You ever see State and Main? I haven’t seen it in a few years, myself, but if I recall correctly, there’s a scene in which Alec Baldwin wrecks his ride, gets out all drunk, announces in a not-uncontented tone, “Well…that happened,” and toodles off, leaving his underage date concussed up in the car.

I don’t remember the exact details of the scene (and someone’s going to email me with a correction in three…two…one…it’s probably fixed now so I won’t sweat it), but it’s something I always say when a situation leaves me nothing else to say, and it’s what I said when I arrived at Bean’s house to watch the Mets game Saturday night. Bean, a Mets fan, said with an impressive amount of sincerity, “Sorry, dude,” and I really had no choice but to shrug, “Well…that happened.”

And then, a silence.

And then I regarded Bean, attired from top to toe in orange and blue, and asked for a corkscrew, stat.

So…yeah. I mean…well…that happened. You know? What else can I say, really. We’ve still got another two weeks of baseball, which is nice, and what I said in a recent column still holds true; my text-message inbox is overflowing with penetrating insights like “argh,” “WTF?!,” “Noooooooo!,” and “Fuck this,” all of which flew between bars and couches and sidewalks in the last week. It’s an exciting time, the postseason, when a grandmotherly woman and I can summon the restless ghost of Ray Knight in a bowling alley in Sunset Park. Baseball fandom has a ritualism about it; it allows a channeling or spending of unexpressed melodrama. It lets you wail and gnash your teeth and bang your forehead down on the nearest hard flat surface to nail the punchline. It directs gratitude, contentment, mourning, rage. It shouldn’t have all these jobs, because it’s just a game in the end, but it does.

It can also turn neuroses into full-blown compulsions, and Yankee fans can look forward to months of obsessive Monday-morning managing and misdirected hostility in the blogosphere and at the bar. It started before Saturday’s game even ended, for God’s sake; radio listeners heard the tiny [thock] of the seal breaking on a bottle of Old Granddad as Sterling and Waldman gave up on the season and started drinking. (In Sterling’s case, not necessarily in that order, but I think we have to give him a pass on it this time.)

So, to the post-mortem. Assume the customary disclaimers about my impressionistic take on the game here.

Waldman

She’s taking some heat for her comments during the broadcast; I believe it was some of the commenters at Replacement Level Yankees Weblog who felt she didn’t show the team enough support during the drain-circling the other night. I didn’t hear every word she said, but I do remember Sterling calling the game “gut-wrenching” and Waldman correcting him that a close game in which the players don’t look anesthetized is gut-wrenching, while this game was just an embarrassment. And I also remember saying, out loud, “God, word.”

Now, I like Waldman. I liked her on the YES Network, I like her in the booth with Sterling, and while I can understand why others don’t like her, I don’t think I see why Waldman has to temper comments like that — she was speaking the truth. It was an embarrassing display. The team looked completely lost and logy at the plate; they couldn’t get it together, and at times it seemed like they didn’t know they should try. It isn’t Suzyn Waldman’s job to shine that on, and if Michael Kay wants to do his relentless-homerism thing and try to make it out like the Yankees caught bad breaks with the rainout and the travel day and the blah blah, fine, but if Waldman is sitting there with an inch of Kentucky’s finest and a wild hair, well, good for her, because we were all thinking it, or should have been. Any Yankee fan who legitimately believes that the Yankees got hard done by in this series really needs to meet my friend, Mr. Reality.

Come on, people. Waldman didn’t beat the Yankees; the Tigers did, soundly and fairly, with a little help from the Yankees beating themselves. And partisanship in the booth is okay, I think; it doesn’t bother me when broadcasters root for one team or the other, as long as the plays get called accurately and reasonably. Kay does not do that very well; Waldman does (actually, so does Sterling) — you can root for the team and still dog them out for screwing up. I’ve done it a dozen times in this space. I love the Yankees and I want them to win, but in the absence of a starting pitcher who didn’t serve his country in the First World War, they needed to hit, and didn’t. To an embarrassing degree.

