Hip Hip Jorge and other Bronx Tales

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Lovely win for Yankees last night to take round two of the Subway Series against a reeling Mets club that looks as though all nine players are channeling Jay Payton’s brain waves. Seriously, Carlos Delgado forgetting how many outs there were was just one more ugly moment for a team that’s been in vaporlock for the past couple weeks; having watched them against the Dodgers I’ve seen plenty of the Mets during their slide.

Chien-Ming Wang’s career-high 10 strikeouts were impressive, showcasing his much-improved slider and change-up but perhaps also a byproduct of his struggling opponents; the sight of Jose Reyes corkscrewing himself into the ground on the latter in the eighth and then trying not to crack up was worth the price of admission, but it also speaks volumes as to how out of whack the Mets’ heads are these days.

The Yankee offense looked in fine form, piling the late-inning runs on in true Bronx Bomber fashion (always good to leave a footprint on your opponent’s neck). I missed a live viewing of Alex Rodriguez’s monster home run, but then I’ve seen plenty of those lately; over his last 14 games, the kid is hitting .412/.492/.961 with eight homers, and he’s been having great at-bats all over the place.

Also nice to see Jorge Posada rip that eighth-inning short-porch special, which came shortly after I saw his ESPN promo for the first time. Today I took a quick JAWS-flavored look at Hip Hip Jorge‘s budding Hall of Fame case over at Baseball Prospectus Unfiltered. The short version is that his peak is about average among Hall of Fame catchers but that he’ll probably need two excellent or three solid seasons after this one to reach the career WARP levels, no sure thing for a catcher who turns 36 in August. Still, it’s pretty impressive that he’s even on the Cooperstown radar.

Update: There’s much discussion of what I had to say about Posada over at Bronx Banter. I’ve got about a post or two worth of comments in there myself, some pertaining to Thurman Munson, and a couple of charts whose formatting got messed up, so I’ll repost here.

The first is a ranking of the 32 catchers under discussion according to Fielding Runs Above Average. Sparky Anderson famously dissed Munson after the 1976 World Series by telling a reporter, “Don’t ever embarrass anybody by comparing him to Johnny Bench,” but his boy is no longer the benchmark by which defensive catchers should be judged: 

Player           FRAA
Ivan Rodriguez    200
Gary Carter       149
Yogi Berra        145
Johnny Bench      142
Tony Pena         127
Del Crandall      123
Gabby Hartnett    113
Bill Dickey       111
Buck Ewing        100
Ray Schalk         98
Jim Sundberg       95
Lance Parrish      89
Charlie Bennett    83
Thurman Munson     79
Roy Campanella     74
Mickey Cochrane    58
Darrell Porter     54
Carlton Fisk       47
Jorge Posada       34
Benito Santiago    32
Bill Freehan       28
Javy Lopez         20
Rick Ferrell       14
Jason Kendall       2
Joe Torre          -2
Gene Tenace        -5
Deacon White      -11
Ted Simmons       -23
Wally Schang      -51
Roger Bresnahan   -72
Ernie Lombardi   -126
Mike Piazza      -150

The second is the other side of the coin, the best hitters among catchers according to Equivalent Average, a rate stat which measures relative offensive ability, with park and league adjustments built in. EqA is essentially runs created per out, adjusted to a batting average-like scale. Slugging and ability to get on base are in there, as they are in OPS+. A .260 EqA is defined average, a .300 is outstanding, .230 is replacement level (note: the previously published version of this at BB and here used the wrong version — adjusted for season, rather than adjusted for all-time — of the stat. The correction helps Posada considerably.): 

Player            EqA
Mike Piazza      .315
Gene Tenace      .309
Joe Torre        .298
Jorge Posada     .298
Bill Dickey      .295
Mickey Cochrane  .295
Ernie Lombardi   .295
Johnny Bench     .292
Gabby Hartnett   .292
Roy Campanella   .292
Roger Bresnahan  .289
Yogi Berra       .288
Carlton Fisk     .285
Wally Schang     .285
Ivan Rodriguez   .284
Ted Simmons      .284
Thurman Munson   .282
Darrell Porter   .282
Gary Carter      .281
Buck Ewing       .281
Javy Lopez       .279
Bill Freehan     .277
Jason Kendall    .277
Deacon White     .276
Charlie Bennett  .273
Lance Parrish    .271
Del Crandall     .263
Rick Ferrell     .261
Benito Santiago  .256
Jim Sundberg     .255
Tony Pena        .248
Ray Schalk       .246

Note that Piazza ranks last with the leather and fist with the lumber. If I were to “zero out” his defense, giving him credit for league-average defense every year, his numbers would shift from 97.5 career WARP/66.1 Peak WARP/81.8 JAWS to 114.9/69.9/92.4, which would put him in the Bench-Carter-Rodriguez-Berra group, the crème de la crème of catchers. His lousy defense has that big an impact on his case by my system, but it won’t keep him from Cooperstown.

Cross-Platform Synergy

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Another week, another Hit List, this one completed at breakneck speed since I more or less put myself out of commission on Wednesday with a combination of radio, my BP chat, and a trip to Yankee Stadium to see the hottest team in baseball. And no, I don’t mean the Diamondbacks, who left New York looking like the “Join Or Die” snake after being trounced by a combined score of 18-4 during the three-game sweep.

Wednesday night’s game was the only one where the Diamondbacks even got a lead; they scored off Mike Mussina with two outs in the second, but Jorge Posada led off the bottom half by drilling Livan Hernandez’s first pitch just over the rightfield wall. Number of outs over which Arizona held a lead = 1. The Yanks loaded the bases with two walks and a single, but neither Miguel Cairo and Wil Nieves — two absolute zeroes with the stick — could take advantage.

That was the last bit of luck for ol’ Livan, whose velocity seldom reaches higher than the mid-80s at this point. A leadoff walk to Derek Jeter in the third — one of five walks Hernandez surrendered during his brief stint — was soon followed by Alex Rodriguez’s 25th homer of the year, a no-doubter into the leftfield stands. That was nothing compared to the fourth inning, when a two-out single by Bobby Abreu sparked a rally. Abreu stole second and scored when A-Rod singled to leftfield. A Posada walk was followed by a monster shot to right-centerfield by Hideki Matsui, and as fast as you could say “Go Go Godzilla!” the Yanks had expanded their lead to 7-1. That would be the last inning for Hernandez.

