Yes, it’s another baseball entry. I know, I know. Last one of the year, I swear. Just tying up a few loose ends here…

On gloating

As you no doubt have heard, the Yankees lost the World Series to the Marlins in six games. It is not my fault — I faithfully watched each game, and not only wore a rally cap again in Game Six but conscripted the lovely Wing Chun to wear one also, to no avail — and it is, to my mind, a fair result. The Marlins played better, and pitched better, and the World Championship is rightfully theirs.

Let the gloating begin!

Sigh.

Look, if you hate the Yankees, you hate them. I won’t try to talk you out of it. I hate the Braves for no substantive reason; I know how it goes. Enjoy a smug chortle, on me. But unless you are

1. a Mets fan;
2. a Red Sox fan;
3. a fan of another team that got beat by the Yankees during the postseason in the last five years;
4. a fan of another team whose best player went to New York without putting up a fight, at which time your team fell out of contention;
5. a fan of another team who got a player from New York, at which time that player got hurt, stopped hitting, forgot how to throw a slider, went into rehab, or said something mean about your mom; or
6. currently embroiled in legal proceedings against George Steinbrenner,

you need to chortle, and to chortle only. Seriously. A member of the Red Sox Nation has earned the right to emit intermittent beery-spittle-flecked roars of “YANKEES SUCK!!!” even though, strictly speaking, the Yankees don’t suck, because if the Yankees did suck, everyone would feel sorry for them and love them the way they do the Cubs, which…yeah, not happening. But every sports fan has a Moriarty, and for Pabsty McSpittleson, it’s the Yankees, and I respect that, just as I respect the caustic muttering of a man on the wrong end of a David Justice trade. You don’t have to take the kick in the slats yourself to know how much it hurts.

But what I say now, I say for your own good — do not be trying that shit with a Padres hat on. For real. Your team reeked last year, your mascot is kind of a dork…you have a lot of anger, and that’s okay, but you need to do the bellowing in the direction of your GM, because it has nothing to do with the Yankees. Literally nothing.

And do not be trying any kind of salary cap shit with me, in any hat, ever. Not even if you have a fez on do I want to hear that crap, and let me tell you, I love me a fez, so I mean it, don’t even, and here’s why — it just isn’t going to happen. It isn’t. Revenue sharing from radio and TV is a more equitable solution, and more importantly, it’s the only one the players’ union will ever even consider. Just to review — the salary cap? No. No way, no day. Also? I don’t write Jason Giambi’s checks. I can only listen to so much gnashing of teeth about problems that belong to baseball as a whole, and that I can’t fix in the second place. Call Bud Selig up and tell him. You can use my calling card. Just don’t tell me.

On personnel

So, Grady Little got fired. Yeah, I know, your socks just blew clear across the room…not. I do have to wonder whether he should have gotten fired, though, and the Sox fans in the crowd will have to enlighten me, because here’s how I see it.

I commented a few days ago in The Vine that he screwed up big-time, and that we could rightly place the blame for the Red Sox loss that night on his shoulders, and I stand behind that. Pedro had obviously gotten tired, his pitch count had spiked, and it looked like a no-brainer given that, as of that moment, the Red Sox pen had a postseason ERA of around one. Little should have yanked him, period.

But. Everyone had pointed to the Sox pen as their primary weakness going into the postseason, and I’d seen the evidence myself during the season series against the Yanks; the bullpen-by-committee thing looked pretty good on paper, but it didn’t work as well in practice. Ask BSD, who spent most of the summer moaning about it.

Now, put yourself in Little’s shoes. The Committee? Not your idea. Management’s idea. Bill James’s idea, and I love Bill James (viz. my parroting of his revenue-sharing platform above), but he’s not going to get it right every time. Anyway. You, Little, don’t have one guy in the closer role, and the Keystone Kops you do have lose you games in the ninth all year. Now it’s the ALCS, and yeah, the pen is throwing the hell out of the ball — so far. Do you bet on that to continue, or do you think, well, damn, any minute now they’ll start sucking wind again so I’d better stay with my ace?

I still think he made the wrong choice in that situation; I still think he should have trusted Timlin to come in and get it done, not so much because I think he underestimated the relievers but because Pedro clearly couldn’t get it done past that point. I mean, hell, bring in your mom if she’s got her jock on, but your boy Martinez is done and you need a live arm out there, now. But I also think that Little had gotten conditioned, based on a long season of watching the bullpen shoot the rest of the team in the feet, to stick with the starter as long as he could, and it backfired on him here, but I don’t think it’s a fireable offense.

Again, though, I don’t know what other sins Little committed over the course of the season. I did think it a bit odd that he let Damian Jackson stay in after that collision with Damon during the ALDS. Okay, he’s up and walking around, but…dude’s bleeding. Where I come from, that means you sit down for the rest of the game. But if Little got fired for that one inning…feh. Yeah, it’ll pacify the Nation, I guess, but that bullpen isn’t his fault. He got the team to the postseason with it somehow, after all.

I don’t know.

And I don’t know what to make of the rumors about Yankee personnel changes, either. Zimmer says he’s out of there — he hates George, he’d like to go fishing and hang out with his grandkids, fine. So who else is leaving (read: “taking a George to the goolies”)? Names on the grapevine include:

1. Joe Torre. I really doubt it, but you never know with Steinbrenner. You’d like to think a sane person would say to himself, “Well, Torre didn’t trade for Orosco, so I can’t blame him for the result,” but Steinbrenner is not a sane person. Steinbrenner is barely a person, period. By the way, George — lose the white turtlenecks. This isn’t Vail. Also, shut up. Anyway, Torre: Might get fired, won’t deserve it.

