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.
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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.
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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.

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Countdown to Gardner

As one mythologized figure gets sent down, another waits for his moment to be embraced. Bloggers and beat writers are chomping at the bit to see a bit of Brett Gardner, who sports a robust OBP at SWB and, as they say, can flat out run.

Having Gardner on the roster wouldn’t be a bad thing. If you can’t grasp the value of a legitimate pinch runner – as opposed to Enrique Wilson – then you didn’t learn one of the more basic lessons from 2004.

Our fear is that at some early point in his Yankee tenure Gardner will win a game with his legs, and in doing so win the ever-lasting adoration of fans, and maybe even Girardi. We’ll all eagerly equate speed with hustle, and if the Yankees do make a wild card push in the second half, his contributions will looked back on as one of the major reasons why. Melky Cabrera, who should not be consigned to the dustbin of failed prospects, at least not yet, will become an understudy in spite of being a superior hitter.

The Yankees might be especially vulnerable to the universal tendency to overvalue speed. We haven’t had a track athlete since Charles Gipson’s 10-at bat tenure in 2003, and the image of Gardner on the basepaths will undoubtedly inspire melodramatic commentary from beat writers and the mindless band of announcers at Yes. Whether or not Girardi will share these views remains to be seen; indeed, if he has any views at all on what kind of traits he admires in a player, he isn’t sharing.

Through some benevolent act of God we’ve avoided a Jason Tyner all these years. It may be that our time has at last come.

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What Joe Girardi should be reading

Because so much in baseball games falls to chance -- the soft pop up that dies between three fielders, the drive down the line which brushes the chalk, the bizarre definition of a swing held by certain umpires -- it is all the more important for a manager to make the right choice in those instances where a decision is required.

This frequently means deciding not to do anything; in the American League especially, the best and only move is often to let the players play and see what falls into place. When managers decide to assert themselves, bad things can happen. This was very much in evidence in yesterday's thrilling win, when Joe Girardi called for Derek Jeter to bunt in the first inning, invoking his predecessor, whose philosophy of baseball we thought was no longer welcome in the Bronx.

Joe Girardi apparently owns a copy of Baseball Prospectus 2008. Presumably he has an online subscription, too (if not, you have to imagine that he could charge $39.95 to the Yankees). In other words, if he doesn’t know it already, it’s well within his grasp to learn that bunting, on average, produces fewer runs than not bunting with runners on base. By ignoring this simple principle, or failing to crack open a book or do a simple web search that might explain it to him, he is costing his team runs. Maybe he’s more like Torre than we thought.

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Books we still won't be reading, even if it's to our detriment

Steven Goldman is the unique example of a sabremetrician who bears, through his Yes Network byline, the implicit imprimatur of the Yankee establishment. Nearly all Yankee analysts (beat writers, announcers, sports radio hosts) are ignorant of, if not downright hostile to, the Jamesian revolution. Michael Kay, the face of Yankee punditry who believes in the sanctity of the RBI and stubbornly holds that wins are the most important barometer of a pitcher's effectiveness, is the clearest example of Yankee conservatism, but he is just one example among many reactionaries who dominate pinstripe media.

Given the culture of ignorance that hovers over River Avenue, it seems implausible that a committed sabremetrician like Goldman would be the featured writer for Yes's website. And yet there he is, more real than Michael Fishman has ever been.

Because we don't take his words lightly, this little nugget from his Yes bio took us by surprise: ""Forging Genius," Steve's biography of Casey Stengel is available at Amazon.com and a bookstore near you, as is "Mind Game," about the intellectual conflict between the Yankees and the Red Sox." (Emphasis added.) Intellectual conflict? It's pretty clear that those who report on the Yankees revel in being members of the old guard, but the philosophy of the front office has mostly been a mystery. So, what exactly does Goldman know? What does the book reveal?

We are steadfast in our refusal to read books about the Red Sox, especially those based on the '04 season, but we may need to check out a copy of "Mind Game" from the library. Or, Goldman could just reveal in his blog the inner-workings of the team's brain trust to those of us too scarred to relive the trauma of 2004. We suspect that he may need to do so quickly; it won't be long before Yes executives realize that they've hired a baseball heretic. Read more

The Clash of Sentimentalisms

We have a theory that in baseball sentimentality is inversely proportional to winning -- at least for the Yankees. New York media and fans love to exaggerate the contributions of bad but lovable players. It's why fans fondly recall Andy Stankiewicz's stint with the team in the early 90's, but few remember Dion James, who was vastly more valuable. It's why the portly Enrique Wilson, with a career line of 14 stolen bases against 19 caught stealings, served as the team's pinch runner during the unspeakable horror of the 2004 playoffs. Give us a player with a funny face (Wilson) or a funny name that makes for a goofy sobriquet (Stanky), and we'll find a spot for him in our hearts, and sometimes our lineup.

