Daily Archives: May 31, 2005

Baseball is a fickle game. On any given day, the worst team in the major leagues can beat the best team. On any given day the worst hitter in the game can go 4 for 4 and the best 0 for 5, while the best pitcher can take the mound without his stuff and get rocked as the worst finds an unfamiliar feel and pitches a complete game shutout. A large part of this is that baseball, more than any other sport, is a game dependent to a large degree on luck. It’s the line-drive right at a fielder versus the weak grounder that finds a hole, the hanging curve that’s taken for a high strike versus the one with a sharp break and great placement that gets deposited in the seats.

These are all reasons that the two tremendous losses the Yankees suffered at the hands of the Red Sox this weekend (total score, 24-3) don’t really bother me all that much. It was clear that Pavano and Mussina simply didn’t have it and that Clement and Wells (who found that famous curve after the first inning on Sunday) did. In and of itself, that doesn’t really reveal any essential flaws in this Yankee team other than the fact that they were simply off their game two days in a row. Consider the following:

Tuesday through Thursday the Tigers are swept by the Yankees. Friday through Sunday the Orioles are swept by the Tigers. Saturday and Sunday the Red Sox humiliate the Yankees. Monday night, the Red Sox get crushed by the Orioles (8-1).

There’s no logic to that. As of this afternoon, the Orioles are the best of those four teams (.620 winning percentage), the Tigers the worst (.479) and the Red Sox and Yankees are tied, four games behind the O’s in second place in the AL East with .540 winning percentages. One or two, or even three-game sample sizes are simply not enough to determine the relative quality of two or more teams. Heck, take the seven days since Tuesday:

Orioles 5-2
Yankees 4-2
Tigers 3-3
Red Sox 2-5

Then there are these guys:

Royals 0-6

Yeah, they’re that bad. But given the nature of the game, even the Royals, who are indeed the worst team in baseball (.260 winning percentage, even worse than the Colorado Springs Sky So . . . er, Rockies at .286), win a game every now and then (once every four days or so, to be precise). Having been without an official manager since Tony Peña resigned exactly three weeks ago today, the Royals have just hired Buddy Bell, who will manage his first game for Kansas City tonight. With a new skipper in the dugout and their best pitcher on the mound, the exciting young phenom Zach Greinke, it wouldn’t surprise me to see the Royals stop that six-game losing streak tonight despite being clearly overmatched by the invading Yankees. That’s just how this game works.

That said, the Yankees should feast on the Royals over the next three days, which would be a nice way to kick off the year’s longest road trip (12 games in four cities).

More on the Royals themselves below the fold.

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Book Excerpt

Chapter Two from “Forging Genius”

By Steven Goldman

(First of Two Parts)

“Rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for U. S. Steel.” The line is variously attributed. It might have been said by the comedian Joe E. Lewis, whose son was the general manager of the hapless Pittsburgh Pirates; the great sports columnist Red Smith; Spinoza; or Maimonedes. Whatever its provenance, it perfectly encapsulated the preferred image of the New York Yankees. New York City’s American League ball club liked to portray itself as a horsehide IBM, an organization run with the clockwork precision that generated almost constant success. While the on-field victories that fueled this image were generated by players no less earthy or hard bitten than any of their contemporaries, the Yankees, seen through the lens of that era’s sports pages, appeared to succeed through high character, superior morals, management, and discipline, all held together by the esprit de corps of an elite military unit. Though the team had ridden to incredible riches on the back of Babe Ruth’s boisterous and often-boorish exploits, the organization saw Ruth as an excess to be tolerated. It was hoped that the fans, though they loved the Babe, would prefer to identify with the quiet efficiency of Lou Gehrig, “a self-effacing star who never gave a manager a day’s trouble.”

The Yankee formula meant victories and businesslike comportment. Deviation from the formula was not long tolerated. Hence the almost palpable sense that something had gone wrong when on October 13, 1948, the New York Yankees announced that Charles Dillon “Casey” Stengel had been hired to manage the team for the next two seasons, replacing the popular incumbent, Bucky Harris. Stengel, a fifty-eight-year-old veteran of nine lackluster managerial campaigns, was widely perceived to be a clown, “A second division manager who was entirely satisfied to have a losing ball club so long as Stengel and his wit were appreciated.” The general attitude among the newspapermen who covered the team, which they then transmitted to the public, was disbelief.

There was no reason for their skepticism, and the writers knew it. At mid-century, many of the New York sportswriters had been covering baseball since the days of Cobb and Wagner. Stengel had been associated with New York baseball almost as long, having played, coached, or managed in the city for all or parts of fourteen seasons from 1912 to 1917, 1921 to 1923, and 1932 to 1936. The same writers whose mouths were agape at Stengel’s hiring had spoken with him, drunk with him, and ridden the rails with him on the long trips to baseball’s distant outposts in St. Louis and Chicago (until 1958, baseball thought the American frontier ended at the Mississippi river and that “The Lewis and Clark Expedition” referred to an evening in 1921 when Duffy Lewis and Clark Griffith stayed out all night trying to find the best speakeasy in the District of Columbia). Their coverage of him had always reflected their apprehension of his intelligence and the bonhomie of their relationship.

Stengel’s unexpected association with the Yankees changed everything. The sportswriters of 1948, as with the political journalists of today, had only a sideline in reporting the events of the day. Their primary job was to produce storylines, in the soap opera sense of the word. With over a dozen area daily newspapers, game stories were a commodity product. What sold papers were heroes and goats, complex events and personalities reduced to morality plays, fairy tales without the sophistication.

New York City had three baseball teams in those days, and each had long had an established character, unchanging, like the cardboard leading men in the boys’ adventure serials of the time; unflinching square-jawed hero in episode one, unflinching square-jawed hero in chapter twenty-five. The Dodgers were bumbling and yet lovable. The Giants were hard-bitten and driven, as exemplified by a managerial line of descent from John McGraw to Bill Terry to Leo Durocher, the momentary interruption of which by the administration of the milquetoast Mel Ott inspired Durocher to quip, “Nice guys finish last.”

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Sorry I wasn’t around yesterday to recap the Sunday night game. Call it a rare day of rest for Cliff and me. But other than Gary Winfield’s line drive dinger in the first, there wasn’t much to get excited about for Yankee fans, as a three-headed Red Sox monster (Edgar-Cookie-Manny) helped sink Mike Mussina. Boomer Wells, sporting some silly-looking facial hair, had a rocky first inning and then settled down and pitched a fine game. Rodrigo Lopez did much better against Boston last night, as the Sox, Yanks trail the Orioles by four games in the AL East (the Jays are four-and-a-half behind). The Bombers start the first of four series on the road in Kansas City tonight.