Meanwhile, Mike Mussina baffled the D-back hitters in what may have been his best outing of the season. He threw first pitch strikes to 13 out of the first 17 hitters he faced and 20 out of 28 overall, and struck out seven — four of them looking — while walking none. Brian Bruney and Mike Myers came on to make things interesting, but in the end, the Yanks took their eighth straight. With Thursday afternoon’s win, they ran that to nine straight and 12 out of 14; they’re #8 on this week’s Hit List and have shaved seven games off the once-ridiculous 14.5-game lead the Red Sox held on May 29.

Next up for the Yanks is the crosstown Mets, who are amid a slump in which they’ve lost nine out of 10. Spent a good deal of time watching them play the Dodgers, who had problems of their own coming into the series, in front of a star-studded Dodger Stadium audience that included Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (having it both ways with a Brooklyn Dodgers cap), Hilary Swank, Jerry Seinfeld, and — for the first time I can recall in the 25 years since he left he organization — Steve Garvey. Anyway, here’s what I wrote in the Hit List:

Code Blue: amid a 1-5 skid that sends them tumbling into third place in the NL West, the Dodgers recall James Loney and Matt Kemp to fortify a flagging offense that’s second-to-last in the league in homers; they’ve gotten just one from Nomar Garciaparra and none from Rafael Furcal, a duo that combined for 35 last year. The moves pay off as the Dodgers sweep the swooning Mets, with Wilson Betemit, Kemp, and Hong-Chih Kuo–the lineup’s 7-8-9 hitters–homering on three straight pitches. In addition to adding a Bonds-like flourish to his longballs, Kuo’s pitching in on the mound, yielding just two runs in his last 13 innings while striking out 12.

Mets color analyst Ron Darling spent an endless amount of time discussing Kuo’s bat toss amid an interminable multi-night lecture series on proper conduct amid a losing streak. Darling felt Kuo should have gotten some chin music for his admittedly egregious display, and had he left it at that, things would have been fine. But he’d been pressing the same kind of “Don’t hit ‘em so hard, Reggie” whine line for two nights in a row, and I was ready to puncture my eardrum with an icepick after listening to him. I don’t usually watch the Mets, given that I have two teams to follow already. But while I like the clean graphics of their TV network better than those on YES, and while I dig a good number of the Mets players — Jose Reyes, David Wright, the slugging (or struggling) Socialist Carlos Delgado, El Duque, Carlos Beltran, etc — so much about that organization — from the announcers to Shea Stadium to the life and times of Brooklyn’s own Paul Lo Duca (who looked amusingly pained amid the Mets’ ridiculously poor play) — is irreducibly Met-like, and every bit as enthralling as a make-out session with Gary Carter. Yeah, eeeuw.

Anyway, the Dodgers swept the Mets, and combined with the D-bags’ sagging fortunes, narrowed the NL West fight down to two teams for the moment. The aforementioned recalls illustrate a club that’s clearly undergoing a midseason transition; my man Jon Weisman covers the changes over at Dodger Thoughts. Interestingly enough, as the team has cycled through prospects Andy La Roche and Tony Abreu in an attempt to get some production from the hot corner after Wilson Betemit’s woeful .125/.297/.161 start (thought May 4), it’s Betemit himself who’s re-emerged as the best option. Since losing his job, he’s hit .340/.446/.851, including a 7-for-15, 1.200 SLG turn as a pinch-hitter. Nice.

As for the chat, it was a breezy one that likely didn’t piss off as many people as I have recently with remarks about Murray Chass or Tony La Russa (I guess I lacked the rojo, as Ron Darling would say). I’ll cherrypick a few of the better exchanges:


Malcolm Little (Lansing, MI): We’re a little more than 1/3 of the way through MLB v.2007…. ….Can you think of a couple of teams who are very unlikely to get back on track this “late” in the season (beyond the obvious)? Is there a wayward team out there still likely to get it together in time for at least a perfunctory run?

JJ: The last two World Champs, the White Sox and Cardinals, look to be in horrid shape right now. I know the latter has made some advances in the past week or so, but their run differential says that even at 27-34, they’re overachieving. As for the White Sox, man, that offense is just kaput, and the low BABIPs of the rotation have been regressing to the mean pretty quickly over the last few weeks.

On the other side of the coin, I really don’t think the Cubs are as awful as they look or as the media is making them out to be. For all of their problems they’ve still got a +25 run differential and they’re only 5.5 out. Maybe the Aramis Ramirez injury changes things, but I still think this team can wait out their troubles and give the Brewers a scare.

bloodwedding (BK): Let’s face it: Sheffield’s last month makes him a lock for the Hall.

JJ: Sheffield’s a fantastic hitter, no doubt about it, and he’s put up an OPS around 1100 for the past seven weeks. Suffice it to say that no matter what kind of trouble his mouth gets him into, his bat usually manages to hit his way out.

Shef’s JAWS coming into the year is already ahead of the HOF rightfielder standards (120.2/68.0/94.1 for him, 119.8/65.5/92.7 for the average), so he’s plenty qualifield. The question will be whether the various controversies that surrounded him throughout his career, from the infamous “intentional error” quote to the endless bitching about his contracts to his involvement in BALCO to his latest comments about race are held against him. I’m inclined to think that the writers like him because he give them good copy, and that may help. But I do think there’s a lot that can be held against him, with the steroid allegations the biggest threat to him being elected

akachazz (DC): Hey Jay, The situation with the Mariners really REALLY needs to be addressed. Nothing about their roster seems impressive, their hitters are impatient, their staff is mediocre, and they are run by the dunce of the GM world. But their record is outstanding. ???

JJ: The Mariners would rank 10th on the Hit List if it ran today. They’re nine games over .500 but only 16 runs above even, which tells me they’re not nearly this good (as if their roster didn’t tell me that). At the same time, ESPN’s Strength of Schedule numbers say that they’ve played the seventh-toughest schedule, so there is something going on there that’s positive.

What’s working? They’ve got a good bullpen, third in the league in WXRL. They may well continue to maintain that, but I think they’ll have a hard time preserving the 21-12 record they have in games decided by three runs or less without some serious help from the rotation, which is fourth-to-last in the majors in SNLVAR.

In other words, locate your parachutes.

