.
The team seemed to be feeling that pressure in the bottom of the inning. With one out, Bubba Trammell singled, and Flaherty ripped a double into the left-center gap. With the Astro outfielders having displayed woefully off-line throws thus far, third base coach Willie Randolph was licking his chops as he waved Trammell around to score. This time the Astros made a perfect relay play, Berkman to 3B Morgan Ensberg to catcher Greg Zaun, and Bubba was lunch.
Jimy Williams chose the occasion to pull Robertson in favor of Kris Sarloos, one of the previous night's heroes. Juan Rivera worked a full count off of Sarloos and then picked up Flaherty on a single to left, and the Yanks cut the Astro lead to 5-4. They tied the game in the next inning after Berkman dove and missed a Jason Giambi bloop for a double, and Mondesi lined a two-out single to right. The clutch hitting animated the crowd considerably, and there was a palpable sense of we're-gonna-win-this-one relief in the air.
Antonio Osuna had come on in relief of Wells after six; the REAL Osuna , not the impersonator who bore a rather strong resemblance to Juan Acevedo on Tuesday night. Osuna shut down Houston in the seventh and eighth, allowing only one hit.
Facing Octavio Dotel, Hideki Matsui led off the Yankee eighth. In the hole 0-2, he hit a fast grounder right down the line to Bagwell, who got the ball just past the bag, but apparently not so well. E-3. Pinch-hitter Ruben Sierra stroked a single as I badmouthed him, and then pinch-hitter Jorge Posada battled back from 0-2 to draw a walk, loading the bases with none out. Rivera popped out, but Soriano dunked one into rightfield, scoring a run. Dotel finally settled down and struck out Jeter and Giambi for a grim reminder of the previous evening's affairs.
But the Yanks had the lead going into the ninth, so "Enter Sandman." Mo Rivera rung up Craig Biggio to start the 9th, and ended up closing the door on the Astros, just like he's supposed to, giving the Yanks their first late-inning come-from-behind victory of the season.
Not to mention their third straight in my presence. If George won't spring for my limo, I figure the Yankee coaches might chip in.
Of course, in the department of Being Careful What You Wish For, when Antonio Osuna entered last night's ballgame against Houston I wrote "I don't care what happens from this point forward, I'm just glad Juan Acevedo is gone." Osuna's first pitch ended up about 400 feet away in Monument Park, prompting me and a few others in Game Chatter to wonder whether Acevedo was really gone ("I think Acevedo killed Osuna and put his body in the river. Now he's pretending he's Osuna," was the best guess). Still, it was only a solo shot, and the Yanks won the ballgame 5-3.
Meanwhile fairly hefty but interesting debate over Acevedo's "merits" sprung up over at Baseball Primer, with a few heavy-duty statheads singing "The Ballad of Small Sample Sizes" and "The Regression to the Mean Song" to us high-blood-pressured, myopic Yankee fans. Their main point was that Acevedo's been more or less average for the past three years and that sooner or later he'd return to being more or less average again, and that we shouldn't get all fahitched about 23 lousy innings. Meanwhile we Yank fans argued that it was senseless for the Yanks to waste their time waiting for Acevedo's performance to normalize when they had access to plenty of other relievers on the farm and in the free talent pool, including Jason Anderson and Al Reyes, both of whom they recalled after whacking Juan.
Larry Mahnken of the Replacement Level Yankee Weblog has done a better job summarizing some of the arguments that broke out on that thread, and he's got a few other interesting tidbits and smart-assed comments as well. If your'e a Yank fan, you should be reading him.
One thing I'm extremely grateful that never got tossed was my baseball mitt, a Rawlings RBG80 Greg Luzinski model that dates back to my days in Little League. It's funny because not only was Luzinski a horrible fielder ("worst outfielder I ever saw, bar none" says Bill James), but he'd also graduated to his natural position as a DH by the time I was playing. Fortunately, I was at least competent with the leather, unlike the Bull (who could make up for his shortcomings with the long ball, unlike yours truly). I retrieved that mitt about five years ago, and regularly toss the pea around with friends (even my girlfriend gets into the act -- she's got a great arm). But that old glove is really starting to show some wear, especially on the inside, where moisture has led to cracking. Still, I'm horrified at the thought of having to replace it, because of how long it would take to break in a new one and because this thing still fits like, um, a glove.
That kind of relationship with a glove is something nearly everybody who's played the game at any level can relate (everybody except Edgar Martinez, perhaps), which is why it's surprising it's taken so long for somebody to do a book about them. My mom called my attention to Noah Liberman's Glove Affairs: The Romance, History, and Tradition of the Baseball Glove via this review in the Salt Lake Tribune. I haven't seen the book yet, so I'll let the linked review do the talking. But I'll be looking for Glove Affairs the next time I'm in the bookstore.