A corollary to this theory is that the Yankees are more vulnerable to sentimentality than other teams. This is not because New Yorkers are more sensitive souls than the rest of the country. Rather, it's because we're deeply insecure about the team's disgusting wealth. The only way to relieve the burden of guilt -- a burden which stems from the litany of expensive free agent signings and salary dump trades which every year benefit us at some other team's expense -- is for us (the fans and media) to latch onto the journeymen, the career minor leaguers, and any other underdog we can find. Enrique Wilson, Clay Bellinger, and yes, Shelly Duncan, represent the Yankee fan's penance. It's our way saying to a Royals' fan, "we, too, know it feels like to support shitty journeymen. "

Never mind that this is a false analogy, or that Royals fan would be rightfully offended at any suggestion of empathy from a Yankee supporter. The Yankees will always be filthy rich, and as fans we'll always be despised for it. Since it's impossible even for Yankee fans to embrace this side of Yankeedom -- wealth just isn't attractive -- we need to forge some type of underdog-ism in our identity, even if it's largely a lie. Otherwise we'd be unbearable, even to ourselves. But how can we do this without disrupting the team? Can the Yankees build a roster that makes sense and allows us to feel good about ourselves at the same time? Read more

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

The Edwardians

In his first appearance of the season, Edwar Ramirez, poster-child of the movement to inject saber-sense to the Yankee front office, pitched two innings of scoreless baseball. He'll almost certainly be sent back down in a matter of days, and that's really too bad. We're still waiting for any evidence that Bruney, Albaladejo, Traber, Ohlendorf are better at baseball than Edwar -- not to mention the more established due of Farnsworth and Hawkins.

It's quite a puzzle. The papers earnestly follow Shelly Duncan's mashfest in the IL. Beat writers cum bloggers refer to him as the "Babe Ruth of the IL"; in response fans clamor for his promotion. (His extraordinary stretch aside, Shelly Duncan's minor league numbers are more evocative of Ron Kittle than any other Yankee, past or present.) So why it is that when Edwar dominates in the minors -- which is something that, say, Russ Ohlendorf has never proven capable of -- he is overlooked? Read more

The Running of the bullpen, part 2

Only the most cynical fans root against players from their own team. But our tendency to hope for bad things to happen to Brian Bruney has nothing to with spite, and everything to our desire to see the Yankees succeed.

We believe that good performances by Bruney and co. masks over the impending implosion of the team's middle relief. And it is our opinion that it this implosion should happen sooner rather than later. So forgive us for putting on a dark spin on last night's game, but every strikeout, save and clean inning can only serve to strengthen the grip of the team's woeful middle relief on the middle innings -- and lead ultimately to greater disaster when the games count more. Read more

Russo madness, part 1

Making sense of Chris Russo's syntax can be a bit like trying to understand cricket if you hail from the non-Caribbean Americas. Yet it is only in those rare instances where his sentences contain all the vital parts of speech, placed in the proper order, that you can you fully appreciate how lost he actually is.

A recent example of a sentence, from earlier today: "The problem with Johnny Damon is that he's inconsistent as a player." Damon is struggling, and he is on the downturn of what's been a good career. But just how has he been "inconsistent"? Read more

From smallball to a soccer ball

Last night, as we watched the fleet-of-foot Joey Gathright impose his dubious smallball theories on yesterday's game, we thought now might be an appropriate to switch gears to soccer, a decidedly anti-Fishman sport that has nevertheless filled a gaping void in our lives.


Living in a terminally depressed city of medium size and limited culture in the British midlands, one cannot avoid get swept up in soccer. We are not immune to it, and, for all its flaws, have found terribly exciting, and rich in drama and spectacle in the same way that the baseball is.

But if there is one thing which can ruin a game, and call into question the overall merit of a sport itself, it’s an unjust rule. Last night, Liverpool beat Arsenal 4-2 in the second leg of the Champions League Quarterfinal. The game was decided when Ryan Babel, a striker for Liverpool, was ruled to have been fouled by Arsenal’s Kolo Touré. Steven Gerrard tucked away the penalty shot, and the game was over. The English papers have debated the call for the past 24 hours, with each teams’ mangers and players have offered utterly useless and predictable thoughts on the call.

The point as we see it is not whether it was a penalty, but the lack of justice in a sport which allows games to be decided effectively by the judgement of a single referee, often from great distances. Why allow an important game to be decided by a penalty shot, which is basically an exercise in precision kicking? (In my five years of watching soccer, I’ve never seen a well-placed penalty – that is to say, fired into the high corner – parried away by a goalkeeper.)

Penalty bashing isn’t exactly new, but what is usually criticized is the penalty shootout, not the penalty shot. Then again, what does a expat from Suffolk County really know about soccer?


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What a fool believes

After Farnsworth’s latest pathetic showing, we’ve been thinking a lot about the Yankee’s inability to find even a near-adequate bridge to our ninth-inning security blanket. Since the Stanton/Nelson heyday, the list of failed signings and mid-season picks up is remarkable. Consider: Steve Karsay, Jay Witasick, Mark Wohlers, Kyle Farnsworth, Chris Hammond, Armando Benitez, Tom Gordon .... All setup men who didn’t pan out; all, with the notable exception of Hammond, hard-throwing right handers. (The inclusion of Gordon may be a bit harsh, but his Yankee record will forever be stained by his implosion in the '04 playoffs.)