Regarding the Mariners, I had some serious vertical integration going on Wednesday, as I was able to use the same set of factoids for chat, radio, Hit List, and even idle ballpark chatter — not that my friend Julie was particularly concerned about the doings in Seattle beyond Jeff Weaver’s weird season. Gotta love the cross-platform synergy. Also, there was lots of Hall of Fame/JAWS talk in the chat, with Curt Schilling, John Smoltz, several Mets, and Jorge Posada all up for discussion. I’ll have more on Posada in an upcoming Unfiltered entry at BP. Until then…

Chat-Tastic

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Once again — the tenth time, by my count — I’ll be hosting a chat at Baseball Prospectus on Wednesday at 1 PM Eastern. Dodgers, Yankees, Hit List, JAWS, The Sopranos finale, the eternal genius of Tony La Russa, anything but the draft — you’re barking up the wrong tree there. Drop by with a question or submit one beforehand.

Spirit of ’77, Part II: Very Serious

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Alex Belth’s follow-up to my initial entry in our discussion of the seven-disc New York Yankees 1977 World Series Collectors Edition is up at Bronx Banter. In it, he discusses the ’77 ALCS between the Yanks and Royals at length. Here’s the start:

Yo Jay,

Dude, one of the main reasons why I loved football so much as an early teenager is because that was also the time I first really started getting into movies, and NFL Films had an enormous impact on me. The way they visually presented the game, the melding of movies and sport, defined the sport for me. It had a reverence for the sport and mocking sense of humor too. We didn’t have to just read about Jim Brown or Gayle Sayers, we could see. But we can’t see Sandy Koufax or Willie Mays in the same way because Major League Baseball has never had anything close to NFL Films. Part of this is understandable because baseball has such a long season with so many games. You’d go broke if you filmed all of it waiting for a great moment to go down. I understand why it hasn’t happened, but that doesn’t mean that it couldn’t of have, to some extent. The other part is that baseball has simply never been blessed with a creative partner like the Sabols….

Ah, NFL Films, how I love thee; far more than football itself, actually. Anyway, be sure to read the rest of Alex’s entry. I’ll be back with my next installment sometime in the coming week.

Hit The Road, Jack

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For the second weekend in a row, I’m on the road, this time up in Northampton attending my good friend (and frequent FI foil) Nick’s wedding to his lovely bride Atoussa. As such, I didn’t even get to stick around to see this week’s Hit List go up.

The Red Sox remain #1 on the list, with the Mets second and the Padres, who swept the Dodgers in three straight this week, running third. I couldn’t get Thursday night’s San Diego-LA game on Extra Innings for some reason, and pulled away from the computer and the in-progress Hit List with the Dodgers carrying a 5-1 lead into the bottom of the eighth. When I checked back in just before bed and saw that five-spot staining the bottom of the ninth, I was not a happy camper; the absence of hamstring-addled Takashi Saito appears to have caught closer-in-waiting Jonathan Broxton at a bad time (11 earned runs in his last 5.1 innings), though given that the inning began with an infield single and an error on Nomar Garciaparra, it’s not like he acted alone.

Perhaps it was all karmic payback for my vociferously summoning enough anti no-hit mojo to prevent Curt Schilling from finishing his job against the A’s earlier that day; I was texting, emailing and IMing my friends, who loathe the Big Schill every bit as much as I do, in order to prevent the deal from going down. To quote a Deadspin commenter, “If Schilling gets a no-hitter, it will give new meaning to the word ‘insufferable.'”

I wasn’t alone in trying to do so; oddly enough it was a Sox fan who first invoked the Chatter curse by emailing Baseball Prospectus’ internal list to alert us to the no-hitter in progress; when I counted last fall on the occasion of Anibal Sanchez’s no-no, no fewer than 15 potential no-hitters had been jinxed during my time in BP. Like just about everyone else, I was resigned to the no-hitter’s inevitability by the time it reached the ninth, so it was more than a pleasant surprise that Shannon Stewart lined a two-out single into rightfield to end Schilling’s bid. To my wife’s horror, she had barely walked in the door to find me jumping up and down like a rabid monkey, shouting “Take that, Fatty!” A Great Moment in Schadenfreude History somewhat spoiled by being made aware of my childish behavior. Oh well.

In any event, the Yankees rode their 6-2 run back into the Hit List top ten at #9, one spot below the Dodgers. Special guest stars include the late James Brown, C. Montgomery Burns, Ghostbusters, Win Remerswaal, and Bob Barker. Not pictured: Roger Clemens’ fatigued groin, about which enough has already been said, at least until the aftermath of this afternoon’s game. Check it.

There’s a Beer Riot Going On (encore)

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The following is an encore presentation of one of my favorite FI blog entries, originally posted June 5, 2004 and itself recalling one of my favorite baseball books (thankfully restored to in-print status since the original entry). More beer-soaked linkaliciousness here.

• • •

Friday marked the 30th anniversary of one of the more colorful — or dubious, depending on your take — events in the history of baseball, the 10-Cent Beer Night Riot. On June 4, 1974, at Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium, a promotion — ten ounces of Strohs for ten cents — went predictably awry, resulting in a fiasco of epic proportions and a game forfeited by the Indians to the Texas Rangers. Nine people were arrested and seven hospitalized, and an an example of preposterously bad judgment on the part of the Indians’ organization turned into a very strange baseball legend.

Put it another way: I don’t condone angry, drunken mob violence, but I refuse to not be entertained by it when it suits my purpose. Anyway…

Trouble was brewing between the two teams even before the first beer was served. As James G. Robinson recounts for BaseballLibrary.com, the bad blood between the Rangers and the Indians centered around the actions of Rangers second baseman Lenny Randle in a ballgame six days earlier. Randle slid hard into second base on one play, then later gave a forearm shove to a pitcher fielding a bunt and on the same play crashed into the first baseman. A bench-clearing brawl ensued, and Rangers fans threw beer on Indians players.

When the two teams rematched, the Indians fans were carrying a serious grudge. The team had been averaging only 8,000 fans a game in cavernous Municipal Stadium, but 25,000 turned out for 10-Cent Beer Night, many already plastered by the time they arrived. Writes Robinson:

After the Rangers took an early lead, the alcohol-fueled frenzy that had pushed fans through the turnstiles began to push them onto the field. In the second inning, a large woman jumped into the Indians’ on-deck circle and lifted her shirt; in the fourth, a naked man slid into second as Rangers outfielder Tom Grieve circled the bases with his second homer of the game; and in the fifth, a father-and-son team welcomed [Mike] Hargrove to Cleveland by leaping into the infield and mooning the crowd. From the seventh inning onwards, a steady stream of interlopers greeted [Jeff] Burroughs in right field. Some even stopped to shake his hand.

