SEAT LICENSE RENEWALS It's almost spring
when a young man's thoughts turn to... those expensive
seat licenses. An online cash advance can help relieve the anxiety.
Last year, we were about four rows from Newark up in section 413 just beyond the infield down the right field line:
This year, we're in the front row of section 422, much closer to the plate:
These are much more comparable to our seats in the old stadium, albeit an estimated 30 feet back and 30 feet higher:
Best of all, the seats are just $25 a pop on our plan, up a reasonable $5 from last year and still less than half of what we paid in 2008. That's a huge win, and while it doesn't completely replace the bitter taste in my mouth over the way we were treated last winter, it's only fair to acknowledge that things have improved, and that my friends and I are happier for it.
• • •
Gathering the week's work at Baseball Prospectus:
• On Wednesday I wrote about the Red Sox on the heels of their five-game losing streak, which they shook off even as I was finishing the thing. The biggest deal about their situation isn't their pitching or their defense, it's David Ortiz:
Most of the handwringing regarding the Sox's slow start boils down to concern about Ortiz, who's in the final year of a four-year, $52 million deal. It took just two games and seven futile at-bats before the calls for his benching began, and at this writing he's now 6-for-41 with 17 strikeouts and zero homers; last night he was pulled in favor of Mike Lowell to face lefty Darren Oliver with two on and two out in the seventh inning, the Sox down by two. That the 34-year-old slugger is in decline isn't exactly up for debate:
As bad as that progression looks, the last line conceals the drastic split between the first couple months of his season (.185/.284/.287 with a lone homer in 208 PA through May 31), and the rest (.264/.356/.548 with 27 homers in 419 PA). Which isn't to say that it's only a matter of time before Ortiz's 2007 form comes around again; two years of wrist woes as well as the general aging process applied to a bulky sloth with a history of knee problems should see to that. PECOTA isn't entirely down on Ortiz, forecasting a .274/.368/.514 weighted mean projection, but even so, those aren't the numbers of a lineup centerpiece anymore.
Still, some of this has a whiff of confirmation bias. Ortiz is a notoriously slow starter who owns a .257./345/.502 line in 1030 March and April plate appearances for his career, and a .286/.382/.551 line in the other 5067 PA — 86 points of OPS higher. He has had some good Aprils, but not since 2007; his last two came in at a combined .205/.292/.342, compared to .261/.362/.516 otherwise over a span where AL designated hitters combined to bat .255/.338/.439. His overall mark in that span (.250/.348/.482) is still better than the league-average DH, even after adjusting for park.
The real issue isn't his slow starts so much as it's his performance against lefties:
Always fun to see Boston down, but I don't think they're going to stay down for long — there's too much talent and too many resources there, though the catching situation is also a concern given that Victor Martinez and Jason Varitek have only thrown out about 11 percent of base thieves over the past year-plus; the Rangers ran riot on V-Mart, stealing nine bases on Tuesday night.
• The NL Hit List features Chickens for Checkups and endless dry-humping (the term for what the Mets' idiot savant manager Jerry Manuel did by warming up closer Francisco Rodriguez nine times during the team's 20-inning win on Saturday).
• If you follow my Twitter stream, you've already heard my blue-streaked mea culpa regarding Phil Hughes' no-hit bid on Wednesday night. The sanitized version is as follows. I was out with my friend Nick at Beauty Bar in the East Village, preparing to call it a night after a few beers, when I checked the Yanks-A's score on my iPhone. I saw that through seven innings, Hughes had a no-hitter going, so we bolted out of the bar (which doesn't have a television) in search of one that did. We passed a sports bar with a big Yankee logo, but every TV we could see in there had basketball or nature shows on, so we peered into the next bar down Second Avenue. By the time we'd sat down with our beers, I realized it was a Red Sox-flavored bar, the notorious Professor Thom's, which everybody in the Twitscape seemed aware of but me. One pitch later, Hughes' no-no was no mo'. From the AL Hit List , which is topped by the Bronx Bombers:
[#1 Yankees] Philthy: Phil Hughes becomes the second Yankees pitcher this season to take a no-hitter into the eighth, but he's jinxed by a bum who stumbles into the wrong bar, fails to locate a comebacker, and settles for a 7 1 1 1 2 10 line. At least he emerges in one piece, unlike his last no-hit bid three (!) years ago. The Yanks' rotation is firing on nearly every cylinder, though Javy Vazquez's 8.27 ERA is nearly as high as the other four pitchers' marks added together (8.91). Meanwhile, the team's equivalent of Halley's Comet comes around, as they pull off their first triple play in 42 years.
In addition to being Philthy, the Hit List is Trembley, Slowey, Javy, Brantley and totally Lackey. Also Smoaky.
• One final note: on May 1, Blogger will stop FTP publishing, the means by which this blog is published so as to reside on the same server as the rest of my site while emulating its look and feel. I am investigating a move to the WordPress platform, and at some point am going to need to provide some instructions (a new URL, likely) as to how to find FI. If for some reason this blog is offline for any length of time, know that it will be back soon enough and that I'll see you on the other side.
• A few weeks back I looked at 2009 home run rates, overall, by league, and by ballpark. Overall, home runs per game increased by 3.3 percent this past season, a figure that masks a 4.9 percent drop in the NL and a 12.7 percent climb in the AL, producing the widest AL-NL split since 1996. The changes aren't entirely explained by the two new New York parks, though Nu-Yankee Stadium was the easiest place to homer (1.463 per team per game) and CitiField the sixth-hardest (0.802 per team per game).
• Next up was an analysis of the top two free agent hitters available, Matt Holliday and Jason Bay. The pair share the same position (left field) and thus have relevance to the beasts of the AL East given that they've both got vacancies — the latter, of course, having served as the Sox's left fielder since Manny Ramirez's trade to the Dodgers. The two are very close as hitters, with virtually identical translated OBP and SLG lines (career-wise) but differing walk rates and batting averages: "The major point of contrast is that Bay walks considerably more often, drawing an unintentional pass in 11.8 percent of his career plate appearances, compared to 8.2 percent for Holliday. It all comes out in the wash: Holliday owns a Clay Davenport-translated career line of .312/.384/.541, while Bay is at .285/.384/.540."
Where the two differ is defense. Using a three-year average of the big three defensive systems (BP's Fielding Runs Above Average, Fangraphs' Ultiamte Zone Rating, and John Dewan's Plus/Minus), Holliday has a staggering 18-run annual advantage, making him worth something like $3.6 to $5.4 million per year more depending upon where you set the value of a marginal win.
• In an Unfiltered post, I revisited Jaffe's Ugly MVP Predictor in advance of the AL MVP announcement. At the time of the original article, Joe Mauer's Twins were a game under .500, making him an extremely unlikely winner based upon Wild Card era voting trends, but the Twins' late rush to the postseason vaulted him into the system's crosshairs. JUMP doesn't peg him as the winner, but it places him in the AL top three between Mark Teixeira and Derek Jeter. That classifies him as a "secondary hit" for the system, which as designed can put every MVP since 1995 except 1999's Pudge Rodriguez in that class. Which isn't to say either of those Yanks should have won, just that historical precedent favors big sluggers and middle infielders on 100-win teams over catchers on Wild Card winners. In the NL, JUMP nails Albert Pujols as the winner, which wasn't too surprising given his monster year.
• In part of what will be a six-part series on the winter free agent market, I examined the available relievers. It's a group that upon examining three-year track records for performance and health, can basically be divided in two by a sizable gulch, with the top six clearly separated from the rest of the pack. Number one on the list is Billy Wagner, who agreed to a deal with the Braves last night. Numbers three and six, Rafael Soriano and Mike Gonzalez, who both spent time as Atlanta's closer last year, are that much more available; both have drawn interest from the Yankees and Red Sox. Number seven, the first one on the other side of the divide, is Brandon Lyon, who apparently is also drawing interest from the Yankees, but it sounds as though their rotation plans need to fall into place first.
• Which brings us to Tuesday's arbitration news, which, come to think of it, deserves a post of its own. Stay tuned.
I attended the game with my friend Julie, and our seats were in the left field bleachers, providing a fitting bookend to the season given that the two of us were also in the bleachers for the Yankees' April 3 exhibition against the Cubs, the new ballpark's unofficial opener. Raising the stakes even more was the fact that Pedro Martinez started for the Phillies against the Yanks' A.J. Burnett:
For as much baggage as Burnett brought to the party, his opposite number, Pedro Martinez, brought more — an epic history of battles during his days with the Red Sox, highlights (his Yankee Stadium record 17-strikeout performance in 1999, the Red Sox's 2004 ALCS comeback) and lowlights (his 2003 ALCS meltdown, his promise to "Wake up the Bambino, I'll drill him in the ass," and the taunts of "Who's Your Daddy?") aplenty.