Lay off the Sooz. This isn’t on her.

A-Rod

It isn’t on him either. It just isn’t. The whole team looked like The Louis Braille Base-Ball Academy for three days. Did he suck? Oh Mylanta yes he did. You know who else sucked? Everyone.

Alex Rodriguez is a problem. I don’t think it’s fair to blame him entirely for the Yanks’ failure in the ALDS; I don’t think it’s fair to keep harping on his clutchness when we really don’t have the right stats to measure that at the moment. But I also don’t think that he had no negative effect; it’s entirely possible that all the hoop-de-hoy surrounding him this year had an impact on the rest of the team, that the SI article and the uptick in throwing errors and the unconsidered booing of some of the fans rattled not only his cage but the rest of the team’s as well.

The guy is a head case, it looks like, and that won’t work in New York. You have to go out there, do your shit, and not explain yourself or try to suck up to them, and you can think what you want about Jason Giambi but the guy got that a hundred percent. He issued the apologies he needed to, he didn’t give any details, and he put his head down and went to work, and after a while, he got the fans back on his side, because he went out there and got it done and didn’t whine. A-Rod is a great player, but it means too much to him that everyone in New York sees that, acknowledges it, forgives him his mistakes because of his other contributions. Loves him. But you can’t come onto a team that already contains Derek Jeter, and that has in the past contained such scrubs as Mickey Mantle and Lou Gehrig, and wait for the mantle of worship to settle on your shoulders. You have to go out there and get the hits and keep your mouth shut, and he’s still not getting that.

But he is what he is, so now what? Trade him? I’d sort of like to see him go to Philly, if he thinks it’s so tough to catch a break from the fans here. See how you do with the bases loaded when you’ve got nine-volts pinging off your batting helmet, Princess; I know some Yankee fans gave you a harder time than you deserved, but you ain’t seen nothin’, seriously.

What I’d really like is for him to suck it up, adopt a Steve Carlton “never complain, never explain” attitude and stick it, and run out and play without feeling like he and the fans and Moss Klein all have to go to relationship counseling every time he looks at strike three. I’d like the entire team and the front office to just pretend everything’s cool and stop drawing attention to the story.

But he’s a distraction. It isn’t about his numbers, it isn’t about his attitude, not anymore. Now, it’s about the fact that Torre dropped him to eighth in the batting order in a deciding game. I’ll get more into that later, but if your boss gave you that kind of no-confidence vote, publicly, on a national stage, and signaled to you and the rest of your industry — hell, your country — that he does not trust you to do your job correctly? Because you can’t unknow that. You can’t forget it. When it was important, your boss didn’t think you could handle it, and he made sure you and everyone else got that — he put that making sure first, ahead of what would have probably been better for team morale.

That is a cold, lonely place to find yourself. Alex Rodriguez gets paid a lot of money to eat that kind of thing and pretend it’s cherry pie, so I don’t feel sorry for him, exactly, but I think it’s not a tenable situation in terms of conflict and the way it gets handled. Did he “deserve” to drop to eighth in the order? Yeah, kind of. In August. You can’t make that kind of lineup change and expect it to get any results in the playoffs — except the results it did get, namely that they lost.

Let me put it another way. I think A-Rod had a window in which he could have started turning this around — zipped the lip, focused on his hitting, risen or fallen with his performance and not commented on it either way. He missed that window, and whether Torre slammed it shut on him or not, I don’t think it can work for him here anymore. He’s always the story, whether it’s fair or not, and when that’s the case, it’s better for everyone to just give it up as a bad job.

Torre

Speaking of bad jobs. I would like to believe that Joe Torre did not drop A-Rod to eighth to set him up as a scapegoat. I would like to believe that Torre did it because he believed a lineup reshuffle would work best for the team — that he thought it over, that he knew it would look bad in terms of his belief in his third baseman but went ahead with it anyway because it would strengthen the order. Because eighth is insulting to a player of A-Rod’s caliber. Eighth sends a message, and that message is, “You are fucking up, badly.”