The stadium simmered until the Tribe came to bat in the bottom of the ninth, down 5-3. With one out, an Ed Crosby single scored George Hendrick; two singles later, a bases-loaded sacrifice fly to center by John Lowenstein plated Crosby to tie the game. But slugger Leron Lee never had a chance to drive in the game-winner (Rusty Torres) from third. As the Cleveland fans pelted the field with golf balls, rocks and batteries, someone took the opportunity to swipe Burroughs’ glove. Burroughs chased the fan back to the stands and in response, people began swarming into the outfield, surrounding the Rangers’ star outfielder and ending any hope for an Indians rally.

Dodging more than a few flying chairs, Texas manager Billy Martin grabbed a bat and led his team on a rescue mission to right field. “The bat showed up later,” Hargrove recalled, “and it was broken.” Even the Indians were helping to fight off their own fans. Umpire Nestor Chylak, hit by both a chair and a rock, quickly forfeited the game to Texas, officially ending the Indians’ comeback. “They were just uncontrollable beasts,” said Chylak later. “I’ve never seen anything like it except in a zoo.”

Wild and crazy times. Incidentally, Grieve, Burroughs, and Lee are all fathers of current major leaguers: Ben Grieve, Sean Buroughs, and Derrek Lee, respectively.

In an article from last November (excerpted from a book called Cleveland Sports Legends: The 20 Most Glorious and Gut-Wrenching Moments of All Time), Bob Dyer of the Akron Beacon Journal noted that while the idea of the 10-Cent Beer Night seems self-evidently idiotic today, “The media didn’t seem the least bit put off by the prospect. In his pregame story in the Cleveland Press, writer Jim Braham gleefully proclaimed, ‘Rinse your stein and get in line. Billy the Kid and his Texas gang are in town and it’s 10-cent beer night at the ballpark.'”

In his lengthy report of the affair (which is well worth reading), Dyer recalled that you could buy six cups of beer at a time, and that some 65,000 were consumed on this particular night. “Let’s say half the crowd consisted of teetotalers, juveniles, and the elderly,” he wrote. “In that case, the average consumption would have been more than five cups per person. And plenty of fans were imbibing even before they got to the ballpark.”

The definitive account of the evening was written by gonzo journalist Mike Shropshire in the hilarious memoir of his stint covering the Rangers in the mid-Seventies, Seasons in Hell. I’ve cherrypicked some of my favorite lines from his seven-page account to paint a picture of the surreal milieu:

On the commuter train from Hopkins Airport into downtown it became clear that something really special — or at least different — was looming at the ballpark on 10-Cent Beer Night. At each stop the train was filling with young people obviously headed for the game to take advantage of the promotion. Everybody was wearing Indians baseball caps and Indians batting helmets. As a court-certified expert on brain abuse, it was my educated guess that most of these fans were already loaded on Wild Turkey and whatever medicine it is that truck drivers take to stay awake on long hauls. Their condition suggested that they might be on their way home from, and not on their way to, a 10-cent Beer Night game.

…If it is true the decade of the Seventies was earmarked by behavioral residue of the spirit of the late Sixties, then Beer Night in Cleveland was the archetypal illustration of what all of that was to represent.

…When the game reached the bottom of the ninth inning, the temperament of the crowd became strikingly like that of Billy Martin when he reached his hour of belligerence in the cocktail lounge. What had been a largely congenial gathering turned combative. Woodstock had become Kent State.

…From my safe haven in the pressbox I was delighted by the entire spectacle since my dispatch to the newspaper back in Texas would offer something out of the ordinary and I figured that the players’ post-game quotes might not be as clichéd as usual.

…When I talked to the Rangers, most of them appeared rather shaken by what they had clearly regarded as an ordeal. Billy Martin was predictably verbose. “We got hit with everything you can think of,” Martin recounted with an air of seeming wonderment. “Chairs were flying down out of the upper deck. Cleveland players were fighting their own fans. First they were protecting the Rangers and then they were fighting to protect themselves. Somebody hit Tom Hilgendorf [Indians pitcher] with a chair and cut his head open.”

…About a dozen players were in the bar when I got there. One — Burroughs — pulled me aside. “Hey,” he wondered, “do the stats count in a forfeit? I hope not. I went 0-for-4, but the marijuana smoke was so thick out there in rightfield, I think I was higher than the fans.”

No truth to the rumor that the smoke came from the Indians’ management as they dreamed up their next promotional stunt. And sadly for Burroughs, the stats did count, though he was actually only 0-for-3 with a walk. Fortunately, he did recover to hit .301/.397/.504 with 25 homers and 118 RBI on his way to the AL MVP award.

If you haven’t read Shropshire’s book, I can’t recommend it highly enough. My first copy of it, a $6 paperback, circulated to about seven or eight people and traveled around the world before falling apart somewhere in Thailand. It’s laugh-out-loud funny, and the Beer Riot is just one of its high (or low) points. Imagine Hunter S. Thompson as a beat reporter for a lousy but eminently colorful ballclub — managed at times by Whitey Herzog and Billy Martin, brains a-fryin’ in the Texas heat, the fire only put out by copious quantities of beer and cocktails. Somebody ought to make a movie.

Spirit of ’77, Part I: Grand Entries and Royal Exits

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I’m pleased to announce that today marks the beginning of an extended series of correspondences with Alex Belth of Bronx Banter that will be unfolding over the next several weeks as we discuss The New York Yankees: 1977 World Series Collector’s Edition DVD Set recently released by A&E TV (list price: $69.95). The format of our discussion was inspired by Slate.com’s Sopranos exchanges. In addition to the correspondences, we will be holding trivia contests to give away additional sets provided by the folks at A&E.

This also marks exactly the 1000th post of the Futility Infielder blog, a milestone I’m quite proud to note.

• • •

Dear Alex,

As I broke the shrinkwrap on this seven-DVD Dodger and Yankee World Series film collections we reviewed last year — I couldn’t help but think, this is where it all began. I was seven years old in 1977, and to me, baseball was still a game of catch or whiffle ball in the back yard, and an occasional TV show Dad watched. I knew vaguely of the Dodgers because an old pennant — as red-white-and-blue as the American flag — had hung in my bedroom from the time I moved to Salt Lake City around age four, but the comprehension of baseball as a professional sport whose players had discernible personalities, and whose comings and goings were as accessible as the morning paper, hadn’t reached me yet.

