Tag: Yankees

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Derek Jeter’s Brand New Shiny Swing

“God, I hope I wear this jersey forever.” Derek Jeter

I almost wish it hadn’t been said. But then, I’ve never been a big fan of Derek Jeter anyway.

Jeter was a very good hitter for a shortstop– but then, he shouldn’t really have been shortstop. It is well known in informed baseball circles that Jeter’s range has been seriously diminished for years. He really should have moved to 3rd base by now. You can’t really move him to the outfield. He doesn’t make many errors– if he gets to the ball– but the Yankees are taking a hit on defense to keep him on the team. In the position to which he is accustomed.

Anyway, this is what is said: Jeter has been working with Yankees hitting coach Kevin Long to adjust his stride.

I am skeptical. I am skeptical that, at 37, a player can discover a hitherto unknown (to him) technique that will allow him to improve as a hitter. At the same time, I am very skeptical that a player with Jeter’s reputation would cheat. At the same time, I am skeptical that a player like Jeter would be happy fading into the limelight after such a celebrated career. Look at Andy Pettite.

I am skeptical that baseball incorporated has really made it all that difficult for players to cheat. Baseball incorporated benefits from records and milestones and the attraction of even washed-up stars like Derek Jeter. And young stars like Ryan Braun. And I fervently wish that those who wish to give Ryan Braun the benefit of the doubt on his positive test for performance enhancing drugs be put in charge of our criminal justice system to see if we can’t reduce the rate of spurious convictions.

I don’t know what to make of it all. Jeter was clearly washed up in 2010, and last year, and then made a dramatic improvement in September, and he has continued to demonstrate this radical improvement in April 2012. He is hitting up a storm. At 37, he is top of the charts, again. At least, in terms of offense. The Yankees won’t be able to sit him down now.

As a Blue Jays fan, I’m delighted.

Did you think that the very public, loud MLB commitment to drug testing has made it unlikely someone like Jeter would cheat? The 2008 #1 draft pick, Tim Beckham (Tampa Bay) has just been suspended 50 games for his second violation. There have been at least 37 other suspensions this year for doping violations in the minor leagues.

If a #1 pick was doing it, what is the likelihood #179 was doing it? Or #400? Or an aging superstar with declining skills?

Did you ever think about how funny it is that players all wear uniforms and sit in the dugout chewing in sunflower seeds between innings? Really, given their economic power, they should be driven out to their positions by chauffeurs in gold-plated golf-carts. But then, how would that make baseball look, as a sport?

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Jittery Jeter

As a fervent Blue Jays fan I would definitely say to the Yankees, Jeter at a different position? Are you mad? Derek Jeter is THE shortstop of the century and has to stay there, just like he says, right through 2014. Everybody knows that range and quickness are over-rated: what really matters is that he almost never fails to catch any ball he can reach. And of course, the kiddies will be screaming and screaming for him at every home game no matter what he does.

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Yankee Aura: $$$

Please spare me all the rhapsodic prose about the Yankee Mystique, and the “aura”, and “knowing how to win” and coming up big for the games that count, and so on and so and so on.

There is nothing mysterious about it. The Yankees win because they have the biggest payroll in baseball.

Now you may look at their line-up and say, well, who the heck is getting all that money? Paul O’Neil? Scott Brosius? Chuck Knoblach?

Not exactly. Big money looks like Mo Vaughn. It looks like Alex Rodriguez. It looks like Juan Gonzalez. It looks like Cal Everitt. It looks like all those “star players” that you hear about all the time, who set records for largest salaries, and biggest egos. The Yankees used to be the prime offender.

But that’s from the old days when George Steinbrenner called the shots and micromanaged the team into mediocrity, before he got smart and left baseball to the baseball men, and before Pat Gillick, the smartest manager in baseball, left the Blue Jays to try his luck in Baltimore, and then Seattle, and before Oakland decided to concentrate on young, talented pitchers.

The new big money talks more eloquently. Steinbrenner now lets his baseball people call the shots. The money is still big, but instead of being squandered on a couple of big, bloated Cadillac’s, it is wisely distributed among a dozen or so Accords. Fine cars. Reliable. Solid. Durable. Instead of Mo Vaughn or Carlos Delgado, and a cast of nobodies, the Yankees feature Bernie Williams, Derek Jeter, Roger Clemens, Mike Mussina, Mariano Rivera, Jorge Posada. None of these with the exception of Rivera are the very best, or the very biggest. But no other team can afford such an all-round stellar cast.