But the Pedro who took the hill for the Phillies is a different Pedro, five years and several miles per hour removed from the end of his Boston tenure, and nearly a decade beyond a peak that can stand with any pitcher in the game's history, from Walter Johnson to Sandy Koufax to Roger Clemens. He's older, sadder—his father died of cancer last year—but almost certainly wiser. No longer able to summon superhuman velocity, he showed during his NLCS start against the Dodgers (a rich enough tableau in its own right) that he could still baffle hitters by keeping them off balance, moving their eye level and changing speeds, hitting nearly every increment on the radar gun between the mid-70s and the low-90s while artfully working in and out of the strike zone across seven shutout innings.
Martinez held the Yankees to one run through the first five innings, striking out six and yielding only one run on a solo shot by Mark Teixeira into the Yankees' bullpen to lead off the fourth. But even when he was missing bats, he was running up his pitch count; his first four K's cost him 27 pitches. He surrendered another solo homer, this time to Hideki Matsui, on his 96th pitch.
Martinez finished the inning with his pitch count at 98, but much to our surprise, Phillies manager Charlie Manuel sent him back out for the seventh, apparently forgetting the hard lessons of the 2003 ALCS Game Seven. Martinez yielded singles to Jerry Hairston Jr. and Miguel Cabrera to lead off the seventh, with Hairston's pinch-runner Brett Gardner going from first to third, at which point Manuel finally went and got the wily, wiry 38-year-old. For all the taunts Martinez had endured on the night and over the years from the Yankee Stadium crowds — particularly in the bleachers — it was an incredibly poignant moment. If this was the sun setting on Martinez's career, then it was one hell of a sunset, and I was determined to appreciate its brilliance:
I don't care who you root for, it was impossible not to feel for Martinez as he slowly strode off the Yankee Stadium mound, perhaps for the last time in his storied career. The crowd in the bleachers jeered him rabidly, but I could only stand and applaud, doffing my cap not only at the magnificent effort he'd mustered, but all of the pain and pleasure his years of battling the Yankees had brought. At least from this writer's vantage point, never was there an opposing player who made for better blog fodder. My season at Yankee Stadium wasn't the only thing that had come full circle.
Looking back at a recording of the game a day later, the close-ups of Martinez's face are priceless. Bated breath to collect his emotions before walking off the mound. A raised finger and a glance skyward as he headed towards the visiting dugout on the third base side. A head bowed, and then, as he approached the dugout, chin raised with a genuine smile [pic], perhaps at the large sign held by a Yankees fan near the dugout that read: "Daddy's Got a New House." Unable to withstand the lure of consumer capitalism in favor of a poignant moment in baseball history for one single second more, Fox cut to a car commercial. Perhaps their producer had something in his eye.
Their lead expanded to 3-1, the Yankees called upon the great Mariano Rivera to make his second two-inning save of the week. He went on to close out the game and help the Yankees even the series, and while there was so much more to say about his performance and that of Burnett, what stuck with me was Martinez, particularly as the reports of his post-game press conference emerged. Not to be confused with his pregame conference from the day before in which he made a bold declaration regarding the fans in the Bronx:
Q. You've had a unique relationship with the fans in the Bronx over the years. Why do you think that is? Have you thought about that over your career? And what about it do you enjoy?
PEDRO MARTINEZ: I don't know if you realize this, but because of you guys in some ways, I might be at times the most influential player that ever stepped in Yankee Stadium. I can honestly say that. I mean, I have been a big fan of baseball for a long time, since I was a kid. My first ball I ever got from a Big League player I actually got to purchase in Dodger Stadium in a silent auction, was Reggie Jackson. I was actually a big fan of the Yankees, too.
For some reason with all the hype and different players that have passed by, maybe because I played for the Red Sox is probably why you guys made it such a big deal every time I came in, but you know, I have a good bond with the people. After playing in New York, I went to realize something: New York fans are very passionate and very aggressive. But after it all, after you take your uniform off and you deal with the people, they're real human beings. It's all just being fans.
I have all the respect in the world for the way they enjoy being fans. Sometimes they might be giving you the middle finger, just like they will be cursing you and telling you what color underwear you're wearing. All those things you can hear when you're a fan. But at the end of the day, they're just great fans that want to see the team win. I don't have any problem with that.
Q. Could you just walk us through what your feelings were? A long rehab for you over a year, you come in, you pitched a great game in the NLCS, and then tonight. I know when you're pitching, you're not thinking about that stuff, but now that you got back to a World Series game and pitched so well in it, talk about what's going through your mind about the whole year of rehab really.
PEDRO MARTINEZ: You know, regardless of what happened, the fact that I was the loser today for the game, I'm extremely proud and happy being able to participate, compete against a real, real good team, a very solid team, be able to put my team in position to catch up or win that game, and at the same time tell myself that I made the right decision by coming back and getting this opportunity, putting myself in the position to get an opportunity to pitch in the World Series.
It was a real good game. It was a real baseball game.
Q. As you were walking off the field, you were hearing it from the Yankee fans and the TV camera caught you breaking out into smile. Can you talk about as you were walking off the field kind of what was going through your mind in the new Yankee Stadium?
PEDRO MARTINEZ: Yeah, you said it right, it's a new Yankee Stadium, but the fans remain the fans. They're going to give you — like I remember one guy sitting right in front of the front row with his daughter, sitting with his daughter, and his daughter in one arm, and a cup of beer in the other hand and saying all kinds of nasty stuff. I just told him, "Your daughter is right beside you. It's a little girl. It's a shame you're saying all these things."
I had to stop and tell him because I'm a father myself, and God, how can you be so dumb to do those kind of things in front of your child? What kind of example are you setting?
But the fans, I enjoy that, because at the bottom, I know I played for the Mets, I know they really want to root for me. It's just that I don't play for the Yankees, that's all. I've always been a good competitor, and they love that. They love the fact that I compete. I'm a New Yorker, as well. If I was on the Yankees, I'd probably be like a king over here. (Laughter.)
That's not the case right now, and it's going to be that way.
As you'd expect, there were plenty of good articles about Pedro Martinez to go around, both before and after the game. Jonah Keri had some great stuff about Pedro's days with the Expos. The Wall Street Journal's Matthew Futterman provided great context for both of Martinez's press conferences while comparing him to Reggie Jackson and calling his comments "subversive." The Faster Times' Lisa Swan predicted the postgamer would be a doozy, no matter what the outcome (she also did a nice retrospective of great Martinez quotes as he was returning to the majors in August). Esquire's Charles Pierce to compared him to Luis Tiant, the hero ace of an earlier Red Sox era, for his ability to get by on guile and guts.
The legend goes that back when Martinez was breaking in with the Dodgers, manager Tommy Lasorda felt he was too small to withstand the rigors of starting. In retrospect, it seems clear he was right, at least if that meant starting for Lasorda, who broke many a promising young Dodger starter - Doug Rau, Rick Rhoden, Fernando Valenzuela, Orel Hershiser, and older brother Ramon Martinez. Who's to say the baseball world wouldn't have been deprived of a Hall of Fame talent and one of the game's great personalities had he not been traded to the Expos? Ultimately, it was in the best interests of baseball.
I had the pleasure of viewing the festivities from Section 406 in high right field:
After the previous night's rain and the previous weekend's chill, the weather was incredibly cooperative, with the game-time temperature announced as 58 degrees. I know this because we were one section over from the auxiliary press box, where a special PA feed fed the writers a stream of tidbits ("Alex Rodriguez now has an 11-game postseason hitting streak," etc.).
Pettitte came out firing, getting ahead of the Angels' hitters in the first inning and striking out Bobby Abreu, but the former Yankee gave the Halos the lead in the third inning with a two-out RBI single to capitalize on a Jeff Mathis double. Meabnwhile, the Yankees had their opportunities to score early against Angels starter Joe Saunders, leaving two men on base in the first, three in the second, and one in the third.
They broke through in the fourth inning, which Robinson Cano led off with a walk — the first time the Yanks had gotten the leadoff hitter aboard thus far. Nick Swisher broke out of an 0-for-12 slump with a single, Melky Cabrera laid down a sacrifice bunt, and Derek Jeter walked to load the bases with just one out. Damon, who'd grounded out weakly with the bases loaded to end the second, this time delivered with a two-run single up the middle. Mark Teixeira reached on an infield single to shortstop Erick Aybar that should have been a double-play ball.