Fast-forward a year later, when the Dodgers and Yankees would meet again in the World Series. By the 1978 Fall Classic, I was collecting baseball cards (that delightful Topps set with the script and the event-by-event game on the back), knew how to read a box score, and followed the pennant races in the daily standings. Somewhere in between those two World Series, the switch flipped, and as fast as you could say Lopes-Russell-Smith-Garvey-Cey-Baker-Monday-Yeager-Sutton, I knew what the hell was going on, from the Steve Garvey-Don Sutton dustup to Bucky Dent’s home run.

At the center of my newfound baseball consciousness wasn’t a Dodger but a Yankee, Reggie Jackson. While I’m sure I saw bits of the World Series games contained in this set, I must have been safely tucked in by the time Jackson’s three-homer game applied the coup de grâce to the Dodgers. Obviously, Reggie made a big impression on my father, himself a second-generation Dodger fan who had no truck with the pinstripes. Via him, Reggie gained larger-than-life status in my eyes. When we played catch, occasionally Dad would toss me one that would sting my hand or glance off my glove. If I complained, he’d shout, “Don’t hit ‘em so hard, Reggie!” In other words, don’t bellyache, and don’t expect your opponent to cut you any slack.

Jackson had come to the Yanks prior to the 1977 season, and while the previous year had seen the reopening of Yankee Stadium and the team’s return to the World Series after a decade of dry seasons, this was the year that gets remembered. That probably has something to do with the championship halo; we remember teams that won it all better than the ones that didn’t. But as I’ve come to appreciate as an adult resident of the Big Apple, it was also a major year for New York City, which was still emerging from its Sucking in the Seventies nadir, its brush with bankruptcy. The blackout, the Son of Sam murders, the advent of Studio 54, and the mayoral race that serves as a backdrop in Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning, which I’ve only just begun reading — all of that and more lent the city an edge while casting a long shadow on the events that follow right up until this day. And the Yankees were at the center of it, with Jackson the self-proclaimed Straw That Stirred the Drink. Aside from the special features on this set — and I’ll wager some of the commentary from the broadcast crew — Jackson’s fussing and feuding with Billy Martin, George Steinbrenner, and Thurman Munson is on the periphery here. His bat and his magnetic smile are the stars of this show.

And then there are the Dodgers, who had reached their own critical moment in history. The 1977 team was Tommy Lasorda‘s first at the helm after 23 years of Walt Alston. Aside from a trip to the World Series in 1974, it had been a dry stretch for the Dodgers since the days of Sandy Koufax. Anchored by their longest-running infield (Garvey, Davey Lopes, Bill Russell and Ron Cey, a homegrown unit who had played together since 1973), they got off to a 17-3 start that buried the Big Red Machine that had reigned over the NL in 1975-1976.

At the same time, and I know this from having already watched the 1977 World Series film from the Yankees set, celluloid consigns these Dodgers to patsy status. Particularly in their road greys, as the imperial Jackson goes deep off Burt Hooton, Elias Sosa, and Charlie Hough in the decisive Game Six, the Dodgers give off a stoop-shouldered, already-defeated vibe. That they’d lose the next series as well, blowing a 2-0 lead to the Yankees, put them well on their way to Brooklyn Bum status even in the eyes of a kid who didn’t yet know his team’s colorful and occasionally heartbreaking past. As Roger Kahn wrote of dem Bums in The Boys of Summer “You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat.”

I know these are themes you and I have talked about a million times in our conversations and explored some of them at our respective blogs and beyond. Given that the 1977 season occupies a similarly key moment in your life and your burgeoning baseball consciousness, I thought this set would be the perfect vehicle for the two of us to collaborate via an extended dialogue, something more than a perfunctory review that says, “I liked it more than Cats.”

So I’ll start it off by taking a quick physical measure of this set. From a design standpoint, it’s most impressive. The individual discs are housed in thin cases that wrap with a cover page of tidbits — line score, starting pitchers, attendance, temperature — and trivia, a Retrosheet-quality play-by-play on the inside, and the game’s full box score on the back. All in all, a very efficient delivery of information. As much as I wanted to see the Dodgers, my Dodgers, I refrained from skipping over the set’s bonus disc, the deciding game of the League Championship Series with the Royals. In some ways, that KC team mirrors the Dodgers, with a similarly stable cast of stars — George Brett, Frank White, Hal McRae, Darrell Porter, Amos Otis — who carried them through multiple battles with King George’s minions, sometimes successfully.

It wasn’t until I moved to New York City that I could even remotely consider pulling for the Yankees, so the sympathy and nostalgia for the guys in Royal blue that I felt while watching this disc was accompanied by amusement that by the bottom of the first inning of the LCS, about 10 minutes into the disc, bedlam has already broken out. With one out and McRae on first base, Brett triples over centerfielder Mickey Rivers’ head. He goes into third hard, and overslides the bag. As he’s popping up, his right shoulder gets tangled up with Yankee third baseman Graig Nettles. Interpreting it as an act of aggression, Nettles kicks Brett. To the surprise of no one who’s viewed the Pine Tar Incident that would happen a few years later, Brett comes up swinging. With his left hand he grabs Nettles by the collar, and with his right he clocks him with a haymaker. Yankee starter Ron Guidry risks life and limb to separate the two as players from both sides, including Munson, jump into the fray. Miraculously, nobody is ejected, but I think you have to go to the Nolan Ryan-Robin Ventura “brawl” to find a fight as satisfying as this one. How did I not know about this?

It’s pretty much all downhill for the Royals from there, despite their knocking out Guidry in the third (fallout from intervening in the fight?). Paul Splittorf, who like Guidry was working on three days’ rest, gives K.C. seven good innings, but then Whitey Herzog La Russas himself to death, chasing platoon matchups through five more pitchers as the Yanks mount a late rally with a flurry of singles. Reggie nearly steals the show with a key eighth-inning pinch-single that cuts the lead to 3-2. He flattens Royals shortstop Freddie Patek on a force out — great diving stop by Frank White, who could really pick it — and the inning ends with Jackson cutting short an argument with the second base ump to sheepishly acknowledge the havoc he’s wrought on the 5’5″ Patek, who’s writhing on the ground in agony. It’s not the last time we’ll be hearing from him.

Anyway, I’m sure you’ve got plenty to add here, so I’ll refrain from mooching all the good stuff from this disc, including the generous selection of interviews and special features.

