Enjoy the holiday everyone, and be sure to check back in with us after the weekend as we have a big week coming up! Former Yankees’ PR director Marty Appel has written a new book titled MUNSON: The Life and Death of a Yankee Captain, and the people at Random House and Doubleday were kind enough to send me an advance copy of it to review for you all on the day of its release, Tuesday, July 7th. I can tell you all this much already: if you’re a Yankee fan, or just a baseball fan in general, this is a MUST read; this will come to be regarded as the definitive biography of the beloved former Yankee catcher. So be sure to check that out, and then on Thursday, I’ll be fortunate enough to talk to Marty Appel about the book, and I’ll post our convo for your consumption as well.
Remember about two weeks ago when I talked about those “non-championship losses” that have plagued the Yanks since, you know, they stopped winning championships? Well, does blowing a 10-1 lead after 6.5 innings qualify as one? Cause that’s exactly what the Sux did last night. Sure, every team is going to have at least one the-sky-is-falling-type loss, but a couple of guys, namely Papelbon and Pedroia, looked they were ready to pull a David Carradine in their lockers after the game. I’m not saying they’re gonna fall off the face of the Earth or anything, but you can all stop worrying about another running of the Duck Boats in Boston because the Sux basically wrote the book on “non-championship losses” with that one.
Great job by Slats shipping $8M-worth of dead weight up to Canada.
People have been calling Gomez a disappointment for the last two years, but as I’ve told a friend of mine who’s a die-hard Devils fan time and again, the guy always sucked in my opinion. Before coming to the Rangers he averaged 64.3 points per season. In his two years with the Rangers he averaged, well, whaddya know, 64-even. He’s scored more than 15 goals in a season only four times, and two of those times came, yup, you guessed it, the past two years in New York (16 each). Sounds to me like he was doing anything but disappointing. Granted, he may not have been living up to expectations, but you can’t call the guy a failure for maintaining the status quo. Obviously for $8M a year that’s not good enough, but the point is, I have no idea why people expected more from this guy in the first place.
Now today’s probably a bad day for Gomez because he loved NY, but it’s gotta be worse for John Madden and Brian Gionta (I know you have no idea who they are. I’m already resigned to the fact that none of you are actually reading this post anyway after seeing the headline. Don’t worry about it.). They just found out they’re gonna get a chance to test the waters of free agency, but after seeing the offensive numbers past Jersey defectors have put up elsewhere — cough, cough, Holik-Gomez, cough, cough — good luck to ‘em.
Today the Yanks replaced one of the like half-a-dozen late 90s/early 2000s joke Rookie of the Years they got rid of when they DFA-ed Angel Berroa last week by trading for Eric Hinske. My concern isn’t when or where Hinske’s gonna play. Whatever the answers to those two questions are, the guy won a championship in ‘07 with the Sux and an AL pennant with the Rays last year, so it’s fairly obvious he’s a valuable guy for a winning team to have coming off its bench (keep in mind, he played 133 games with Tampa last year). This just makes the Yanks significantly deeper, and a lot more like the championship teams, which were stacked with guys who could start for a lot of other clubs — Tim Raines, Ricky Ledee, Chad Curtis, Darryl Strawberry — but helped make the Yanks virtually unbeatable by giving them versatility at multiple positions. So, obviously, I love this deal.
But if you’re a Met fan today, do you have any hope that your team’s season isn’t already over? Other than David Wright, Gary Sheffield is the only remaining guy not on the DL who has at least 30 RBIs, so you’d figure the Mets could absolutely use someone like Eric Hinske. But he winds up in the Bronx instead of Queens?! I know a lot of Met fans are furious right now because their team refuses to go out and get guys that could, at the very least, keep them from devolving into a AAA team. But, the truth is they’re in an impossible situation right now. I can’t even remember a scenario in which a team lost 3 of their 4 best players to significant injury, let alone competed for a playoff spot without them. Regardless, by not even taking a run at a guy like Hinske, Manaya and Co. are basically telling fans this season is dunzo. Now, there’s pretty much no trade out there that can help the Mets considering how many guys they’ve lost, I get that. But for the team with the 2nd-highest payroll in baseball ($149.3M) and a brand new $632M stadium, that’s not exactly the message you want to be sending to an already disillusioned fan base.
See, this is what makes Mo the best– another supposedly “great” closer would prove absolutely nothing by blowing Mariano “I have all of 3 career regular season ABs” Rivera away, and yet Franky Rodriguez was so geeked up to gas him… that he handed Mo another milestone instead: his first career RBI. Just call him “The Measuring Stick.” Every other closer is overly preoccupied with how they compare to Mo to the point that they actually believe striking him out will somehow demonstrate their superiority. If Joey G. has half a brain, he’ll pinch-hit Mo if/when there’s a bases loaded situation against Papelbon in the future; the guy would have to be on horse tranquilizers just to keep the ball inside the backstop.
But just think about this everyone– you know how our dads always talk about how great the Berra’s, Mantle’s, Jackson’s, Munson’s, etc. were? Well, we’ll get to tell our kids about Rivera, a closer the likes of which never had been, nor will ever again be, seen.
First Ed McMahon, then Farrah Fawcett, then Michael Jackson… and now Bill Mays?! Ok, so he’s doesn’t exactly fit with the others, but talk about screwing up the whole “These things come in three” thing, huh? And good luck finding anything for $19.99 ever again.
Though while the rest of us mourn, somewhere the Shamwow guy is trying to market the voodoo doll he created this morning…
And this probably ends his career as a Yankee, too. As many of you remember, I lobbied hard for the Yanks to get Nady last year, but that’s because I — like the rest of us who aren’t MLB GMs — had no idea Jason Bay was available.
I’m trusting B-Ca$h did though, and while he couldn’t have known his new right-fielder would require Tommy John surgery… oh wait, Nady already had Tommy John surgery once before! Nady going down really is a microcosm of the trajectory of The Rivarly these past few years. Two legit hitters are languishing in Pittsburgh, one ends up in Boston, the other in NY. And wouldn’t you know, the guy who goes to Beantown currently leads the league in RBIs, while the guy in NY won’t even be swinging a bat in the big leagues for a year, and that’s if he can convince a team his elbow won’t disintegrate again.
That sound you just heard? That’s B-Ca$h’s stance on the Yanks’ not needing a bat flying out the window.
Maybe the watch should be called off? Since Girardi got tossed the other night, the Yanks have scored 18 runs in 13 innings. Even A-rod’s awoken from his Kate Hudson-induced trance, with 4 hits in his last 6 official ABs to go along with a homer and 6 RBIs (by the way, congrats to A-rod and his needle for tying Reggie Jackson on the all-time home run list). Who knew getting kicked off the job for a few hours could actually help stave off a pink slip?
We’ll continue to keep an eye on things, though, because after ‘03, even when the playoffs were still the Yanks’ birthright, these hot streaks tended to be fleeting. You know, the week to two weeks when everyone’s knocking the snot out of the ball, followed up by a week to two weeks of what we saw, well, for the past two weeks. But, for now, things seem to be on the up and up and the way the pitching matchup shakes out this weekend — no Santana and no guys they’ve never seen before– a sweep looks like it’s in the offing (I figure if I keep predicting sweeps, eventually I’ll nail one).
Oh, and Happy Birthday, Derek Jeter! Can only imagine what the guest list for that party looks like:
