The things we know that we know

After last night's latest kick in the teeth by the most unlikely of sources, we found ourselves considering the vicissitudes of popular and media perception of managers over the course of a season. If the ship doesn't turn, Girardi, thus far admired for his candor and "no-nonsense" approach, may find himself firmly on the defensive.

Girardi is not only in trouble because his team is floundering. What his supporters might be worried about is how fans and the press will reflect on the season if the Yankees miss the playoffs for the first time since 1994 and the Dodgers make it. Columns will be written in droves about Torre's deft managerial touch, and how sorely his calming presence was missed. Maybe he'll even earn manager of the year of the honors.

What Murray Chase and his peers will fail to realize is that correlation does not equal causality, and that Joe Torre inherited a team teeming with excellent young players as he left a team whose golden era had long passed -- and whose decline he helped accelerate.

We of course consider it axiomatic that managers thrive on luck. And has there ever been a luckier son of a bitch than Joe Torre? Read more

Ride me, big Sheldon

Maybe we are being overly pessimistic, but it seems more likely that Shelly Duncan, anointed the "Babe Ruth of the ICL" by our very own Peter Abraham, will be given a shot as the regular first baseman. And why not? He's large (and yet utterly childlike), enthusiastic, prone to smiling, and one of the few genuine feel-good stories of last year. People seem like him, particularly sportswriters, most likely because he's a walking human interest story.

We've already lamented the free ride he gets in spite of what has been a thoroughly mediocre career. At some point, though, the inability of the brain trust to look in an unbiased way at exactly what the team has in Shelly Duncan is going to hurt them.

The big concern is that the right player may become available, but will get overlooked due to the team's faith in Shelly. Dan Johnson was recently DFA'ed, again, and would probably provide a more dependable bat. He's far from Carlos Pena -- unbelievably a Yankee farmhand once -- but he has consistently gotten on base over his career at an excellent rate, unlike Duncan.

Then again, Dan Johnson didn't toil in the minor league for years, and doesn't play the game with the requisite childlike exuberance. And what use would he be to the team without those qualities on a resume? Read more

Books we won't be reading

We thought it'd be fun to keep a list of books we won't be reading this summer, or ever. One that will be pretty high on that list is a new one from Mike Lowell -- Deep Drive: A Long Journey to Finding the Champion Within. If the title alone doesn't grab you, consider that Josh Beckett has wrote the introduction.

We wonder how soon it will be before we reach a saturation point of books about the Red Sox. The Yankees are not immune to self-congratulatory publishing, but the team has yet to violate the unwritten rule which dicates that players who are not one of the, say, seven best on their team don't deserve their own book. (Baseball Prospectus ranks Lowell as the 15th most valuable Red Sox going into 2008). And while Lowell may have won a deserved WS MVP, I somehow doubt that we'll see in print any time soon a memoir from John Wetteland or Scott Brosius.

Alas, until these books cease to make money, we can only guess which excellent new titles will emerge next. A few possibilities:

"Batting Eight: My marginal contributions to the Red Sox Winning Season" by Julio Lugo

"Cleaning My Plate: Backstops Doug Mirabelli and Jason Varitek's share their cooking secrets"

"Putting the 'I' in Team: My failure to meet any semblance of the expectations placed before me" by Wily Mo Pena

"I'm not Greek, nor am I a God: My personal struggle against mistaken identity" by Kevin Youkilis.

We imagine that any of the above titles would be more readable that Lowell's self-indulgent tripe...unless, of course, he managed to track down Ed Yarnall for an interview. (No, we're not bitter about that.) Read more

On Fora and Fawning

If you support the Yankees, are under-35, and have unfettered access to the internet, it is extremely likely that you'll have come across the uninspiredly named "NYY Fans Forum". Some of you may even post to the site, having registered under a clever moniker like "Jeter4eva" and selected a flashy avatar that combines anime imagery with an A-Rod bobblehead.