Have at it, hoss…

j

Men Behaving Badly

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Writing this from Las Vegas, where I’m spending a weekend of debauchery for my brother’s bachelor party. It’s the first time I’ve been here since I was 19, and likely the last for a good long time; writing about baseball doesn’t exactly yield the kind of money you can hemorrhage here without conscience (“call it a rounding error,” seems to be the weekend’s mantra) the way my brother’s investment banking friends do. Anyway, I’m taking a break from the heat and the scenery to catch the latest meltdown by Scott Proctor (his drilling of Kevin Youkilis last night was about all I caught of that game). Not exactly the ideal cure for what ails, but it beats the Jessica Simpson tunes blaring poolside, and I can break down and shave my tongue any time I need to.

First things first, the Hit List is here. Rather than expending another drop of energy discussing the sad state of the Yankees and the various Alex Rodriguez storylines — I did a radio hit on Wednesday and the first thing the host wanted to talk about was the New York Post cover, as if T&A scandals on athletes stepping out were my area of expertise — I’ll cut and paste what I wrote at Baseball Prospectus:

Desperate Times: a five-game losing streak sinks the Yankees to the bottom of the AL East standings before Alex Rodriguez takes a page from the McGraw Orioles by distracting Howie Clark from a popup. For all the bush league accusations (and who knows bush league better than John Gibbons?) and “Yankee Way” hoohah, you can guarantee former pinstripers such as Billy Martin and Leo Durocher would spike their grandmothers in envy of such gamesmanship. As for that other A-Rod story, it stinks of a smear job; since when does such alleged behavior among this demographic merit multi-tabloid, multi-news cycle coverage? How many times would Mickey Mantle or Joe DiMaggio have made the cover of the New York Post if such “reporting” had carried the day? … Elsewhere, Jason Giambi endures a 4-for-44 slump amid heel problems of multiple varieties, and the Yankees strap in for a $28 million Rocket to Nowhere; they’re just 8-14 and have fallen eight games in the standings since announcing the Roger Clemens signing.

The Yanks are #14 in this week’s list, having fallen from two weeks at #12. As bad as they’ve been, they still hold a +30 run differential, which is a good indicator that they should be able to play better than .500 ball (you have to crawl before you can walk). The problem is that they’ve underperformed by a whopping 6.3 games, the largest shortfall in the majors according to BP’s Adjusted Standings, which factor in run elements, park adjustments and quality of competition. That said, now that it’s quite apparent the Yankees won’t be sweeping the Red Sox this weekend, I’m fully prepared to attach the Do Not Resuscitate tag to their chart.

Moving along to more amusing topics, while you may have seen Cub manager Lou Piniella’s meltdown, which comes a day after Carlos Zambrano and Michael Barrett brought new meaning to the term “batterymates” by scuffling in the dugout and again in the clubhouse, the one you really shouldn’t miss is that of Mississippi Braves Double-A skipper Phillip Wellman. There’s a brief description here, but the video — available on ESPN and now YouTube — is an absolute must-see.

Wellman amplifies a couple of tried-and-true tantrum tricks, not only covering home plate entirely in dirt (shades of Piniella and Art Howe, among others), but doing so with his hands and then redrawing a new home plate about three times the size. Additionally, he uproots not one but two bases (Earl Weaver, Lloyd McLendon), tossing third base into rightfield (Piniella) and carrying it and second base with him into the outfield. But in between those two bases, he adds a new one to the tantrum lexicon, crawling on his hands and knees, infantry-style, to the mound and lobbing the rosin bag at the home plate umpire as if it were a grenade. This being Vegas, I’ll wager that’s a vacation of about 10 days.

Freakin’ hilarious — do not miss it.

Update: Better yet, now that I’ve figured out how to embed YouTube video, you can watch it here. Or run for the hills before I unearth every great managerial tirade video on YouTube.

Busy, Busy, Busy

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It’s been a busy week here at Futility Central. In addition to today’s Prospectus Hit List, I had a JAWS Notebook article at BP, a piece on the AL Central for the New York Sun, sidecar Unfiltered entries to both of those pieces, and three radio spots — Toledo, Ohio, College Station, Texas, and my usual XM gig.

Somewhere in there I found time to take in the Yankees-Red Sox series, albeit with my thumb pumping the Tivo remote’s fast-forward button. I’ve literally become tired of watching Yankee games; the combination of the team’s recent mediocrity and typical plodding pace is a total drag when on a given night you can watch about a dozen other games moving along at a more sprightly pace (offer not valid in Boston). Even with the Tivo, watching Kyle Farnsworth endlessly fidget outside the strike zone is no fun.

Nonetheless, it was good to see a bit of energy flowing through the Yankees as they beat up on Tim Wakefield and Curt Schilling; the benefits of time-shifting allowed me to pause after Hideki Matsui’s home run in the latter to cue Blue Oyster Cult’s “Godzilla” for an impromptu celebration of the team’s 3-0 first-inning lead against the Tubby Bitch. And then to see Doug Mientkiewicz upper deck Schilling, both literally and figuratively, aw yeahhh. Derek Jeter passing Joe DiMaggio for fifth place on the Yankee hit list in the midst of a streak of his own added icing to the cake, as did watching Alex Rodriguez get his groove back with homers in three consecutive games, not to mention a nasty take-out slide of Dustin Pedroia that drew words from Boston. Hey, when Jason Varitek takes off his mask to fight A-Rod instead of hiding behind it like a pussy, the latter can send flowers to Pedroia.

Nonetheless, it was a bit of a dark week in Yankeeland for the off-the-field stuff. Jason Giambi’s steroid-related comments drew an audience with Bud Selig, not to mention talk of a voided contract (no chance, and given the Yanks’ cynical contract concessions none deserved) and a failed amphetamine test (quite likely a smear job from within MLB offices; Peter Gammons says that Giambi hasn’t been asked to take follow-up tests, which would have occurred after a positive). My BP colleague Joe Sheehan had an excellent column (free, not subscription-only) on the Giambi situation:

The specifics of Giambi’s point can be debated, but the central idea here, the one that blame for the nominal Steroid Era lies with personnel both in and out of uniform, cannot. The players who took performance-enhancing drugs shoulder the majority of any responsibility, but to absolve non-uniformed personnel, up to and including the ones on Park Avenue, is folly. We live in an era in which the idea of “clubhouse chemistry” is considered a tangible thing that can be manipulated and monitored. With that the case, it’s silly to think that front offices, spending all kinds of time looking for the right mix of personalities, could not be aware of a different sort of chemistry making the rounds.

