Not So Keane Keith Olbermann’s gig as a columnist at Salon hasn’t been much to write home about — like the rest of his career since leaving ESPN, actually. Last week he penned a shit-stirring piece about Buck Showalter’s turbulent history with the Yankees. In it, he posited that an enraged George Steinbrenner, fresh off …
Archive of entries posted by Jay Jaffe
“The Giants Win The Pennant!” Five words that strike an icy dagger to the heart. Five words that–in a particular cadence, repeated with a maniacal enthusiasm–describe what might rank as the game’s signature moment. Five words that never fail to turn my stomach, though that signature moment happened 18 years before I was born, and …
Dis-Carded It took me exactly a week, but I’ve found a silver lining to these pinstripe-free playoffs. The ability to leap from a burning bandwagon just before it careens off the cliff may not be one of man’s more noble traits. But it sure comes in handy these days. I’m referring not to the Minnesota …
Welcome to the Stat Machine Aaron Haspel, who writes a blog called God of the Machine, called my attention to a nice little statistical search feature he’s programmed. Through his page, one can make customized queries against the historical database of baseball statistics. That is, you can define searches for players with (more than/less than/equal …
One Man’s Ballot It was difficult to foresee at the time. But from this vantage point ten days into the postseason, my hand-wringing over my
No Love, New York Nobody wants to hear the whining of Yankee fans this week. Goliath has fallen, and the rest of the baseball world couldn’t be happier. The local papers have already dispensed with the post-mortems and moved on to filling out Uncle George’s Christmas shopping list. I’ve decided to resist my temptation to …
Barry Bonds: Leadoff Hitter? Salon’s King Kaufman has an interesting piece where he suggests that the San Francisco Giants would be better off if they batted Barry Bonds leadoff. When this article appeared the other day, my friend Nick asked me for my take on it. I gave him my best five-minute lunch-hour assessment (short …
Spankees The sun arose Sunday morning and the earth continued to turn, but baseball’s postseason will roll on without the New York Yankees. While this may violate what Yankee fans may feel is the natural order of things–not since 1995 has the team ended its season this early–the Yanks were emphatically spanked by the Anaheim …
Another Friggin’ Thing One other note on the Yankees-Angels series: Anybody who’s watched any amount of baseball this season has had to listen to the likes of Tim McCarver, Joe Morgan, and the YES crew lauding the Yankee defense, particularly Derek Jeter and Alfonso Soriano, in the face of all available statistical evidence. This series–particularly …
A Fistful of Hair Ugh. I’m going to pass on a lengthy dissection of the Yankees two losses to the Angels in the Division Series because I simply don’t have the time or the stomach for it. But the short version is that Joe Torre screwed up in handling his bullepn last night. I practically …