Facing Alex Rodriguez with the bases loaded was something Saunders clearly wanted no part of. Saunders issued a five-pitch walk which scored the Yanks' third run and spelled the end of his brief night. His line: 3.1 7 3 3 5 0. It might have been worse had reliever Darren Oliver not gotten Jorge Posada to ground into an inning-ending double play.
With the Yankees holding a 3-1 lead, I started counting down the outs, at least in my head, working backwards from Mariano Rivera through the suddenly shaky setup corps and back to Pettitte. Fortunately, Andy was dandy, throwing first-pitch strikes to 20 of the 25 hitters he faced, whiffing six while allowing just one walk. He had retired nine in a row before the Angels mounted their biggest threat of the night in the sixth, when Torii Hunter reached on an infield single and Vlad Guerrero blooped a double down the right field line. The Angels looked poised to tie the game when Kendry Morales smoked a ball up the middle, but Pettitte knocked down the hot smash and calmly threw to first for the third out. Money.
He departed to a thunderous ovation with one out and one on in the seventh, with Joba Chamberlain coming on. Chamberlain offered little of his usual drama in either the positive or negative sense — no fist-pumping strikeouts, no well-hit balls following ineffectual nibbling around the plate. He kept the ball in the infield and got two grounders, one a fielder's choice (via a puzzling move by Angels manager Mike Scioscia to pinch-hit for the red-hot Jeff Mathis with infielder Maicer Izturis) and the other on a grounder to Derek Jeter.
With six outs to go, Yankees manager Joe Girardi decided to dispense with all further middling middlemen and go for the kill, summoning Mariano Rivera. My friend Nick, who'd been wearing his Lou Gehrig pinstriped replica jersey, stripped down to a navy blue Rivera t-shirt which dates back at least one pennant ago. It was a bold move that almost backfired — Girardi's, not Nick's — as the Angels scraped out a run in the eighth on a pair of singles and a groundout, cutting the lead in half while forcing Rivera to throw 21 pitches.
Luckily, the Yankees reclaimed some breathing room. Cano worked another leadoff walk, and then the Angel botched consecutive sacrifice bunts, with Howie Kendrick failing to handle the throw at first base on the first one (Swisher's) and then reliever Scott Kazmir (!) shot-putting the second one (Cabrera's) into foul territory right field as Cano scampered home. One out later, Damon walked to load the bases, and then Teixeira delivered a sacrifice fly to plate the Yankees' fifth and final run.
At this point the crowd — 50,173 strong with hardly an empty seat in sight — was in a total frenzy, on their feet for the entire ninth. Rivera made it look easy for the first two hitters, quickly retiring Kendrick on a grounder to Teixeira, then inducing Juan Rivera to fly out softly to right. Pinch-hitter Gary Matthews Jr., another puzzler from Scioscia, battled Rivera to a full count before Rivera snuck his trademark cutter — a bit high and outside — by him for strike three and the AL pennant. He calmly walked halfway to the plate to hug Posada, then ran to leap onto the dogpile forming near shortstop:
So now the Yankees have inaugurated each of the three editions of Yankee Stadium with a pennant. After all the extraneous drama the new ballpark wrought, it felt strange to be celebrating in that space. The crowd was cheerful but maybe a bit reserved, dispersing rather rapidly compared to the way they lingered at the 1999 World Series clincher, the most momentous occasion I've had the pleasure of attending at any ballpark. Back then the upper deck shook for 90 minutes, and 56,782 fans dogpiled on each other after the final out, singing "New York, New York" and "We Are the Champions" in unison as we watched the players celebrate on the field.
Okay, that's a nearly impossible standard to uphold. I don't think it's because Yankees fans take such a victory for granted, not with a six-year pennant drought, but because they/we know there's bigger game to hunt. Unlike in the old ballpark, it was a genuine breeze to exit even amid the celebration, and it was cool to get a glimpse of the players' champagne-soaked locker-room celebration in the Great Hall:
As the Yankees received their championship trophy, an official photographer even snapped our pictures (yes, I'm too cheap to pay for a non-watermarked version, but that flash flatters no one):
That's a couple of happy campers who enjoyed a pretty great night at the ballpark. Bring on the Phillies!
Now, I certainly have my reservations and criticisms about the excesses of Yankee Stadium III, but I was in no position to refuse a complementary glimpse into this little world of indulgence. Steve wrote about his experience at the Pinstriped Bible, but because he was late for the game due to travel difficulties, I gained a slightly different perspective on the pregame accommodations by dining at the all-you-can eat buffet in the Legends Suite club, where the food was considerably better than the chicken nuggets and french fries he availed himself of later in the evening. Without resorting to sheer gluttony, I did sample five different meat offerings (pork loin, veal, beef ribs, mini kielbasa, and something called a foie slider), though I eschewed the tantalizing sweets that were on offer save for one chocolate-covered strawberry. The veal (which I had selected thinking was pork shoulder) was terribly dry, a sad failure to honor the protein, and the slider was just a rather nondescript, dry little burger, but the pork was much better, and the ribs, which had a pleasantly sweet Asian-style glaze, were outstanding. Remembering Steve's sage advice about eating scampi or sushi prepared in the bowels of the previous Yankee Stadium, I steered entirely clear of the seafood, though I must admit that the seared scallops that went by me looked quite tempting.
Thus sated, I didn't need to further gorge myself while seated (as several around us did) or in the smaller Ketel One Lounge behind our section. After I took out a second mortgage to pay for the one beer I ordered at my seat (alcohol was the only cash outlay on my part for the entire evening), I went light on the whole service aspect of things
With the Yankees having clinched the AL East flag and home field advantage two days earlier against the Red Sox — a game I also attended, viewing from my regular peanut gallery seats — attendance was sparse, particularly in these seats. I'd estimate our section, which was the furthest one down the right field line, was about one-third capacity, and I was clearly the only one with a scorebook (some habits die hard). The majority of the male constituents in our vicinity were at the very least dressed in business casual attire. The two gents next to me still had their ties on, and the gin-soused boor who was ejected for harassing the security guard (see Steve's writeup) was wearing a suit, not to mention a particularly horseshit pink-and-purple tie that did not go unremarked-upon by yours truly from down in his cups once said boor was in NYPD custody. In comedy, timing is everything.
The game itself was an exciting affair despite the low stakes. A.J. Burnett was fairly sharp, as was Royals starter Anthony Lerew, providing for a brisk pitcher's duel over the first six innings. The Royals scratched out a run in the third and the Yanks knotted the score in the sixth off a Mark Teixeira solo shot. Things got more hectic in the seventh, when Burnett walked leadoff hitter Mark Teahen and reliever Phil Coke suddenly forgot how to field his position, failing to make a play on a bunt single and making a throwing error one batter later, all leading to two runs.
Lerew's night ended when Nick Swisher led off the home half of the seventh with a solo homer, but by the time the Yankees mounted their rally against Farnsworth (charged with closing because ace Royals closer Joakim Soria had thrown 46 pitches the day before), the B team was in. With one out, third-string catcher Francisco Cervelli beat out an infield hit, then Eric Hinske, hitting for Ramiro Peña (who'd started at second base) singled him to third base, and Robinson Cano, pinch-hitting for Derek Jeter, tied the game with a sacrifice fly. Hinske did a double bellyflop on a busted hit-and-run, sliding into second base safely on his ample gut, then again after taking third when the throw dribbled into center field. Johnny Damon was intentionally walked, and then rookie first baseman Juan Miranda lined a shot off the eternally hapless Farnsworth's leg. The ball rolled into foul territory on the first base side as Hinske scored, and a pack of rabid Yankees ran down Miranda, who got his obligatory whipped cream pie in the face during the postgame interview. Fun stuff for the kid as the Yankee scrubs beat the Royal schlubs.
All in all, it's clear I could never get used to wallowing in such luxury during a ballgame. As the ejected boor's go-work-at-McDonalds tirade illustrated, the class distinctions between the patrons and the employees in the Legends seating area are laid all too bare, at least for my tastes. I won't snub a freebie to get beyond the velvet rope once in a blue moon, but all things considered, I'm much happier paying my twenty bucks to sit in the nosebleeds and standing in line for my beer.
