Daily Archives: November 17, 2003

Christian Ruzich, The Cub Reporter, has launched a new blog here all-baseball.com, The Trasnaction Guy, a site that will ostensibly record each and every transaction that takes place in the world of major league baseball. Ruz will give us the facts on each deal and offer some off-the-cuff comments to boot. Go over and check it out, then link it, and put it on your favorites list, because chances are you will be spending a lot of time there in 2004.

Rob Neyer is often attacked as being anti-Yankee. But he’s also slammed for being anti-Red Sox, anti-Braves and just about anti-every other team too. That is one of the perils of writing a national column, I suppose. Anyhow, in his latest piece, Neyer has some positive things to say about the Bronx Bombers:

The Yankees do have to find some starting pitchers because they’re losing at least one and quite possibly three, but they could begin next season with exactly the same starting lineup and be a pretty good bet to win 95-100 games. Anything that happens in New York gets magnified, almost beyond recognition, but this was a good lineup in September and it’s a good lineup right now.

Which isn’t to say the Yankees shouldn’t try to get better. One of the reasons they haven’t missed the postseason since 1994 is simple: they’re always trying to get better, and that’s not something you can say about every winning team. Some winning teams seem happy to tread water, but when you’re treading water it’s easy for a shark to take off one of your legs at the knee.

Speaking of sharks (he wrote, clumsily switching metaphors), a baseball team might be said to resemble a shark: if you’re not moving forward, you’re dying. And while it’s not precisely true that the Yankees are always moving forward — remember Hideki Irabu, anybody? — it’s true that they’re almost always trying to move forward. If they don’t run into a bunch of injuries, the Yankees will be better next year than they were this year.

Actually, according to Woody Allen in “Annie Hall,” relationships are like sharks. Woody tells this to Diane Keaton as they travel back to New York from a weekend in Hollywood (she loved it, he was miserable). “Relationships are like sharks. They have to keep moving forward,” in order to survive. “And what I think we have here is a dead shark.”

Peter Gammons is credited for inventing the ‘Sunday Notes’ column when he wrote for The Boston Globe in the 1970s. These days, Gordon Edes is the top baseball scribe at The Globe, and his version of the ‘Sunday Notes’ is top-notch. Check out the latest from the Hub.

Who will win the A.L. MVP? Alex Rodriguez or (gasp) Shannon Stewart? Jorge Posada, David Ortiz or Carlos Delgado? Which one of these guys will take home the hardware? The results will be announced later today and one thing is for sure: the race is wide open. According to a report in The Daily News:

Anything is possible, because 10 players received first-place votes from the 28 voters, said Jack O’Connell, the secretary of the Baseball Writers Association of America, which presents the award. It’s only the third time in history that the number of players receiving first-place votes has reached double-digits – 1977 (11, AL) and 1947 (10, NL) being the other years.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” O’Connell said. “Sometimes, when you’re going through the ballots before actually counting, you know who’s going to win. I saw Roy Halladay’s name so many times, I knew he was going to win the AL Cy Young. But I have no idea who is going to win this until I count up everything.”

O’Connell added, laughing, “I’m just hoping it’s not a two-way or three-way tie. Those trophies are expensive.”

Steve Goldman, who pens “The Pinstriped Bible” for YES, offers a history of the MVP award over at mlb.com. Like most everything Goldman writes, this article is well worth your time.