When will the brass learn that pitchers who can perform up to this weak standard, and probably beyond it, can already be found in the system?

Joba renders this point mostly moot, but we fear what will happen if, or when, Hawkins and Farnsworth take on a greater burden in the second half of the season.

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Johnny damon -- bad politics, bad judgment...and destined for a bad year?

Johnny Damon has already shown poor judgment in selecting presidential candidates, but you'd think that he'd be able to soundly appraise probably the one thing he knows a bit about -- baseball, specifically the athletes who hurl this stitched sphere towards hitters like himself. So it's puzzling to see him quoted in the Times as saying that Toronto's pitching is "probably the best" and that he'd "put them up against anybody".

We know that Burnett just stymied the team, and we're all for improving bi-lateral relations with our nippy neighbors to the north, but with comments like those make you wonder how much Damon actually follows baseball.

What's most alarming, though, is that Steve Goldman wrote recently that a line of .256/.310/.385 isn't unrealistic. And neocon corner outfielders who can't hit, field, or string together reality-based sentences harm society more than they help it. Read more

Cashman Q & A – Why it matters so much

Peter Abraham, Yankeeland's very own buddha of suburbia, has showered us with his benevolence in the form of a reader's Q & A with Brian Cashman. This is a very interesting interview, though not because it gave us plebeians a chance, however remote, to poke and prod the team's chief's strategist. Instead, what's eye-opening is Cashman's candor about his evolution as a GM, particularly his greater willingness to accept statistic analysis in recent years.

His language is painfully vague and impossibly opaque, but Michael Fishman would be grinning were it not for his imprisonment in a solitary cell that keeps out prying journalists (but presumably allows wi-fi signals to penetrate). Read more

The running of the bullpen

It's been two days since the news was made public, but we'd be remiss if we failed to comment on Girardi's roster selection. The position player selectees were mostly innocuous, but the bullpen is where the mystifying criteria employed by our decision-makers begin to emerge.

Granted, the bullpen won't be terrible, and final two innings of every close game will fall to safe hands. But what is the argument for giving a shot to the backend triumvirate of Bruney, Ohlendorf, and Albaladejo over Britton, Patterson, and Ramirez? What have the former three done in the course of their careers, or even during the spring, to merit a shot over the latter trio? Read more

Lucky goes primetime

In a bit of bad news for those individuals who appreciate serious news programming, 60 minutes has announced that it will air a feature on the Red Sox and the success they've have had with sabremetric analysis.

We have mixed feelings on this here at SMF. On the one hand, Lucchino suggests that the Yankees are moving in the direction of statistical analysis, which, in light of Girardi's latest roster decisions, counts as news to us. But, even if we are to take Lucky's word for it, you can see the Steinbrenner's, in their capacious reserve of stubborn pride, move further away from statistical analysis to prove that they don't need to learn how to win from the Red Sox.

The baseball angle aside, how is the considered a story worthy of national attention in the first instance? Moneyball was published in 2003, the same year Bill James was hired by the Red Sox. Even the New Yorker, which is perpetually behind the curve in its sports coverage, ran a piece on this when it might have been considered newsworthy. And we can't fathom who CBS thinks its target audience will be. Baseball fans already aware of the Jamesian Revolution; and non-baseball fans will find the story tedious and unimportant.

If the promo is any indication, we can look forward to a bumbling Morley Safer reveal his complete ignorance about the sport, while Lucchino, Theo Epstein, and, lord help us, John Henry, try to forge a veneer of humility for a national audience. Read more

Strange Times

These are strange times to be a Yankee fan. Displaced on the throne of supremacy by our rival stepsister to the north, pinstripe aficionados from Passaic to Peekskill face another year fearing a certain opponent more than we are feared by them. Even if fans can muster a glint of consolation in snatching from Boston the moral high ground that comes with the territory of near misses and second-places finishes, an inflated payroll, and the equally inflated muscle mass of our players, makes any claim to underdog status ring hollow.

Where others might see darkness ahead, Searching for Michael Fishman see hopes. Hope not in Rodriguez's bat or Jeter's self-assured smile, but rather in a bespectacled office slave pouring over spreadsheets. Michael Fishman was hired by the Yankees to run their Statistical Research Department, a move greeted with cautious excitement by those who understand the the shortcomings of counting stats, and bemusement by those who believe Miguel Cairo was ever an adequate bench player. Since Cashman's blind leap into the hitherto unknown field of analytical research, an area previously considered anathema to the Yankee way, Fishman has not been seen or heard from. Prevented from speaking to the media by his secretive bosses, Fishman remains a spectre, a math messiah waiting to emerge.

And if the our recent signings are any indication -- the dependably VORP-free Mientkiewicz comes to mind -- Fishman remains not only invisible to the media but to his superiors as well. And yet we hope, we watch, we read Peter Abraham with an uncommon zeal, anything to keep at bay the creeping doubt that we may have lost the throne for good.

Strange times indeed. Read more