Accompanying the regular renditions of "God Bless America" were heightened security procedures that subjected patrons to no small litany of hassles while doing little to make them more secure. Given the cursory frisking procedures and lack of metal detection capabilities, it would have been possible to gain entry with a 9mm handgun jammed down the back of one's pants and a Bowie knife sheathed in one's sock, but without those, the organization simply inflicted its increasing paranoia and greed upon paying customers. Backpacks and briefcases were immediately banned from the ballpark after September 11, as though any potential ticketholder might be a terrorist smuggling in a tactical nuclear weapon swiped from the imagination of some z-grade thriller. Not even Shea Stadium—located only two miles from LaGuardia Airport—stooped to such extremes. Anyone coming to the park while porting one of the banned bag types—say, from work—was forced to check it for a fee at one of the bars or restaurants across River Avenue. Anyone wishing to schlep a bagful of items into the stadium — say, a scorebook, a jacket, and reading material for the long subway ride home — was forced to place those items in a flimsy, clear plastic grocery-type bag available outside the turnstiles. No other types of bags, such as ones with reinforced handles, were allowed, first for vague "security purposes," and then, once fans began pressing Yankee security to explain these increasingly irrational and seemingly arbitrary requests, "because you're not allowed to bring bags with logos inside." As you may have divined, I had many a terse confrontation over this policy.
Thankfully, the ban has finally been lifted and the team's policy has been officially updated, bringing the Yanks into line with the several hundred other professional sporting facilities in the country. This isn't to congratulate the Yankees on finally showing some common sense, but merely one last Bronx cheer for over eight years of idiocy and inconvenience.
Hat tip to Neil deMause, who also passed along potentially good news about Yankees playoff ticket prices. A rare week when the morons, imbeciles, crooks and thugs running the non-baseball side of the operation do more than one right.
When we last checked in on 2009 home-run rates, April was just about in the books, and was providing a strong indicator that this year's overall home-run rate would finish ahead of last year's. But while the performances of Adrian Gonzalez (22 homers) and Raul Ibañez (20), and the frequency with which balls continue to fly out of Yankee Stadium (1.81 homers per team per game) suggest a homer-happy season, the reality is that rates have slowed considerably.
Through April 25 -- the cutoff point for the data used in my previous piece -- batters were homering in 2.79 percent of their plate appearances and averaging 1.082 home runs per team per game. By the end of the month -- a period shortened by the World Baseball Classic having pushed Opening Day back a week -- those figures had dropped to 2.71 percent and 1.051 per game. Thanks to a May where the fences seemed to move outward (2.58 percent and 0.999 per game), the overall rates are now ringers for last year's numbers, and would be among the lowest of the post-strike era if the season had ended on June 9:
The numbers are more revealing once they're broken down by league, with the two new New York parks excluded:
Lg 2009 2008-td 2008-f AL 1.032 0.858 1.002 NL 0.946 0.989 1.003 ML 0.986 0.928 1.003
Eliminating the New York parks from both years, we find that per-game home-run rates are up 6.3 percent over last year at this time [2008-td, for "to date"], but that the current figures would still finish 1.6 percent below the full-season 2008 rate [2008-f] because of a June-July uptick (1.073 per game) that pushed things back toward normalcy.
Also noted in the article is the recent Accuweather report discounting the meteorologists' earlier theory about the new Yankee Stadium creating a wind tunnel in favor of, um, closer fences due to less gentles curves (a point my BP colleague Marc Normandin already hit. You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
There are futility infielders, and there are Futility Infielders. Today's New York Times features a Tyler Kepner article on Yankee first base and infield coach Mick Kelleher, an exemplar of the good-field/no-hit players whose baseball cards clogged my collection in the late '70s. Joe Posnanski has his Duane Kuiper, owner of one major league home run in 3,754 plate appearances. Kelleher, who plied his trade for five teams over 11 years, never homered in 1,202 PA. "Since he retired in 1982," notes the article, "no position player with that many plate appearances has failed to hit a homer."
For his career, Kelleher hit .213/.266/.253, which if you'll pardon my French is spectacularly craptatstic. Though not as bad as the late, legendary John Vukovich, Kelleher ranked in the top 15 in the Futility Infielder Foulness Index. None of which is to heap abuse on his lack of ability or love for the game. Men like Kelleher, Vukovich and Mario Mendoza are the glue that holds baseball together, lifers who despite their limited playing skills find ways to pass on their love and knowledge of the game, often with half a century of service.
In Kelleher's case, he's consistently worked as a coach, instructor and scout following his 15 years as a player (including the minors). According to the article, he's spent most of the past 13 years in the Yankee organization, and has worked extensively with Robinson Cano and Derek Jeter. While neither has a sterling defensive reputation by any stretch, a bit of sun is shining on the Mick these days as the man behind the scenes of the team who went a record 18 games without making an error, a streak that ended last night when Jorge Posada threw one into center field on a stolen base. A lack of errors or high fielding percentage isn't the defining stat of a good defense, but it's worth noting that the Yankees rank fifth in the league in Defensive Efficiency, the frequency with which they turn batted balls into outs, and third in Park Adjusted Defensive Efficiency. Last year they were 12th and 11th, respectively. And that's in a 14-team league. So if Kelleher's a part of the improvement, he deserves a tip of the cap.
I was at the park last night, as it stands, in the company of one of the usual reprobates, Nick Stone, as well as Matador Records/Can't Stop the Bleeding domo Gerard Cosloy, the first time we'd met after years of occasional link swapping. As we watched the Rangers get their asses handed to them -- seriously, the ghost of Johnny Oates was shaking his head as he watched their more well supported than actually improved pitching staff get the shit knocked out of them -- we spent plenty of time discussing the finer points of Wilco and Fall personnel changes as well as the relative career arcs of AL Rookie of the Years gone sour Angel Berroa, Bob Hamelin and Joe Charboneau. Meanwhile, spurred by a pair of plunkings by Vicente "Shitty Pitcher" Padilla, Mark Teixeira had a big takeout slide which uncorked a seven-run inning for the Yanks (the two don't like each other much at all, going waaaay back. Good times.
And maybe it was a couple of those big $11 beers talking, but our seats in section 423, in the fourth row of the upper grandstand between third base and home plate, felt a little like home. Observe the following triptych from my iPhone's crappy little camera:
Last night
Our current plan seats
My final game at the old park
OK, I'm not exactly sure why the last one is so messed up -- it appears I shot while the camera was scrolling from pic to pic -- but it's the sense of scale that's the take-home. We were still further back and up than our old seats; about halfway into the old Tier Reserved, if I had to hazard a guess. But a definite improvement on our current lot.
Speaking of Kelleher, his former Cubs teammate Steve Swisher, father of current Yankee Nick Swisher, also came up for discussion as a thoroughly crappy hitter (.216/.279/.303 in 1,577 PA). In fact, both rank among the Seventies' 30 worst in terms of OPS+ with an 850 PA minimum (stats 1970-1979 only):
Player PA HR BA OBP SLG OPS+ Mario Mendoza 879 2 .201 .237 .247 31 Luis Gomez 1043 0 .216 .265 .248 44 Mick Kelleher 943 0 .223 .272 .265 46 Rob Picciolo 907 6 .224 .238 .291 46 Luis Alvarado 1177 5 .218 .251 .276 48 Jack Heidemann 1210 9 .212 .264 .269 49 Dal Maxvill 1593 1 .210 .289 .241 49 Hal Lanier 887 6 .227 .263 .273 49 Rich Morales 998 6 .195 .270 .249 50 Terry Humphrey 1170 6 .211 .265 .267 52 Bobby Wine 951 4 .219 .272 .276 52 Pepe Frias 1153 1 .239 .269 .294 53 Paul Casanova 1173 20 .213 .243 .307 53 Jim Mason 1756 12 .203 .259 .275 54 Bill Plummer 1005 14 .189 .267 .280 54 Tim Johnson 1408 0 .223 .274 .265 55 Dave McKay 1289 12 .224 .259 .307 57 Paul Popovich 1036 11 .226 .279 .303 57 Randy Hundley 1403 24 .222 .273 .311 58 Hector Torres 1321 16 .216 .267 .294 58 Doug Flynn 1863 6 .240 .271 .298 59 Tom Veryzer 2243 11 .237 .281 .295 60 Bob Heise 1129 1 .243 .274 .288 60 Steve Swisher 1458 18 .219 .282 .307 61 Enzo Hernandez 2612 2 .224 .283 .266 61 Tim Cullen 893 3 .211 .274 .278 61 Johnnie LeMaster 1016 6 .223 .275 .304 62 Pete Mackanin 1107 22 .212 .255 .335 62 Darrel Chaney 2164 14 .220 .298 .294 63 Ted Martinez 1574 7 .240 .270 .309 63
Ah, so many memories of worthless baseball cards and automatic outs, from Papa Mario on down to the Dodgers' resident futilityman, Teddy Martinez. Somebody ought to start a web site.
