New home!

Looking for SMF? Check us out at our new home

http://searchingforfishman.wordpress.com/
Read more

Gamers?

It's been six full days since the last Yankee loss, and here at SMF we could have used even a few more days to recover from last weekend's drubbing at the hands of the merciless Indians. Last night's loss was perhaps equally deflating, and with two remaining games at the home grounds of the "Olde Towne Team", it's highly doubtful that fans will be granted any sort of respite this time. It's become a cliche, but these games, taut as they are with emotion, are replete with mini-dramas, some of them personal, that make baseball the great game that it is.

Here are SMF we downplay the emotional side of the game. In keeping with Sabremetric theory, we avoid subjective descriptions of ballplayers. You'll rarely hear us describe a player as "clutch", or as having "heart" or, one of our favorites, as a "gamer". Last night, though, made us consider, for a brief moment, that the Red Sox might possess those qualities in abundance. In the top of the 10th, the Yankees put two on against the mighty Papelbon, with Teixeira due up. A visit to the mound followed. As the powwow broke up, the camera lingered on the mound just long enough to show Youkilis turn back to his teammate and say something to the effect of "just fucking blow it by him". Papelbon, who had previously been so out of sorts that he allowed a sharp leadoff single to the meekest of the meek, Jose Molina, proceeded to do just that.

The moment probably meant nothing. There's no reason to believe that Papelbon threw any harder after Youkilis's exhortation. Or that Papelbon even heard him. Or that our lipreading skills are even any good. But while it's entirely believable that Youkilis would say something along those lines, could you ever imagine a Yankee player say something so raw and emotional? Do the Red Sox simply have, in addition to the smarest front office in the league, the most gamers as well? If so, the team is at even greater disadvantage that we'd previously thought.
Read more

Blogging the Yankees, one loss at a time

Last night we had a brilliant thought. Since we find everyday blogging too demanding, why not lighten the load by simply writing after each loss? If the fluctuation of comments on Lohud is any indication, it's the losses which boil our blood, not the hum-drum two-run victories.

How could I have known that the very next day my epiphany would provide a loss of titanic proportions, the ground zero of Yankee pitifulness? But now that we've been spotted a lead, we don't know quite what to do with it. How do you sum up such a colossal fuck up? And, more to the point, if today is the first day of a diary of Yankee losses, where can we go from here?

Only up, I suppose. Rather than try to encapsulate today's ballgame, we'd rather highlight a few of the more salient points. Besides, this blog is more about what each loss signifies more than anything else. We care about the failure of the team in theory as much as the team's failures on the field -- and when those two strands happen to converge, all the better.

So, rather than place bets on whether Cleveland reaches 30 to tie an ML record (the game isn't over, so we're cheating a bit), let's run through a few things of note:

- At some point, someone needs to take responsibility for the bench play. And that person has to be Brian Cashman. Any idiot with a blank check can figure out that Mark Teixeira and CC Sabathia are worthy of pinstripes. It takes smarts, though, to go through the trash and find someone serviceable when those stars come up lame. To wit, Cody Ransom. Why not, we wonder, bring in Mike Lamb?

- If this is the offense we can expect all year from Brett Gardner, he's going to have to learn to play a decent centerfield. It's the least we can do for us.

- We've been Edwar's biggest defender, but his inability to throw strikes and keep the ball in play is wearing thin.

- The bullpen is not good. Other than Mariano Rivera, not a single Yankee reliever would crack the pen of the Red Sox. That's very revealing.

Final thought of the day: do Girardi and Cashman have the balls to jettison Wang from the rotation?
Read more

Explaining Brian Bruney

"The bullpen is Bruney and Mariano -- and that's it." That's how Mike Francesa explained the Yankees' bullpen woes on this afternoon's program after the opening day meltdown.

The fan reaction has revealed a similar faith in BB as a reliable arm, a pitcher who will succeed in the eight inning where the likes of Farnsworth and scores of others have failed since the Stanton/Nelson days of yore.

Here at SMF we've never understood the public's embrace of mulleted flamethrower. Apart from a solid spell in an injury-shortened 2008, Bruney has been less than mediocre, and his SO\BB rate for his career is an apalling 1.4. Why is there so much optimism in his ability to bring the game to Rivera?
Read more

The arrogance of Mike Scioscia

It's been nearly four months since my last post, a fact which makes a mockery of the whole idea behind a blog.

It's what happens when you uproot and move to a new city. Emails go unanswered. Bills go unpaid. Projects get pushed aside.