Lest we sound too arrogant, let it be known that we too have acted on the urge to post, empowered by a unbelievably available username that alludes to our favorite member of Murderer's Row. What really bothers us, though, is that our beloved community of fans -- and we don't use the word "beloved" ironically -- seems to have convinced itself that the team's current struggles, not to mention every playoff and World Series defeat since 2000, can be attributed to a failure to compete. Or, to use an even more vexing term, a failure to "execute".

We think Girardi addressed this point best in a recent post-game interview. Asked about Ian Kennedy's struggle to throw a first pitch strike, a telltale sign of "execution", Girardi curtly replied "it's not like he isn't trying to get ahead of hitters."

In equating a failure to "execute" with a failure to "compete", one necessarily makes the assumption that the players aren't trying hard enough. Or, even more curiously, that they've "forgotten" how to compete, as if competitive instinct were a trig formula or a set of keys. Every time a pitcher walks a batter on four pitches, or a hitter fails to bring home a runner on third with less than two outs, we are told that our players, by not performing these fundamentals, are not competing. It's not about playing well; it's about effort.

This actually makes us pine for the days when Yankee fora were little more than collections of fawning love notes to O'Neill, Bernie, and Jeter. Are we Yankee fans really as bad at losing as we are at winning? Read more

The Long Count

It was pleasant while it lasted. And yet we never quite trusted the team's early season penchant for winning close games.

We know that close games rest so much on chance, so we won't read too much into it, or offer any kind of recap of what was a painful loss. That's what beat writers are for: to remind us that no matter how bad it appeared on television, it was actually more irritating to watch it unfold in person. And this is the only explanation for the infantile quality of some of the questions asked by beat reporters after the game. Kudos to Girardi for showing flashes of impatience. At the very least, it's a mark of stubborn pride and a refusal to offer trite answers to trite questions, which is something his predecessor had no qualms about.

Lest we go too far in our praise of the manager's ability to undress banal questions, it's worth noting that Girardi also remarked, without a hint of detectable irony, that Olendorf's had pitched "better than his numbers indicates". Read more

Gold Prospecting

If Boston’s rise to superpower status could be attributed solely to an increase in spending, we’d feel better. Of course, we know better than to assume a simple causal relationship. After the Hendry/Werner sale, the team was thoroughly revamped – smarts became a prerequisite for contracted employees, players and management alike. Watching this transformation unfold in the early part of the century, we knew that the groundwork for a winning product was being formed, one that would inevitably derail Torre’s previously uncontested stranglehold on success.

What we did not expect was that as it was building a winning team at Fenway, Boston would pay equal attention to Pawtucket and every other lower station. This caught us by surprise – and it made us feel worse. By drafting and developing very good players, Boston has pre-empted what was been the most effective anti-Yankee barb over the years – “you buy your championships”.

Which is why today is so important. Justin Masterson, the next hyped product of a stellar farm system, makes his debut. If he falters this year, there’s that much more of a chance Boston will throw cash around in Yankee-like desperation come August. If his performance is Papelbonian, then we’ll lose not only in the standings, but also in the very significant department of moral high ground. And that’s about the best we can hope for these days.
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The Franciscan monkey

To some, the season is over. Joba's right arm is preordained to be sliced open. Late innings lead will be turned over to Farnsworth. The team will place somewhere between Tampa and Toronto. Cashman will leave at the end of the year.

While recognizing that the furor over Hank's comments is a distortion of reality -- as are the bulk of developments on River Avenue -- moving Chamberlain to the pen will have pretty big ramifications. There are three competing viewpoints on Joba's future.

Those viewpoints are:

a) He should be moved to the rotation immediately;
b) He should be moved to the rotation later this year, as scheduled;
c) He should stay in the bullpen now and forever, because Mariano Rivera excelled as a setup man as a rookie and then became a legendary closer, and the team must recapture this formula if it is ever to succeed again.

Of those three options, which would you guess represents the ravings of lunatic that has paralyzed the city's sports news for the past 24 hours? It takes a particularly deluded person, in this case Mike Francesa, dogged believer in the innate holiness of middle relief, to make Hank Steinbrenner seem innocuous. And yet he manages.

Moving Joba to the rotation now would be a mistake. But keeping in the rotation for life for no other reason than to try to duplicate the career path of Mariano Rivera would be pathological. Read more