Over the winter a few teams took a page from the Rays' book, one of them being a team that's suddenly surprising people:
Don't look now, but the Rangers are leading the American League West. Coming off four straight sub-.500 seasons, projected for just 70 wins and the #29 spot on the preseason Hit List, they're out of the gate at 19-14 clip, with the fifth-best run differential in the majors. With the A's, Angels and Mariners stumbling and bumbling, the Rangers are starting to look like plausible contenders in a division where 84 wins may be enough. Our PECOTA-based Playoff Odds report estimates they have around a 23 percent shot at the flag, more than double their chances as of Opening Day but still roughly half of the Angels' estimate.
...Though the pitchers have gone backwards in two of the three key categories, they're surviving thanks to the Rangers' defense, which after ranking dead last in Defensive Efficiency in 2008 has improved by 45 points and now leads the AL. The shift of Young to third base to accommodate the arrival of the slick-fielding Andrus — a pair of decisions I criticized in this space, much to the dismay of our Rangerly readers — is bearing fruit.
More than that, it's following the template of one of last year's top story lines, the record-setting defensive turnaround of the Rays, a point that certainly factored into the decision to skip [Elvis] Andrus from Double-A to the majors even at the tender age of 20. In fact, the Rangers were one of three teams who elected to try replicating the Rays' recipe, patching a porous defense with a defensively sound shortstop regardless of his offensive limitations.
...If the Rangers' 45-point DE improvement were to hold, it would rank as the third-best turnaround ever, behind the Rays and the 1980 A's (Billyball comes to Oakland) and ahead of the 1991 Braves, who kicked off a dynasty. That would translate into about 100 runs saved based on Ben Lindbergh's math, and perhaps more, given the inflated value of each hit in the Rangers' offensive environment. In all likelihood, that would probably spell a postseason berth.
As noted in the excerpt, I was critical of the decision to promote Andrus during a season where it didn't look as though the Rangers could win much. But since then, the AL West favorite Angels, who won 100 games last year, took several hits in the pitching department, losing both Ervin Santana and John Lackey for the first month of the season, and suffering the tragic loss of Nick Adenhart. The A's, who were predicted to win the division in BP's preseason projections, have fizzled and already look a bit green around the gills.
I got my first extended look at Andrus on Wednesday night against the Mariners, who led the West until recently. The kid made a couple of really nice plays, including a spin-and-fire move behind second place which the Rangers' announcers called his best one of the year. He also had a couple of hits, including a game-tying RBI triple in the sixth. The kid wasn't expected to hit much (PECOTA .248/.301/.334), but he's shown better contact skills and more gap power than the system gave him credit for, and his speed has helped him take advantage of that. I can see why Rangers fans were excited enough to rush him to the majors, and why they're excited about their team's chances after years of futility. I'm not incredibly optimistic they can pull it off, particularly with the Angels surging while getting Santana and Lackey back this week, but suddenly I've got another team to keep an eye out for on the Extra Innings package.
• • •
Meanwhile, this week's Hit List is still topped by the Dodgers, who've seen Juan Pierre go 12-for-25 with five doubles since you-know-who was suspended. Sampling a few entries of interest:
[#3 Mets] Tossing the Bad Apple: The Mets reel off seven straight wins to take over first place in the NL East, yielding just 20 runs in that span. The streak is part of a larger stretch of nine straight quality starts for the previously beleaguered rotation, one that coincides exactly with Oliver Perez's exile. The offense takes a hit as Carlos Delgado is sidelined by hip woes just as he's heating up (.423/.516/.654 in May), but replacement Fernando Tatis (.328/.385/.517) has been no slouch.
[#5 Brewers] Prince and the New Power Generation: Rickie Weeks homers in three straight games, while Prince Fielder bashes a trio of homers in a three-game sweep of the Marlins, two of them go-ahead shots. Fielder's hitting .341/.472/.659 ths month, one of five Brewers—along with Weeks, Ryan Braun, J.J. Hardy, and Craig Counsell (!)—who are slugging above .600 in May. The Brewers are tied for the league lead in homers, and they're a major league-best 18-6 since their 3-8 start, helping them grab a share of the NL Central lead.
[#12 Tigers] D-Train and E-Jax: Dontrelle Willis returns to the majors in shaky fashion (4.2 8 4 4 2 0), but the real story in the rotation is their three shutouts in a four-game span, including a two-hitter by Justin Verlander and a combined seven-hitter spearheaded by Edwin Jackson. Jackson appears to have finally turned the corner. He's got the rotation's best ERA (2.60), his 3.18 K/BB ratio is more than double his career rate, and he's still getting excellent double play support for such an extreme flyballer.
[#15 Yankees] Alex Rodriguez drills a three-run homer on the first regular-season pitch he sees, but he goes just 3-for-21 amid a stretch that sees Jorge Posada hit the DL and Derek Jeter and Hidkei Matsui both miss time due to nagging injuries. The Yanks need A-Rod to hit like the guy in the catalog, and they need Mark Teixeira (.203/.333/.424) to heat up as well. He's getting his walks and homers (four of the latter in a seven-game span), but his .193 BABIP is the lowest among the league's 105 batting title qualifiers.
Finally, I've been to each of the two new NYC ballparks twice over the past couple of weeks, and I'm quite sure I'm getting the short end of the stick with my current arrangement. CitiField, though it's definitely overplaying the Brooklyn Dodgers angle at the expense of Mets history, and though it has some particularly hideous signage, particularly around their gigantotron video, has an intimacy that lends it an energy which has been sorely lacking at the new Yankee Stadium. Additionally, the refreshment prices are much more reasonable, and the management hasn't embarrassed itself on a daily basis with odious pronouncements from Lonn Trost and Randy Levine about ingenious new ways to beat the peasants back from the playing field or otherwise separate them from their cash.
New name for the park in the Bronx, as noted in the Hit and Run article: Epic Fail Stadium. Use it.
She'd get a kick out of Mark Lamster calling bullshit on the coverage the new stadium has received in the design press. Lamster, in addition to weighing in on the eternally partisan scrap that is the AL East at YanksFanSoxFan, is a true Renaissance man. He's the author of a terrific book about the most ambitious baseball barnstorming expedition of all time, Spalding's World Tour and a forthcoming book on 17th century painter Peter Paul Rubens (mmmmm, Reubens...). He's also an editor-at-large at Princeton Architectural Press. In a piece for ID magazine, he takes some of the architects of the puffery surrounding the stadium to task:
The problems with these new ballparks go far beyond mere questions of style; they strike at the essence of what it means to create good design.
The new Yankee Stadium, for instance, is costing American taxpayers several hundred million dollars and the local community a cherished park. In exchange, we're getting a stadium with fewer seats, a dramatically higher percentage of which will be at luxury price levels. Gone is one of New York's great public spaces: the vast upper deck of the much-maligned old stadium, which was rebuilt in the 1970s. Perhaps that building was not an architectural showplace, but when it was packed with fans for a big game, there was no more electric place in the city.
Sadly, as is so often the case in the public discourse on architecture, the debate about this new ballpark and its cousin in Queens defaulted to questions of superficial formalism. The New York Times critic Nicolai Ouroussoff set the tone in his initial critique of the Bronx park, panned for its "faux historical" envelope. Destruction of the standing building, however, was not at issue. "There are those, no doubt, who will complain about the loss of the site of some of the most memorable moments in the history of sports," he wrote. "I am not one of them."
I am, but perhaps that's not the point either. New York has lost one of its great public spaces, the experience of the average fan has been compromised, and the community has been asked to pay astronomical sums for a work of (mediocre) architecture. Aren't these the real design issues at stake?
In a blog entry, Lamster further elaborates on the Times article, noting that Ourossouff "does not mention any of the controversy surrounding the stadium's financing, its appropriation of public land, or the fact that the average ticket is 76 percent more expensive than last year, according to a recent study," and taking issue with The New Yorker's recent take as well. Smart stuff.
It's a mallpark, and an absurdly expensive one at that. All the bells and whistles in the world could do nothing to alleviate the ambivalence I feel about the venue. To my mind, the Yankees need a new park more than ever.
