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