Fourteen months ago, Commissioner Bud Selig drafted George Mitchell to investigate the use of PEDs in baseball during the pre-testing era. I said at the time, and I believe now, that the Mitchell Commission is a cynical exercise in public relations, designed to turn up no surprises. What I didn’t see coming was how the Commission would be used to focus blame for the era exclusively on uniformed personnel. Every time the Commission makes the news, it’s in some way reflecting badly on the players: they won’t talk, they won’t give up medical records, they won’t cooperate. If the Commission isn’t going to make any new findings along the way, it will certainly make sure to establish in the public eye who the villains are.

To which I say, “enough.” The Mitchell Commission isn’t going to—and isn’t designed to—make any discoveries about the nominal Steroid Era. It has neither the authority nor the gravitas to do any real work. It exists merely in the hopes that it will provide a veneer of credibility to official disdain and/or condemnation of the media-approved bad guys of the timeframe.

The Mitchell Commission should be disbanded. It should be disbanded because all it’s doing is extending the shelf life of a story that does the game no good. MLB isn’t going to get anywhere by trying to figure out who was doing what five to 10 years ago; there’s nothing that can be done, and no credible way or sorting out the impact of PEDs on gameplay, wins and losses, or statistics. If the evidence in Game of Shadows isn’t enough for the Commissioner to come down on Barry Bonds — and no, it’s not — then no amount of paper-shuffling and stern questioning is going to produce actionable information.

The Commission isn’t helping baseball. It’s only keeping a dead story alive, while shifting focus from the evidence we have from three years of testing, from MLB’s toughest-in-sports PED policy, from the great storylines created by the players on the field. In four seasons of testing, going back to the survey year, the number of positives has dropped from the high 80s in survey testing down to a single-digit number. Of the players who have tested positive, we’ve seen a mix of pitchers and hitters—putting the lie to the idea that steroids were responsible for the raised offensive levels of the 1990s—and the entire list has a Q rating comfortably behind your average “Dancing With the Stars” cast.

Also weighing in with a must-read is The New York Times’ Harvey Araton:

Imagine if Jason Giambi had gone to the House Government Reform Committee hearing in March 2005 and said what he told a USA Today reporter last week.

Imagine if, after Mark McGwire had ceased stammering and Rafael Palmeiro stopped grandstanding and Sammy Sosa was done pretending he couldn’t understand English, it was Giambi’s turn and this is what he said:

“I was wrong for doing that stuff. What we should have done a long time ago was stand up — players, owners, everybody — and said: ‘We made a mistake.’ We should have apologized back then and made sure we had a rule in place and gone forward.” In that setting, that context, can’t you hear the politicians and reporters gushing over Giambi, saluting him for setting a standard of accountability for the rest of baseball to follow?

Can’t you picture the commissioner, Bud Selig, thanking Giambi for placating the pols instead of summoning him to meet with baseball officials — as Giambi did Wednesday — and perhaps considering punitive action?

Meanwhile, it appears Carl Pavano’s tenure in pinstripes is mercifully over, as the various big-name surgeons consulted confirmed that Pavano is a candidate for Tommy John surgery. As I said in the Hit List, here’s hoping Dr. Octagon — or Dr. Nick Riviera or Dr. Leo Spaceman, depending which flavor of pop-culture quack you prefer — performs the operation, preferably after some Yankee official slips the guy a $20 and tells him to take a detour through the abdominal cavity. After drinking a six-pack, preferably.

I did a quick bit of figuring on Pavano’s contract, comparing it to the infamous Darren Dreifort deal (five years, $55 million) the Dodgers handed out back in 2000. Using BP’s marginal dollars per marginal win formula, Dreifort netted the Dodgers one extra win for every $13.1 million of the deal. Pavano blows that away, with one extra win for every $35 mil. It may take BP’s equivalent of the Warren Commission to find a worse contract.

On the topic of marginal dollars per marginal win, do check out Maury Brown’s tribute to the late Doug Pappas, the originator of that formula. It was three years ago this week that the game lost its foremost expert on financial matters and one of the biggest bees in Bud Selig’s bonnet, a sad day indeed.

• • •

A bit more about those off-site articles of mine. The most interesting facet of the JAWS piece, to me at least, was the impact of Frankie Frisch on the Veterans’ Committee from 1967-1973. Frisch led the way in the election of some of the Hall’s most dubious members, particularly with regards to my methodology:

To give an idea of just how far off the mark these candidates — Frisch’s Follies, if you will — are, [Chick] Hafey (CF), [Fred] Lindstrom (3B), [George] Kelly (1B), and we’ll-include-him-anyway [post-Frisch honoree and former teammate Travis] Jackson (SS) rate as dead last among Hall of Famers at their positions according to JAWS, which makes them the players that I drop when I compute the positional averages (as explained here). [Jess] Haines is the second-to-last pitcher, which puts him in the same category (I drop four pitchers). [Ross] Youngs is second-to-last in rightfield,[Jim] Bottomley is third-to-last at first base. [Dave] Bancroft, sixth-to-last at shortstop (one hair ahead of Phil Rizzuto), is the closest thing to a defensible pick here.

…Bancroft aside, none of these players are within 25 JAWS points of the average Hall of Famer at their positions. Furthermore, out of the 138 hitters with a JAWS score, Bancroft ranks 100th, Jackson 119th, Youngs 126th, Lindstrom 134th, Kelly 136th, and Hafey 137th — that’s right, three of the bottom five. To borrow a phrase suggested by Derek Jacques, these guys should pack their plaques.

Along with that, a look at the cases of Jeff Kent and Bobby Grich, the all-time ranking of Roger Clemens, I also found time to add JAWS to BP’s glossary, a long-overdue move that can provide a quick reference for anyone looking for the system’s explanation and standard numbers.

At the Sun (which is now free as well), I examined the likelihood that the AL Wild Card would come out of the Central division, as it did last year:

When the Red Sox went into a tailspin last August, the collapse hastened an end to their threeyear monopoly on the AL Wild Card. Confusion reigned, as though birthright and expense guaranteed playoff spots for the AL East’s top two teams, the Sox and Yankees. That breach was filled by a thrilling AL Central race, as Minnesota overcame the upstart Tigers’ early lead and fought off a late challenge by the defending World Champion White Sox. Though the Twins won the division, Detroit’s wild card winners ultimately snagged the pennant.