As big and bold as the scoreboard is, it offers a dearth of real information; nowhere did the names of the pitchers appear, so because we arrived in the middle of the first inning due to subway havoc -- just in time to see Derek Jeter step into the box -- I went the entire evening without figuring out who actually started for the Cubs (it was Ted Lilly). In fact, I had a hard time paying attention at all, in part because it was an exhibition wrapped in a spectacle and in part because sitting in the bleachers makes one feel as though anything that happens in the infield is a distant rumor even under the best of circumstances. The new bleachers do have a steeper pitch to them, which at least makes seeing the outfield a bit easier.
Undoubtedly the highlight of the game came when Robinson Cano smacked a home run in the third inning, the first in the new park's history. It landed three rows in front of us, and soon afterward, stadium security came down to ask the gentleman who recovered the ball if he'd be willing to make a deal. He and his female companion left with them while their friends looked on with concern, but they came back a couple of innings later still clutching the ball: no deal.
As it turns out, Julie and I wound up visible on the brief NY1 highlight loop featuring the home run:
You can see me stand to applaud at the end of the clip here, for whatever that's worth.
Alex Belth weighs in with a more substantial take on attending the game, while Neil deMause has a pair of articles regarding the stadium's opening and the impressions gleaned from attending Thursday's workout, one at the Village Voice and the other at Baseball Prospectus.
Just moments before I embarked for the Baseball Prospectus 2009 Baltimore whistle stop earlier this week, I got a call from my friend Nick, the "commissioner" of our aggrieved group of Yankees partial-plan ticket holders. Two weeks after turning down the team's generous offer to accept $85 dollar obstructed view seats behind the right field foul pole instead of $25 grandstand seats, a representative from the Yankees ticket office had phoned Nick to apologize for the way the ticket renewals had been handled, offering us a closer approximation to our initial request. Instead of a 20-game set of $25 grandstand seats between first and third base, we were offered $20 seats just beyond first, in section 413, three rows from the back of the stadium. No word on whether complimentary oxygen tanks would be provided.
As tempting as it might have been to tell the Yankees where to stick that offer given the way we and so many other fans had been treated, in the end, we accepted the deal. The desire to preserve the continuity of our 11-season tradition of making the occasional trip to the ballpark in each other's company outweighed our distaste for the new world order in the Bronx. Still, this is no happy ending. In spite of this belatedly semi-favorable outcome, this episode still represents one more data point in a long line of them detailing the demise of the Yankee brand, at least from the nosebleed seats where I sit.
As it is, we're only spending about one-quarter of the dollars did on last year's 26-game Flex Plan Tier Box seats—a steep decline in our outlay which makes it clear we've voted with our wallets. We've lost our automatic access to playoff tickets, but particularly since 2004, the last time the Yanks made it to the ALCS, that's scarcely amounted to more than a winter-long interest-free loan for tickets to games that never happened.
I'm extremely hopeful that other aggrieved customers have received similar remedies and apologies. Even if this is a case of the squeaky wheel getting the grease -- which I highly doubt given the lack of resourcefulness in the Yankee ticket office, given that my name's not the one on the account -- not everybody's got the platform to speak up as I did and send a little ripple of dissent through the Yankees' world. The Yanks owe every single customer better treatment than the type we received, and they're not easily forgiven under the circumstances.
So while my friends and I will be making our regularly scheduled trips up to the Bronx after all, I'm still livid at the way all of this went down. But I'm also relieved that I'll have the opportunity to shoot the breeze over beers and hot dogs at with my good friends a few times this season as we watch the Yankees. A summer without baseball and bonding at the ballpark would be a bleak thing indeed, so fuck the Yankees for hindering our pursuit of that possibility for even a moment. Seriously.
UPDATE: Great to see that the Yankees' instincts regarding ticket sales just continue to get better. Via New Stadium Insider comes the word about the team's brilliant pre-sale strategy:
Prior to the public on-sale, all Yankees Premium, Full-Season and 41-Game Ticket Licensees will be able to purchase individual-game tickets, online only, via a pre-on-sale on Thursday, March 19. On the following day, Friday, March 20, all other Partial Plan Licensees (of 20-, 15-, 12- and 11-Game Plans) will be permitted to purchase individual-game tickets online only as well. For complete information, including ticket limits, please visit yankees.com.
Backing up a bit... if you simply want to attempt to think about possibly trying to take a chance on buying single-game tickets, you have to register for a random drawing and be one of the lucky souls who wins a golden ticket pulled out of Randy Levine's buttcrack or something, and even then you're still third in line behind the season-ticket and 41-game holders, and then the partial-plan holders, each of whom gets a separate day to pick over the non-plan seats and put them up for sale on Stub Hub because after all, they've already gotten their seats. Swell.
According to Trost's latest appearance on WFAN, there's no truth to the rumor that once you register, a representative from the Yankees will come to your house and spray you with a fire hose for as long as you attempt to log into your Ticketmaster account and participate in the pre-sale. But would it surprise anyone if that were true?
Anyway, lest you grow weary of scrolling down for hours at a time, I'd just like to call your attention to the most recently added link, New Stadium Insider, which has been covering the none-too-smooth transition from the House That Ruth Built to the House That Ruthlessness Built for nearly two years. Proprietor Ross has been following the latest twists and turns in the partial plan ticket fiasco with keen interest, chiming in via the comments here and at Field of Schemes to offer some support. Check his work out when you get a chance.
Friend, colleague and stadium shell game expert Neil deMause has been flexing his journalistic muscles by keeping up with the Yankee Stadium ticket beat(down), and generously salting his reports with a few choice quotes from yours truly. Following up his initial report for The Village Voice, last week he unearthed some choice euphemisms from Yankees' chief operating officer Lonn Trost, who's emerging as the face of villainy in this debacle:
Team COO Lonn Trost's response has essentially been "RTFM," but recent days have revealed some undocumented features. First off was Trost disclosing to WFAN's Mike Francesca that the stadium's 1,886 standing-room tickets will go for "around $20" a pop — and that holders of $12 bleacher seats will for the first time be free to roam about the stadium at will. While this is no doubt because Yanks execs wanted to ensure that Bleacher Creatures are able to get to the new stadium's many premium-priced concessions areas, it makes for one weird pricing scheme: Fans will, in essence, be levied an $8 surcharge for not having a place in the outfield to rest their tuchuses between purchases of $10 caesar salads.
The plot also continues to thicken regarding the seats behind the foul poles that offer obstructed views of the field — or as Trost neologized, are "architecturally shadowed." Trost told Francesca that foul-pole seats will not be offered as part of season ticket plans, but rather only on a game-by-game basis; they won't be marked "obstructed view," however, which is apparently allowable under state law, which requires that obstructed-view tickets be so marked, but doesn't define what "obstructed" is.
Neil then goes on to cite my ticket group's experience regarding those "architecturally shadowed" seats and finds that we're hardly alone in that treatment (a topic that's made its way around the area dailies). Big surprise.
Over at Field of Schemes, the site devoted to his efforts to keep up with stadium shenanigans (following his book of the same name, which is now in its second edition), Neil details a year-old exchange between Trost, Francesca and his then co-host Chris Russo, unearthing some hollow words from the Yankee organization regarding the infamous relocation plan:
Mike Francesca: Are some people getting relocated, getting hurt? Are there some guys who've been loyal season ticket holders who are gonna get hurt in this move?
Trost: We hope not. We spent substantial time coming up with a relocation program, and the relocation program will probably be public in about six weeks. The program basically says, we will put you in a comparable location, and you have the choice of taking it or not. If you don't want it, and elect to go down, or up, or move, we will do that also.
Chris Russo: You will take care of them.
Trost: We will take — and understand, this is most likely the largest and hardest relocation program in the history of sports. ... But the philosophy is try to give—
Francesca: And you're going to take care of your people in the bleachers, and take care of your people who are in the upper deck, and the guy who takes his son once a week, or has his Sunday plan. You're going to take care of that fan in this new ballpark.
Trost: The plans will be the same, or comparable.
That relocation plan actually took six months, not six weeks, to appear, and contained none of the guarantees about "comparable" seating that Trost promised to radio listeners. Noting that Trost has recently begun berating fans for "not reading the documentation," jilted miniplan holder Jay Jaffe tells FoS: "Basically, he's insulting his customers for failing to read the fine print."
