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