That kind of message can rededicate a player to figuring his shit out, sure, but again, a crucial postseason game is not the time to do it, because the message it sends then is, “1. Nobody’s safe; 2. I don’t know what else to do.” Pulling that crap on last year’s MVP, in a must-win game? Never mind having no confidence in him; you clearly have no confidence in yourself.

But…I could still believe that Torre did it in spite of how it would look, not because of it, if he had not sat Jason Giambi as well. But he did. Okay, Giambi has a wrist issue, and it’s not like he was hitting much better at .125, but who’s at first? Sheffield, an even suckier fielder than Giambi who’s playing out of his natural position — and batting a princely .083. Giambi has a better eye and was not out for most of the season. The fans believe in him; it’s a must-win game. So you sit him, and you stick a knife in A-Rod’s back? Why — because you think this is the best lineup you can run out there?

Or maybe it’s because you have a bad feeling about your starter — with good reason — and you sense that it’s curtains for your team tonight, so you want to start setting your players up now for the purposes of plausible deniability.

Torre had a lot to deal with this year — two of his big hitters out most of the season with serious injuries, crappy starting pitching, more DHs than middle relievers and no ideal first baseman. The team is aging; A-Rod is, as previously mentioned, always the story whether he’s really the story or not. But they got through all that, buckled down, and won the division handily; it wasn’t always pretty, but they got it done. They had the tools. I don’t know that those tools were used correctly.

The firing rumors are rampant as of this writing. I don’t know if firing Torre is the solution, but I wouldn’t have a problem with it at this point, because something is not working. This team could have won — not that it should have, or that you’d have been a fool to bet against it, but it could have won. Maybe they got distracted, maybe they all slumped at the same time, maybe they were thinking too far down the road and didn’t take care of the business at hand, maybe the hitters were just tired of trying to bail the starters out of trouble all year; I don’t play baseball, I’m not in that clubhouse, I can’t say exactly. But Jim Leyland hauled a team that lost twice as many games as they won last year into the playoffs, during what looked like a team-wide systems failure, and he got it done. Torre didn’t. I don’t know why. I can speculate, but I don’t know the exact reasons, and maybe it’s time for a new regime.

The names I’m hearing don’t fill me with hope, I have to say. Lou Piniella is not a great fit with a team like the Yankees; I enjoy watching him have a hissy as much as anyone, but I don’t think that’s effective leadership on a team of high-priced veterans, which, like it or not, the Yankees will remain for the next year or two. Nor is Girardi a guy I want to see trying to run things, because I think he’s too green to handle a team like this, and I’d like to see Maz step away from Daddy again and take the reins of another club, but…not this one.

Mattingly? Interesting idea, but he’s a recent coaching addition and is also probably too smart to risk tarnishing his household-saint status. Showalter? Maybe.

But Torre isn’t the only problem.

Age Before Beauty

I forget which blog I read this on last night — I think Canyon of Heroes, which has an extensive rundown of changes both idealized and realistic that could be made for the 2007 season — but one of them suggested moving Randy Johnson to the bullpen and letting him spot-start. No way is RJ going to allow this, but in a perfect world, that’s how you let him serve out the rest of his contract. He was a great pitcher once; now he’s just old. Jaret Wright? Never a great pitcher; dump him. Moose is a very good pitcher, but he’s old too. Mo is an all-time great reliever who is also old. Old, old, old. Who among the name players on the ’06 Yankees is under thirty? Cano, Cabrera…come on.