As for that fine print, here's what I wrote in one of the comments:
It's worth pointing out that not only did Joe Stalin's Guide to the New Yankee Stadium Gulags (a/k/a the Relocation Guide) contain none of the guarantees about "comparable" seating that Trost promised, it included the following, note in response to Question 8 in the FAQ on page 33 ("How will seats and seat locations be assigned in the new Yankee Stadium?"):
...With respect to existing "B" Plan and Partial Season Plan Licensees, the Yankees will attempt to assign seat locations in accordance with the Licensees' seating preferences as expressed in the Licensees' Relocation Program Questionnaires. However, please note, unlike existing Full Season and "A" Plan Licensees, under the Relocation Program, "B" Plan and Partial Season Plan Licensees will not receive reasonably comparable seat location assignments. All seat location assignments for existing "B" Plan and Partial Season Plan Licensees will be made in accordance with the Licensee's preferences as reflected in the Relocation Program Questionnaire submitted by the Licensee. All seat locations will be determined by the Yankees, subject to the pool selection process. Please see pages 36, 38 and 40, respectively, for more information. (emphasis in original)
Got that? WILL NOT RECEIVE REASONABLY COMPARABLE SEAT LOCATION ASSIGNMENTS! Will receive unreasonably incomparable assignments. No wonder Trost is berating us for not having read the fine print, because he as much as said we were screwed, previous statements to the contrary be damned.
Capping it off, on Monday, Neil penned a brief Op-Ed piece for the free commuter paper Metro New York, one whose title may have caused readers to assume he was throwing his hat into the ring as the team's fill-in third baseman ("Neil deMause: The solution to Yanks’ troubles"). Actually, it's his modest proposal to remedy this whole fiasco:
There can be only one solution: The city needs to move as quickly as possible to put this whole sorry episode behind us by starting demolition. Demolition, that is, of the new stadium.
Think about it. The construction jobs that the Yanks were touting from the project have already been created, and the workers are home busily hiding their money under mattresses where the banks can’t get at it. Tear down the new building, and the locals get their parks back right where they’re used to them. Ticketholders get their old seats back. The Yanks can even keep their $350 million in new parking garages as a gift from us for being such good sports — while getting a mulligan on their final Yankee Stadium season, hopefully putting it off until after Jose Molina has retired.
Jay Jaffe, the baseball writer and Yankee fan whose blog posts about his ticket woes have helped spur Polegate, says, "I think it’s a great idea! Tear it down, except for the luxury boxes. Those of us who pay for our own tickets can go back to the great seats we’ve enjoyed for all these years in The House That Ruth Built, while the fat cats can hobnob without missing a thing, as they didn’t come to watch the ballgame anyway."
UPDATE: Over at the excellent Biz of Baseball website, Pete Toms has a lengthy, link-heavy piece regarding the tarnishing of the Yankee brand as it relates to this whole stadium mess and the current economic downturn. A must-read.
Jay Jaffe and a group of friends shared Yankees tickets for 11 years, but they won't be making the move to the new stadium. The 20-game packages of $25-a-game grandstand seats they hoped to get were sold out. Instead, the Yankees suggested $85 seats deep in right field.
"Literally, my words were, 'Are you f- kidding me?'" Mr. Jaffe recalls.
If you're gonna be reduced to a soundbite, might as well go out with guns blazing. Somewhere George Carlin is getting a good laugh.
Instead of being offered our $25 seats, or even anything between the bases, we had been assigned $85 seats in section 107…
…right behind the right field foul pole. Obstructed view, at more than triple the price of what we were prepared to spend. Are you kidding me? No, really, ARE YOU &*^%$#@ KIDDING ME?
The article is a freebie over at BP. Those of you with Yankee-themed blogs, please consider linking to this piece, because the Yanks deserve every iota of bad publicity they get about this. See also the great additional commentary from Neil de Mause at the Village Voice.
As for the clip, once you adjust for the fact that I'd been awake for about seven minutes and was trying to force enough coffee down my gullet to sound coherent, it sounds fine. Though the emphasis is on the Red Sox, there's lots of talk about both LCS matchups.
• I'll be hosting a chat at Baseball Prospectus on Thursday at 2 PM Eastern to discuss both series and anything else you may have on your mind. Those of you looking for something to do after getting home from Yom Kippur services can get a head start on next year's atonement slate by stopping by; that's my plan, at least.
• Familiar faces Joe Sheehan and Cliff Corcoran have nice little wrapups of the Division Series at SI.com on the topic of "What We Learned," in five bite-sized chunks. Cliff's piece covers the AL; here's what he had to say about the Rays:
4. The Rays are an extremely well-rounded team
The Rays aren't going to crush their opponents. They don't have a shut-down ace (though they might when David Price is ready for his close-up). They don't have a don't-let-him-beat-you masher in their lineup (though Evan Longoria could quickly mature into such a hitter). They don't really even have a closer (though curse-spewing Aussie Grant Balfour could assume the role before the postseason is over). They scored just 4.78 runs per game in the regular season, which was a lowly ninth in the AL, and didn't score more than six in any game of the ALDS. They aren't going to beat their opponents into submission; they're just going to out-play them.
The Rays were second in the AL in walks, led the league in stolen bases with a respectable 74 percent success rate, and were the best team in the majors at turning balls in play into outs. Speed, patience, and defense are perhaps the must undervalued skills in the game, and the last has a very large effect on pitching, which is a large reason why the Rays allowed 1.7 fewer runs per game this year than last. The Rays were also second in the AL in one-run wins (to the Angels, who ironically fell one-run short last night) and led the league in extra-inning victories.
One way to look at those stats is to say that the Rays are a team balancing on a razor's edge. Another is to say they're a team that wins games on the margins by being one step faster on the bases and in the field, by tracking down one extra out, and extending their own half of the inning by one extra at-bat, and by not allowing their opponents to plan around their one big bopper or their ace starter. Akinori Iwamura, Dioner Navarro, and Carlos Peña were the top Tampa hitters in the ALDS, but Longoria and Upton both had multi-homer games. Their bullpen allowed one run in 11 2/3 innings while striking out 13. James Shields, Scott Kazmir, and Matt Garza are each capable of a dominant pitching performance. The Rays are dangerous because, while none of their players is going to single-handedly destroy their opponent, they're all capable of hurting them, and the opposing team never knows where the blow are going to come from on any given day.
Joe's piece is on the NL, and his point about the Brewers reflects a change in tune from his thoughts a couple days earlier, perhaps reflecting the enthusiasm he saw in Miller Park last weekend even as the Brew Crew went down in defeat:
4. Despite the early exit, the CC Sabathia trade was worth it for the Brewers.
They may miss Matt LaPorta down the road, as not having him limits their options for future trades, but the Brewers would not have made the postseason without Sabathia, and making the postseason has been a great moment for this franchise. After such a disappointing 2007, in which they blew an 8 1/2-game lead in the NL Central, there was a risk that another such season would jade a fan base just as the products of the farm system were coming together.
By winning a tight wild-card race, bringing October baseball back to Milwaukee and generating towel-waving, Thunderstick-banging excitement for a weekend, owner Mark Attanasio and GM Doug Melvin showed the fans that the Brewers could take the next step, a decision that will resonate for years.
Amen to that.
• Speeking of that, Sheehan's Yankee Stadium Memory for the Bronx Banter series is a fine piece about what must have been a great time -- a doubleheader from 1983, with extra innings in the second game. For a kid that's like ice cream forever.
Emma Span's piece is another worth recommending. Going against the grain, she chooses the infamous Bloody Sock Game (2004 ALCS Game Six) and captures a spirit of camaraderie among the ballpark's infamous hecklers. I bust a gut laughing at her NSFW account of the game, which felt cathartic even after all these years.
All of which prompted me to go looking for my own account of attending the game with Cliff. I wrote it up as a guest piece for All-Baseball.com, which has since merged with MVN.com, orphaning my post. It took me awhile to find it via Archive.org, but I did. Not exactly the most pleasant memory, I'll admit, but I'm proud of the piece and amazed I was able to churn out a nearly 4,000-word opus in less than 24 hours.
Like the other BP series previews (Christina Kahrl on Dodgers-Cubs, Joe Sheehan on Red Sox-Angels, with White Sox-Rays still pending) it's mirrored over at SportsIllustrated.com. For those of you that simply want to cut to the chase and avoid the numbers, here's the payoff. I don't think it'll make my in-laws happy, but I gotta call 'em like I see 'em in this racket, and anyway, I hedged my bets:
This is a more even series than it might appear to be at first glance given the state of the Brewers' pitching staff. That the Brewers might face southpaws three times in a five-game series helps their cause just a hair due to two of those starts being taken by Hamels. The biggest difference between the two clubs appears to be at the front end of their bullpens, where the Phils enjoy a considerable advantage, and the feeling here is that unless the Brewers can find a way to get Sabathia a second turn on the hill for a Game Five, that bullpen edge may prove decisive. I'm predicting the Phillies in four, but if the Brewers can force a rubber game, my money's on the big man.