Baseball loves to believe that he money doesn’t make a difference. In the case of teams like Boston and Baltimore, it’s true. But Baseball acts as if any team can come along and assemble a durable winner, and take on any other team for the championship. The truth is, that the Yankees, spending their huge cable dollars wisely, are almost invincible. They have won four of the last five World Series, and show every sign of winning four of the next five. It may not be with O’Neill, Clemens, and Martinez, but they have some talented rookies coming up, young players like Soriano, and the money to bring in superb free-agents like Mussina to round out the line-up.

So what we have is that the richest team is going to be favored to win almost every year. And what needs to happen is for the Yankees to recognize that their huge payroll is financed by the game of baseball– not by the Yankees playing themselves– and that some kind of revenue-sharing is necessary to preserve a competitive league.

This year, Oakland and Seattle made credible runs at the World Series. Neither team could really match up to the Yankees. It’s deceptive because you think the teams are similar, but the extra money that the Yankees spent wisely– on a Mike Mussina instead of an Alex Rodriguez– made all the difference. Oakland will probably have to give up Giambi as a free agent this year. Seattle will probably never have so many players having career years all at once again.

 

If you made a list of the best players by position in baseball, surprise, surprise, there aren’t many Yankees on the list. Forget the hype about Jeter’s allegedly brilliant defense in the playoffs– Rodriguez is better. Giambi is a better first baseman, and Roberto Alomar is the best 2nd baseman. Ivan Rodriguez is the best catcher, and there is no best 3rd base. Shannon Stewart is a better lead-off hitter than Knoblach.

Where the Yankees do have the best is obvious: Mariano Rivera has no peer as a closer.

The trouble is, no other team has as many second or third best players.

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Blue Jays 1999

Look out Yankees!
The Ripken Curse Continues
Ask Not for Whom the Belle Tolls.

The best division in baseball right now is the American League East, and the best team in the American League East is the New York Yankees. In fact, a lot of baseball writers have already wrapped up the championship and handed it to the pinstripers.

Not so fast. Will the Yankees repeat?

Well, they look pretty solid. But the Yankees last year didn’t really have a single player who was as good as Sosa, McGuire, Griffey, or Roger Clemens. (This year, they have Roger Clemens.) So why did they win so many games? Almost every player in their line-up had a great year. Paul O’Neill, David Wells, Bernie Williams, Tino Martinez…. That’s what happened to Minnesota in ’91, and the Blue Jays in ’93. They had a bunch of players that simply had a great year at the same time.

The Blue Jays won the World Series in 1992 on talent. That was different. They had the best players and these players played the way they were expected to. They deserved to win. But in 1993, the Blue Jays—a completely different team (minus Gruber, Key, Henke, Winfield, Morris; plus Molitor, Henderson, Sprague, Fernandez)—won because a lot of their players had career years. Philadelphia was in the World Series that year for largely the same reason. Atlanta lost to Philadelphia in the playoffs because the best talent does not always win.

The bottom line: you win in baseball when you have enough talented players having good years to beat the other team’s talented players having good or so-so years. Without the raw talent on the bench, all the grit and determination in the world is not going to take you anywhere.

Injuries are not as critical as reporters would have you believe. The difference between the best first baseman in the league (Mark McGuire) and an average first baseman is not the difference between 70 homeruns and no homeruns. It’s the difference between 70 homeruns and 40 homeruns. Over an entire season, that is ¼ homerun a game. How many games are decided by one or less runs? How many of those games would have ended differently had Mark McGuire been at first base instead of John Olerud? Not as many as you might think. That’s why St. Louis didn’t even make the playoffs. Mark McGuire alone isn’t going to get you there. I’m not saying he isn’t effective– I’m just saying that he can’t do it alone.

I’m not sure the Yankees are going to be as fortunate this year as they were last year. The Yankees have three or four great players this year: Clemens, Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams, and Ramiro Mendoza. Then they have a string of superior players, including Tino Martinez, Paul O’Neil, Livan Hernandez, and Chuck Knoblauch. Well, yeah, the truth is, that’s a pretty impressive line-up. Cone and Hernandez can pitch, but Cone is 34 now and not as strong as he used to be. Pettite can pitch, but is he healthy? Jorge Posado is young and strong—how good will he be in September?