2. Soriano. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a player founder quite like Al did this postseason. I don’t mean his numbers either, although that strikeout record is tough to argue with — it’s that he looked terrified out there, utterly adrift, making mistakes I thought he’d outgrown two years ago. I have no idea what happened to him, but I think there’s more to it than just an ill-timed slump. Steinbrenner might order him traded in a fit of pique, but I doubt it, and I hope it doesn’t happen; Soriano’s still young, still learning, and he’s improved so much since he came up. If the Yankees let him go, he’s going to become a rock star for another team.

3. Stottlemyre. I think he’s threatening to retire, anyway, but he’s done that for years now…and I think it’s time to let him. He’s the number-one most screamed-at person on the team at my house, by far, because he’s too slow on the hook with certain starters and too fast on it with others, and because I have to think he called for Weaver in Game Four, and I cannot think of a single good reason to do that. Not one. I can think of bunch of reasons not to bring in Rivera — not great ones, but reasons. But to act like your bullpen consists solely of Rivera and Weaver? What the hell? Heredia didn’t exactly light my fire either, but he’s a damn sight better than the blond. I don’t know who made that call, but if it’s Stottlemyre, and if it’s Stottlemyre who kept going back to Weaver most of the season and Torre just covered for him with the press — bad, fireable call. Might get fired, probably should get fired. Which brings me to my next point…

4. Weaver. Like I said, it’s easy to manage from the sofa, but you get to a certain point with a problematic player where it’s pretty clear, to everyone, that he’s had enough chances, and if he doesn’t get it together, that’s it. Where you put that line depends on the nature of “problematic” in each case, and the line is in a different place for an ongoing drug thing (Steve Howe) from where it is for a serial attitude problem (Mo Vaughn, Carl Everett), or unmet expectations (Gregg Jefferies), or a combination of all of those things (Darryl Strawberry)…and where you put the line as a fan is different from where the organization is going to put it, because the organization has more money invested in a particular solution, blah blah blah. Wherever you locate the line, though, or the blame, or whatever you want to call it, eventually you have to recognize that you’ve crossed from “this could work if we just blah blee bloo” to “this does not work, period, enough already,” and Weaver is, in my opinion, well over the line by now.

It’s not fair to compare Weaver to Strawberry, because Strawberry had a whole goulash of issues on the stove, foremost among them a fundamental immaturity that no team could have “fixed,” and Weaver hasn’t burned through nearly the number of opportunities Strawberry had; Strawberry’s problem is, in the end, Strawberry, and it’s not something the Yankees or any other team had a prayer of fixing. Weaver is more of a Chuck Knoblauch or a Steve Sax — he’s thrown a shoe mentally, I think, and a simple change of scenery might do the trick. It worked for Knoblauch. The problem is, you can’t really move a pitcher anywhere except into the bullpen, which a) isn’t analogous to shifting a middle infielder and b) didn’t work for Weaver anyway. The only thing left to do is trade him, and it’s time to do that. He’s not a bad pitcher, but he’s a bad pitcher here, and he’ll keep proving it. Enough.

5. Pettitte. He is indispensable to the team. The Yankees must meet the price he names. Must. Period. Of course, the team’s owner resents that kind of thing and will probably order Cashman to let him walk to spite Pettitte, and we Yanks fans will then enjoy several years of sub-.500 baseball just for a refreshing change of pace. Won’t get fired; might get cheapskated. Grrr.

Anyone else I think should get the boot? Glad you asked. I’d hate to see him go, but I think we need to swap Nick Johnson for a middle reliever, and Enrique Wilson for whatever we can get for him. And unless Juan Rivera can learn to play center, get rid of him too. That OBP is not going to do it.

On the end

Okay, bear with me here. Do you ever just get a feeling? Like that you might run into someone you know by accident, or that something significant is going to happen, or that you’ve just seen a thing that seems not much like A Thing at all, but you can just tell it’s going to matter later?

I got a feeling like that last one in Game Five. Even when the Yankees mounted that too-little, too-late comeback attempt, I had a feeling — that we’d already lost. I don’t know why I had that feeling, and I don’t know why it came true, but when we couldn’t come back from that hideous extra-inning ending the night before, I knew. Djb came over on Friday, and at some point he asked me whether I still planned to come to his show if we went to Game Seven, and I said duh, of course, but there’s not going to be a Game Seven anyway, you’ll see. And there wasn’t. The team had no gas left, not even a fume. The Marlins did, and beat us.

But I also got a feeling that it’s the end of the Yankee stranglehold on the postseason for a while. I think I said that last year, and believed it, and I said it this season and believed it then too; I kept saying it through September. But the team is old. Bernie is looking more and more like a DH. Our middle relief is not good. Giambi is, I suspect, beginning to come apart. Jeter might need surgery. We’ve got two starters on the way out. Right field is like a traveling production of…I don’t even know. A show I don’t want to see. Now Maz is talking to the Orioles.

It’s going to get ugly. How ugly depends on the moves made in the off season, but it is going to get ugly. I just have a feeling.

On the high strike

Oh my God, CALL IT, umpires! “At the belt” is not a ball! Jesus!

October 27, 2003

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