Also, the flip side of my not-so-happy take on the closing of Yankee Stadium is up at Bronx Banter. It's a top ten countdown of my favorite memories of attending games at Yankee Stadium. A small taste that won't give away too much:
7. The sweltering Sunday afternoon in the summer of 2000 when my friend Julie and I practically peed ourselves laughing at the sight of a young Hasidic Jewish man who somehow fell out of the stands, far enough down the left field line to where the wall starts to slant upwards, a good six or eight foot drop onto the field. Visibly dazed and confused, perhaps even with a broken arm, he was escorted off the premises. His pain was our comedic gain, an eternal reminder of the rough justice of the Bronx.
6. The night of August, 8, 2000, when Oakland closer Jason Isringhausen came on to protect a 3-2 lead in the ninth inning but lasted only two pitches, surrendering solo homers to Bernie Williams and David Justice. The Yankees of the Joe Torre era made routine sport of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, but never did they do so with more surgical precision than that.
I could easily have expanded the list to 20, and once things cool off, I'll run a countdown of the best of the rest here.
Moving along:
• The New York Sun, an occasional outlet for my writing via a syndication deal with BP, has closed up shop. I won't miss their neoconservative politics at all, but their baseball coverage was something else entirely, with Steven Goldman and Tim Marchman appearing regularly, and several BP authors (myself included) getting their first chance to reach the daily newsstands. Christina Kahrl eulogized the sports page.
Apparently, my piece from last week was the final one from our BP syndication agreement. When you folks and your robot monkeys get around to building me the Wikipedia fan page I so richly deserve, please be sure to include that tidbit.
• Alex Belth had something to add about the Sun as well, along with discussing Goldman's last piece and the latest Neyer-Jaffe throwdown. On the latter, so did the good folks at YanksFanSoxFan. Thanks, guys.
• Finally, I haven't had time to write about it anywhere, but I'm elated to hear that Brian Cashman has decided to remain with the Yankees for another three years. I suspect that the dearth of job openings had something to do with that; currently the Mariners have the only GM vacancy. The Dodgers, whom Cashman grew up rooting for and who might be an attractive destination given their payroll and the obvious Joe Torre link, are likely to keep Ned Colletti on after winning the division; that Manny Ramirez trade saved his hide.
Interesting in its own right is that former Yankee and current Dodger assistant GM Kim Ng appears to be the leading contender for the Mariners job. She was the first woman ever to interview for a GM job back in 2005 when the Dodgers tabbed Colletti (ugh) and she's held in such high esteem within the game that it's likely only a matter of time before she lands in the big chair.
The Yankees put on quite a show in the Bronx last night for the final game ever at Yankee Stadium. I wasn't in attendance, alas, unlike some of my NYC-area cohorts like Alex Belth, Cliff Corcoran, Joe Sheehan and Derek Jacques, and without the anticipation of attending the game, I had a tough time summoning the requisite nostalgia beforehand. Over the weekend I did manage to surmount some of my baggage in time to pen a pending piece for Alex and Cliff's Bronx Banter series on my favorite moment in Yankee Stadium; in true Jaffe fashion I turned a simple assignment into a five-reel epic, emerging with a top ten countdown of my most memorable moments at the ballpark. Sooner or later, the piece will join the ranks of those by Pete Abraham, Allen Barra, Brian Gunn, Phil Pepe, Dayn Perry, Ken Rosenthal et al, and I hope it will be a worthy addition.
The flip side of those warm memories is today's piece for Baseball Prospectus in which I come less to praise Yankee Stadium than to bury it. Mainly, it's a much harsher reckoning with all that the Yankee Stadium experience became in the wake of September 11. Regular readers of this site will be familiar with my litany of complaints, from the arbitrary enforcement of "security" procedures to the controversy surrounding the ritualistic playing of "God Bless America," all of which served to make a trip to the ballpark a considerably less fun experience than in earlier years:
The Yankee Stadium which emerged in the immediate wake of September 11 was a defiant symbol of national unity in a time of crisis, and I had the honor of attending a few of the games there, including Game Three of the World Series, when President Bush threw out the first pitch of what Sports Illustrated writer Tom Verducci called "the ceremonial first pitch to America's recovery" (alas, stadium security was so heavy that night that I couldn't gain entry until the second inning, after Bush had departed). The problems began when the Yankee organization, from owner George Steinbrenner on down, couldn't let go of that symbolism. "God Bless America" became a permanent staple of the seventh-inning stretch, devolving from the spectacular pomp of Irish tenor Ronan Tynan's delivery during home playoff games to the banality of the canned recording of Kate Smith and the U.S. Army Band's version. More on that in a moment.
Accompanying the regular renditions of "God Bless America" were heightened security procedures that subjected patrons to no small litany of hassles while doing little to make them more secure. Given the cursory frisking procedures and lack of metal detection capabilities, it would have been possible to gain entry with a 9mm handgun jammed down the back of one's pants and a Bowie knife sheathed in one's sock, but without those, the organization simply inflicted its increasing paranoia and greed upon paying customers. Backpacks and briefcases were immediately banned from the ballpark after September 11, as though any potential ticketholder might be a terrorist smuggling in a tactical nuclear weapon swiped from the imagination of some z-grade thriller. Not even Shea Stadium -- located only two miles from La Guardia Airport -- stooped to such extremes. Anyone coming to the park while porting one of the banned bag types -- say, from work -- was forced to check it for a fee at one of the bars or restaurants across River Avenue. Anyone wishing to schlep a bagful of items into the stadium -- say, a scorebook, a jacket, and reading material for the long subway ride home -- was forced to place those items in a flimsy, clear plastic grocery-type bag available outside the turnstiles. No other types of bags, such as ones with reinforced handles, were allowed, first for vague "security purposes" and then, once fans began pressing Yankee security to explain these increasingly irrational and seemingly arbitrary requests, "because you're not allowed to bring bags with logos inside." As you may have divined, I had many a terse confrontation over this policy.
But wait, there's more. Umbrellas were banned, subjecting patrons to a true soaking at the stadium's souvenir stands, where they could shell out $5 for a flimsy poncho. Confiscated umbrellas were consigned to giant heaps near the turnstiles, where aggrieved fans departing a game were granted the opportunity to choose a replacement vastly inferior to the one they'd brought. But perhaps the reductio ad absurdum was the stadium's ban on sunscreen -- yes, really -- thus creating another opportunity for profiteering inside the ballpark.
All of those were petty annoyances of a type not unfamiliar to any New Yorker; one basically signs up for a host of such inconveniences upon taking residence here with the hope that they'll be outweighed by the advantages of city dwelling. Far more ominous were the crowd-related issues that exacerbated over the past few years. To appreciate them, one need understand the trend of rapid attendance growth that occurred during the Joe Torre era...
For me, the final straw came on April 30, 2007, after attending a tense Saturday game against the Red Sox in which the Yankees prevailed. A very bipartisan, alcohol-fueled crowd had been at each other's throats all game; the cheap seats in Tier Reserved had featured numerous fights and ejections. An irrational security force nonetheless sealed off several of the stadium's ramps, slowing the exits of legions of emotionally overheated fans. It took 40 minutes to crawl from the upper deck to the subway platform, and while I'm no claustrophobe, all I could think about on my painfully protracted way out was the deadly human crush of English soccer riots. The limiting of the exits apparently became standard operating procedure, and if the consequences didn't turn tragic the way I kept envisioning, they nonetheless added an unnecessary, dangerous level of discomfort to the experience of attending a game in the Bronx.
Further down in the piece is a summation of the horrors of the new ballpark's ominously named Relocation Program (if the hot dogs in the new park taste different, you'll know why) and a recognition of the way so many rank-and-file fans stand to be priced out of the cherished ritual of regular attendance in the coming years. On that topic, Cliff C. had a fantastic piece the other day, titled "The Rich Get Richer: The Ugly Truth About The New Yankee Stadium."
Raining on a parade isn't a fun thing to do, and I have to admit, in watching from my seat on the couch last night, I was moved by the pomp and pageantry of the gala affair despite its contrivances. But in the afterglow of the finale, I'm more resolute than ever about the necessity of shedding some light on the dark side of Yankee Stadium's final days and years. I'm not sure things will ever be the same for me in the Bronx again, and I wonder how many fans will feel similarly in the coming years.