Well it’s early. They’ve picked up where they left off. They will play pretty well at times this season. But I’m not sure that, over the stretch of 162 games, this line-up is quite as durable as many people think it is. Most people never noticed it, but the Yankees were not the best team in baseball, or even in the American League, over the last two months of the 98 season: the Blue Jays were. And the Blue Jays whipped the Yankees in September.

I don’t expect Boston to continue their string of early success. After all, they are Boston. After Martinez, the pitching is pretty thin, and with the injury to Noamar Garciaparra and the absence of Mo Vaughn, they’re going to finish no better than third. More likely they’ll finish fourth. [this was written before Boston lost 4 straight].

Baltimore chose to spend big bucks on free agents, but, as usual, spent the money on players who were well-known for having had great years in the past. The trick is to spend that kind of money on players who are about to have great years, like Chris Carpenter, or Vladimir Guerrero. Baltimore will finish fourth.

This is why Montreal often does much better than expected: their scouts and coaches are good at identifying players who are going to command big salaries because they play well. That is why Baltimore is so BAD. Their coaches and scouts are really good at identifying players who have already had their best years, and, therefore, are in decline. In fact, they have an icon of a role-model right there on 3rd base: Cal Ripken, the most vastly over-rated player in the league.

Can you believe that the Dodgers signed 34-year-old Kevin Brown for 7 years for $85 million? Is this some kind of joke? Brown won’t be around for five years, let alone seven. Let’s say Brown, like almost every other pitcher in the history of the game, begins to lose his effectiveness in three years. What are you going to do? How are the Dodgers going to be able to pay replacement talent when they’re on the hook for $10 million a year for a pitcher who can’t play?

The Blue Jays have the pitching and offence to threaten even the Yankees, provided that one or two players like Jose Cruz and Alex Gonzalez have breakthrough years. I think it was a mistake to let Canseco go and then bring in Geronimo Berroa. I thought Canseco had reached a new stage in his career where he might avoid stupid injuries and provide a productive bat from the DH spot. I don’t like Canseco’s strikeout ratio but he will probably hit another 40 homeruns this year, and that is enormous offense, and who needs Geronimo Berroa? Still, the Blue Jays have Delgado, Greene, and Stewart, and Fletcher is a solid catcher. Tony Fernandez proved last September that he is still one of the best clutch hitters in the game, and Alex Gonzalez may be one of the two or three best defensive shortstops in the league. When your fifth starter leads the league in ERA and you have to put a guy who had a no-hitter going into the 9th inning last fall (Roy Halladay) into the bullpen, you’ve got a chance to scare a few people.

When the Yankees play Minnesota, you have about $80 million in talent playing about $8 million. There is no way that baseball is going to remain competitive with this kind of system, unless we get more owners like Marge Schott and Peter D’Angelos. But most owners are smarter than they used to be. George Steinbrenner used to squander all his money on players like Joe Girardi and Jesse Barfield. Lately, he squanders his money on players like Chuck Knoblauch and Bernie Williams instead. Why should the fans in Minnesota continue to pay $30-$50 to come out and watch their team get pummeled by athletes that make ten times as much as their players do? What chance do they have?

A word about Cal Ripken. I said many years ago that Baltimore will never win a championship as long as Cal Ripken is on that team. It was not so much that he was a bad player (though he was vastly over-rated) as it was that the entire culture of the Baltimore Orioles baseball club, with fawning owner Peter D’Angelos, centred on THE STREAK rather than THE WORLD SERIES. The focus of the team was Ripken’s achievements, not Baltimore’s. So what does Baltimore do in the off-season? They sign Albert Belle and Will Clark! They let Roberto Alomar, one of the two or three most valuable all-round players in the game, slip away to Cleveland (which is 8-1 or something as we speak).

I also find Ripken rather phony anyway. He goes around acting modest and self-effacing, while he sucks up to all the media attention like a leech. How much do you want to bet that when he retires he’s going to get one of these grand tours of all the major league cities? For classy exits, see Wayne Gretzky. “Hello? Sunday’s my last game. Nice seeing you.”

If the Blue Jays are in contention come August, look for them to trade a prospect or two for a DH or, possibly, a closer. I’m not convinced by Person yet. I liked Escobar there more. Look for Atlanta to try to talk Montreal out of Urbina. They’d be stupid not to try.