The team needs younger blood, especially in the pitching department. If Cashman can buy Dontrelle Willis, I will cringe in anticipation of the bitter commentary from Yanks-haters, and then I will write him a proper thank-you note on scented stationery, because GOD. Get some starting pitching that doesn’t reek, get some guys up from Columbus that can eat innings, start looking around for another closer, and hire a manager who knows how to manage pitching. I thought the end of the Stottlemyre Era would also mark the end of the often inexplicable bullpen decision-making, but it didn’t; Guidry is, I think, a good pitching coach, but he’s not the in-game manager, and I’ll tell you right now, if Sturtze hadn’t gotten hurt, Torre would have let him lose the division for us, because he plays favorites and lots of times those favorites don’t make game-management sense (op. cit. Heredia).

And these things take time to do. It takes time to figure out what a pitcher’s strength is. It takes time to put together a staff where all the parts fit together snugly. It takes time to develop a young player’s confidence and to teach him how to play his role. This franchise doesn’t take that time because its owner is the shortest fuse in baseball, but the difference between the dominant Yankee teams of eight to ten years ago and the muddled underperforming teams of the last five years is starting pitching. We had plenty of hitting back then, too, but even if the team is not apparently huffing ether between innings like the Yanks were on Saturday, you can’t rely on the lineup to cover a six-run deficit every fuckin’ night, you just can’t. The ’06 lineup was a fearsome one, but not only did it have to cover the losses of Matsui and Sheff, it had to cover the starters — how many times did we see this during the regular season, that the scrub du jour (or Grandpa Johnson) lasted three and a third, gave up five and left two runners for the next guy, and hit the showers, leaving the hitters to clean up the mess? Over the course of a season, when you play KC a bunch of times or you face a decent team’s fourth man who doesn’t like to pitch when it’s hot out, you can get away with that. In the postseason, you can’t. You have run a guy out there who can throw without a morphine drip for six innings and give your hitters a chance to work it out. Not happening on this team. If the division series went seven games, yeah, maybe the Yankees could have pulled it out…but then they’d have to do it again. Aaaaand again. And they did not have the pitching.

Ideally, the Boss gets distracted by something shiny long enough that Torre can resign and go out with some dignity. He deserves that much. I don’t hate the guy; he did good work, if not so much recently, and obviously Willie Randolph learned the important lessons from him. Then he tells Cashman to go out and get him a brace of starters and a manager who knows what to do with them, and starts combing the farm teams for prospective relievers, because again: come on.

Bernie

Mr. Williams, I have nothing but admiration for you. I muttered darkly about your role on the team back in the spring, but when it counted, you stepped up. Guys got hurt, and you came in and did the job; you still looked pretty creaky, but you didn’t complain and you had some big hits. This is why everyone loves you.

Medal for meritorious service issued — yet again. But you need to retire. It’s time.

Buck O’Neil

Rufus Wainwright has a song, “California,” with a verse that goes like this:

I don’t know this sea of neon Thousand surfers, whiffs of Freon
And my new grandma Bea Arthur
Come on over

I’ve love that line. If I got to pinch-hit a grandma for my own grandmas, both now gone, I’d take Bea Arthur in a hot second.

And if I could have picked myself out a grandpa, I’d have chosen Buck O’Neil, who died over the weekend at the grand old age of 94. (Hear him say “mmmmmm-hm” right here.) Now I’m too late, and it’s sad.

Listening to Buck O’Neil talk about the sound home runs made coming off Babe Ruth’s bat is what it means to love baseball, to love watching it, listening to it, talking about it, sharing it with your family and your friends and that lady at the short end of the bar. Buck O’Neil knew how to tell a story better than anyone I’ve ever heard, because he knew what makes stories great — the heroism and grace kept by each of us, and how things turn out funny sometimes — and he took his stories seriously, but himself not seriously at all. You never saw anyone so happy to be who he was and know what he knew, and to tell you all about it and make you as happy as he was about the whole thing. All about Jackie Robinson, say, with that Southern-wise inflection of his: “Now, Jackeh…” Pretty good ballplayer; great man; best baseball talker of them all. I miss him already.

October 9, 2006

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