First up is Charles P. Pierce of Slate, who asks, "Is this man a danger to your children?":
Whenever anybody in the modern communications media starts vaguely maundering about The Childrenwhether it's Weepin' Joe Lieberman talking about rap music, or Cokie Roberts wondering how she's going to explain Oval Office blowjobs to her daughter, or sportswriters worrying about the dearth of good role modelsit is time to turn off the set and throw the remote control to the dog. My lord, on Tuesday morning, a full week after the incident happened, Jay Mariotti in the Chicago Sun-Times was still gathering the shattered young ones under his wing. "Children deserve to know what he did and why it's wrong," Mariotti thundered, perhaps mindful of the generation we lost to drugs and crime because of society's tolerance for Gaylord Perry.
Speaking of Mariotti, an otherwise anonymous Primer poster offered a parody, "Sammy Sosa Is a Fraud Who Poops His Pants," that's so dead-on that it makes you wonder how many of the nation's sportswriters churn this kind of stuff out while napping.
Also worth a grin is John Levesque of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, who says that Sammy was merely taking up the cause of the world's cork farmers:
He says he uses the corked bat in batting practice to put on a show for fans, and that he used it an actual game completely by mistake.
I believe him because, well, the whole premise of this column would be shot if I didn't. By using a corked bat in practice, Sosa is telling the struggling cork growers of Spain, Portugal, Algeria, Morocco, Italy, France and Tunisia: "I'm with you guys. Try to stay afloat."
As a popular role model, he's also telling America's kids it's OK to buy a bulletin board, or to ask their parents to install cork flooring in the rec room.
One of my friends, warning that the use of synthetic wine corks is on the rise (dear God, NOOOOO!), asked with a wink, "Won't somebody think of the cork-growers' children?"
The Cubs were not the first team to be owned by a large corporation (even the Yankees spent some time owned by CBS before Steinbrenner rescued them), but their purchase by TribCo certainly foreshadowed the current wave of corporate ownership. Tribune looked at the Cubs as cheap content for their WGN TV station, which was showing up on cable systems all over the country. They talked up the team on WGN Radio and in the pages of the Chicago Tribune. With the exception of the hiring of Dallas Green, however, they did very little to improve the team.
They did lots of things to improve the amount of money the team brought in, though, like installing lights and skyboxes. After the '84 division title, they ended the decades-old practice of selling bleacher seats on the day of the game... And yet, not much of this extra money ended up on the field. Or, when it did, it went to people like Larry Bowa and Dave Smith, and (famously) not to people like Greg Maddux.
On the Yankee front:
Steinbrenner has a lot of money. TribCo has as much money as Steinbrenner, if not more. So does Fox, and Peter Angelos, and look how well their teams have done. Steinbrenner not only has the money, he isn't afraid to spend it, and he is smart enough to hire smart people to run his team. For some reason, those last two things get lost when The End of Baseball As We Know It gets discussed.
Steinbrenner wants to win, and he does what it takes to do so. Plus, he brings all the excitement of a loaded pistol with a hair trigger being passed around by a bunch of speed freaks... But I'd gladly deal with all that uncertainty and day-to-day craziness if it meant I have the privilege of following a team that gave itself every opportunity to win.
While it's tempting to tell Christian, "Be careful what you wish for," I do think he's hit the nail on the head. Baseball needs more owners like Steinbrenner, not fewer, and by that I don't mean a guy who's going to make a horse's ass out of himself every time something goes wrong, I mean a guy who cares more about his ballclub winning than he does about petty issues like revenue sharing. Wouldn't you, Twins-Orioles-Brewers-Royals-Pirates fans, rather have as an owner a guy who'd knock his own grandmother on her ass in order to gain an advantage than a guy who'd pocket revenue-sharing money while complaining about having to trade a star on the verge of free-agency because he "can't afford" him and fielding a team which might struggle to win 60 games? Yes, the Twins are winning right now, and perhaps the Royals have finally turned a corner. But the bottom line is that the bottom line depends on winning: build a winner and fans will show up, and plenty of money will follow.
Speaking of building a winner, the Dodger fan in me is very excited about the news that Tampa Bay Buccaneers owner Malcolm Glazer is close to buying the Dodgers. According to the Los Angeles Daily News:
Malcolm Glazer is finalizing his agreement to purchase the Dodgers from Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., and people with knowledge of the negotiations believe the deal will get done by the end of the week... The purchase price is believed to be in the $375 million range, but even if an agreement is reached this week, it could be months before the ownership officially changes hands. Major League Baseball previously said it wouldn't schedule a special owner's meeting before one in mid-August.
I've cringed before at some of the Dodgers' suitors. When Dave Checketts made a bid earlier this spring, I wrote, "I want my Dodgers back, but I don't want Dave Checketts anywhere near them. I'll take my chances with the next S.O.B. who comes along instead."
I have yet to read anything saying that Glazer is an S.O.B., but even if he is, that shiny Lombardi Trophy he's holding as the owner of the team who won the Super Bowl is good enough for me. Anybody who can turn the Buccaneers into champions ought to be able to restore some of the winning mojo to the Dodgers. I'm sold, and I hope the Dodgers will be soon enough.