Since the last entry, the pinstripes played their final game at the stadium against the Orioles, a game which to everyone's relief they won. But the Yankee's grim season is not the inspiration for this overdue post. We've long repressed the memories of a rotten year. It's about our northerly neighbors who eked out a win last night against the Angels and slipped into the ALCS.

We caught the game from 7th inning onwards, and learned a valuable lesson on how a manager's arrogance can cost his team dearly. After the Angels plated two to even the score in the 7th, they put a runner on third with one out in the 9th.

And here's where the cracks in the logic of smallball, that brand of play long favored by Scioscia, emerged. The batter Aybar got ahead of Delcarmen 2-0. Rather than let the player make the decision about the course of his at bat, the most of crucial of the evening by far, Scioscia decided to dictate the terms of it by calling a bunt -- a suicide squeeze, no less. The ball missed Aybar's stationery bat, and Varitek wobbled down to third to (just) tag a stranded Willets.

Michael Kay once criticized Terry Francona for never playing hunches. Francona rarely puts on a hit and run, a double steal or anything else that could thwart an offense that would put up runs if it played on the moon.

Tito is a company man, and he knows it. His main role is not to fuck up what the organization does. It must take a bit of humilty to admit to the press that you don't ever run the team on instinct. Managers are famous, after all, for gut decisions. Boston, Oakland and other smart clubs stifle those instincts, many of which lead to losses like last night's.

Francona and other managers who join a moneyball francise commit a form of professional castration. But in relinquishing control, they are rewarded beyond imagine. Paroxidically, today few would call Francona an inferior tactician, despite the absence of any strategy to his approach. Not even Michael Kay.

Scioscia, through his own arrogance, seems to want to make people think that he's in control of things. I'm convinced that small ball managers and their advocates suffer from the weight of their own egos. They like small ball because it makes them seem pivotal when in fact they are powerless.

And it's that kind of thinking in the opposition which will make Francona a winner, again.
Read more

The Gardner myth builds

We've been waiting patiently for the Gardner myth to at last take off, but in spite of seeing-eye game winning hit against the Red Sox, it hasn't. This is thanks to his relatively feeble performance to date, which even the eager to embrace NYYFans have noticed.

However, during a casual browse through old Abraham blog entries, we came across numerous explosions of praise for a player who is batting .129 without any extra base hits in 31 at bats. Amidst the undeserved accolades was one especially groveling touch: in the Yanks victory over the Sox on July 5th, Abraham credits a game-winning RBI to Gardner for his sacrifice fly in the 6th inning. Not only is the game-winning RBI a meaningless stat -- so much so that it has actually been dropped as an official statistic -- but Abraham was wrong. The game-winning RBI in fact belonged to Melky Cabrera for his first inning single. (Meaningless stat, you see.)

When a poster pointed this out to Abraham, he promptly did the right thing and edited his original entry. We wonder if Abraham will delete some of his more glowing praise from past posts if Gardner continues to prove incapable of hitting major league pitching.
Read more

Reinventing the Wheel

SMF has been on a brief hiatus, a state of affairs which is the happy product of having little to complain about, other than the continued strong play of the Rays, whom we refuse to refer to as “pesky”, if only because Jason Tyner is no longer on their roster.

Yet the team is a long ways from comforting stability, and in spite of the media’s casual confidence that the Yankees will be playing in October, we still have our doubts.

In the spirit of our longstanding irritability and impatience with an obviously flawed team that should be too rich for obvious flaws, we felt it appropriate to revisit briefly two team’s biggest problem areas – the bullpen and the bench – and the decision-makers consistent failure to offer any remedy.

As always, the main concern isn’t the problem itself, but the team’s failure to identify even the most obvious solutions. Nowhere is this more apparent than the bench. While we may have issued a pre-emptive warning against a Brett Gardner appreciation movement, he was the optimal choice, and certainly better than Justin Christian, whose career .792 OPS in the minors should trump any consideration of his against-all-odds climb to the big leagues or even his right-handedness, which was the putative reason for his call up.

And then there’s the bullpen. The collective failure of this group has been dissected enough, but the blame for the blame rests squarely on management. We wonder: instead of going after the ballyhooed flamethrowers Cashman and co. have always been fond of, why doesn’t the brass recognize the virtues of steady set up men of the Dan Wheeler variety? Wheeler is having a great year, and given his affordable price, it’s appalling that the Yankees continue to relive the Steve Karsay disaster year after year. Wheeler may be punching above his weight, but one need to rely on the benefit of hindsight to recognize his superiority to Latroy Hawkins.

Read more