With the Yankees currently limping along below .500 and nine games behind the sizzling Red Sox, the Central again appears poised to send two teams to the playoffs. This time it’s a four-team race, with the Indians joining the White Sox, Tigers, and Twins. But which two teams will win out? Baseball Prospectus’s Postseason Odds report uses a team’s run-scoring and run-preventing proclivities, adjusted for park effects and quality of competition, in a simulation which plays out the rest of the season one million times. Run the numbers, and the Tribe (67%) and Tigers (47%) have the best shot at October, with both teams’ chances dwarfing those of the Yankees (26%), though both are also well behind the Red Sox (93%).

Three days and a series win for the Yankees later, those odds are more or less unchanged: Red Sox 93.6 percent, Indians 57.5, Tigers 51.2, Yankees 27.5, White Sox 16.3, Twins 9.0. Further sobering news comes in the form of my quick hit at Unfiltered: “During the Wild Card era, just three teams have come from at least 10 [games] back to win a division flag, including last year’s Twins. However, 11 out of the 24 Wild Card teams have come back from double digits to make the playoffs. Five of those teams had fallen to 10 back by the 41-game mark [as this year’s Yanks did], including the pre-Joe Torre 1995 Yankees, not to mention the 2002 Angels and 2003 Marlins, both of whom went on to win the World Series.”

Rest easy on that one.

Sympathy for the Pinstriped Devil

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Outside of a pennant race or a playoff, the phrase “must-win” rarely has a place in baseball. The length of the schedule and the vagaries of hot-and-cold running hitters and pitchers require an ability to modulate such extremes, especially before Memorial Day has even rolled around.

But last night’s 6-2 Yankee victory over the Mets was about as close to a must-win as the Yanks have had for awhile. Coming in at 18-23, having already lost the first two games of the Subway Series, and with a double-digit deficit in the AL East — the first time since September 22, 1995 they’ve been so far back — the Pinstripes had arguably reached the new nadir of the Joe Torre era.

Worse, they had Tyler Clippard, the sixth rookie and 11th pitcher overall to start a game for the Yanks, set to make his major league debut the day after fellow rook Darrell Rasner’s season may have ended with a broken finger. The offense had produced just 31 runs over the previous seven-losses-in-nine games while hitting .247/.301/.391, with Bobby Abreu (.147 during that span), Alex Rodriguez (.176), Robinson Cano (.182), and a bone spur-addled Jason Giambi (.062) tying bricks around the feet of any potential rally. They were facing the NL’s best team, the division-leading Mets.

Amid all of this, the team was making headlines for ugly reasons. First there were Kyle Farnsworth’s comments about Roger Clemens’ ability to come and go (better to send Farnsworth away for three days at a time; that’s not much different from his inability to take the ball for consecutive games). Then came Jason Giambi’s offhand comments about steroids, which may have unwittingly given the Yankees an opening to void the remaining $26 million of his contract, and Bud Selig an opening to grandstand by flexing his best-interests-of-baseball powers years after they may have been relevant to the matter at hand. And as ever, the Joe-will-go rumors are in the air like a noxious cloud.

For all of it, the Yanks looked like a fading diva caught in the harsh glare of the spotlight without adequate makeup. Dear Lord, turn off the Ugly!

Somehow, the Yankees pulled it together for one night. Clippard sparkled in his debut, limiting the NL’s most potent offense to one run and three hits over six innings while striking out six. Jose Reyes went down swinging to open the game, while three of those K’s — David Wright, and Carlos Delgado times two — were of the backwards variety. The rookie hurler even laced a double, joining the fun as the Yankee offense finally caught a break or two. Key was Johnny Damon’s two-out bloop double in the fourth, which plated two runs and immediately preceded a two-run homer by Derek Jeter off a suddenly rattled John Maine. Jeter’s been flat-out raking: .365/.443/.491, with hits in 38 out of 40 games (he holds a share of the season record of 135) and going back to last year, 73 out of his last 76. He’s a .370 hitter against the Mets (85 for 230) during the history of interleague play. You can’t stop him, you can only hope to contain him.

Jorge Posada, who’s only killing the ball at a .382/.441/.618 clip himself, extended his hitting streak to 15 by adding a solo shot in the fifth, while Rodriguez made the most of his late arrival to the outburst by chalking up his second homer in as many days. The bullpen preserved Clippard’s big W, though Damion Easley homered off Mariano Rivera. You had to squint to see it, but for one night, the Yanks gave off the air of a championship-caliber ballclub.

Alas, that’s hardly a consolation given that this was a salvage job for an otherwise disappointing series. And the road — metaphorically speaking, since the Yanks are actually at home for the next week — doesn’t get any easier. The Red Sox, who at 30-13 have the majors’ best record, are in town for a trifecta of agita-inducing games, and the Yanks can ill afford to lose any more ground to their archrivals. They’ve got a pair of nemeses in Tim Wakefield and Curt Schilling surrounding would-be porn star Julian Tavarez — yes, you may want to take a carrot peeler to your brain after that mental image comes through, but it ought to be good for some colorful commentary at the Stadium — but at least they avoid the blisteringly hot (and just blistering) Josh Beckett. That series is followed by three more with the AL West-leading Angels, who’ve kicked the Torre-era Yanks’ collective ass so hard they’ve worn through a pair of cleats.

As for the Giambi situation, this probably marks another turning point in the lengthy steroid saga. You can deplore what he did, but you’d still have to admit that since BALCO broke, Giambi’s been the closest thing to a mensch about the matter among those implicated — no excuses, no denials, no persecution complex, just putting his head down and trying to put the past behind him one pitch at a time. Fans and pundits rode his veiled apology hard a couple years back, and now they along with the feeble Selig, the odious Mitchell investigation, and even the cynical Yankee front office, which agreed to strike steroid language from his seven-year, $120 million deal, have decided to reward his candor with a “Gotcha!” Mark this, neither you nor the powers will hear another active player speak candidly about having used performance enhancers, because the media and the men in charge will instantly turn it against him.

That’s unlikely to evoke sympathy for Giambi, or the Yanks, and with the big money invested in both it probably shouldn’t. Right now, the wheezing $200 million dollar leviathan looks capable of being drowned in a half-inch of water, and there’s no shortage of people who’ve been waiting for that show for all too long.