When the Yankees went into the season, the one position their mighty lineup lacked an All-Star-caliber player was second base. Aaron Boone’s basketball misadventures provoked the Soriano-for-Rodriguez trade, shifting the most glaring Yankee offensive weakness to the middle of the diamond. But despite expectations that George Steinbrenner would throw more cash at the problem to …

Continue reading ‘Tales from the Replacement Level: Yankees at Second Base’ »

No sooner had I dragged out the Yankees’ and Red Sox’s run differentials and expected (Pythagorean) winning percentages than the Yanks took a stumble back towards reality, being swept by the Mets in their three-game series at Shea Stadium. What little I saw of the series — about half of the second and third games …

Continue reading ‘Hip to B Squared (and A Squared, Too)’ »

As you might expect, plenty was written by the people who saw much more of Thursday night’s epic Yankee-Red Sox game than I did. Here are a few highlights from the pinstriped angle: • Derek Jacques, who was at the game: The hardest part of writing about this game is that it’s hard to identify …

Continue reading ‘Reverberations’ »

No sooner than five minutes after walking in the door to my apartment, home from my week-long European vacation (Paris, then London), I had the TV on in search of baseball. A week of reading about the nationalistic soccer miseries of two countries and searching for day-old line scores beneath 900 stories about the ouster …

Continue reading ‘I’m Going Back to New York City, the Only Place I Can Get Enough’ »

I’m off to Europe for a week; Andra and I are hitting Paris (for her 30th birthday) and then London. My travels mean I’ll miss the Yanks’ series with their crosstown rival Mets as well as a set with the Sox, both of which I had to surrender tickets for. Oh well, we can’t have …

Continue reading ‘Off the Continent’ »

As I noted on Friday, the good folks at All-Baseball.com invited me to participate in the Rashomon Project — so named for a Kurosawa movie presented from the point of view of four separate narrators — in which each writer (eleven in all) contributed his take on Sunday night’s Dodger-Yankee ballgame. Jon Weisman was at …

Continue reading ‘Rashomon and On’ »

As has been mentioned several times this weekend, the Dodgers and Yankees have met 11 times in the World Series, the most frequent postseason matchup in history. While the Yanks have won eight of those 11 Fall Classics, the two teams have been fairly evenly matched; the Yanks hold only a 37-30 edge in games …

Continue reading ‘A Thumbnail Guide to the Dodger-Yankee Fall Classics’ »

Round one of the long-awaited interleague series between the Dodgers and the Yankees went to the boys in red, white and Dodger blue, 6-3. Former Yankee Jeff Weaver looked shaky, giving up three runs in the third inning and exhibiting the same pouty body language — like a two-year-old with a full diaper — that …

Continue reading ‘Wearing My Dodger Blues, Part II’ »

It took eight years to bring the most natural AL-NL matchup to fruition, and if that isn’t the most scathing indictment of Bud Selig’s poorly conceived interleague plan, then I don’t know what is. The Dodgers and Yankees have met in the World Series eleven times, the most frequent matchup in history, yet until this …

Continue reading ‘Wearing My Dodger Blues, Part I’ »

I wasn’t at the ballpark, but last Saturday evening was every bit as saturated with baseball as Sunday turned out to be. On the occasion of a Baseball Prospectus/SABR Bookstore Event (no pizza, to our disappointment), Alex Belth, Alex Ciepley, Mike Carminati and I hung out for about an hour at Bryant Park, across the …

Continue reading ‘Bookin’ It’ »