Daily Archives: July 14, 2008

ESPN will broadcast the Home Run Derby at Yankee Stadium at 8pm tonight. It will be the first and last Home Run Derby in the Stadium’s history as the Derby only dates back to 1985 and Yankee Stadium last hosted the All-Star Game in 1977.

The balls for the Derby tend to be a bit juiced, so it’s quite possible that there will be balls hit to previously unreached portions of the park tonight. If you follow the link above, you’ll find a video that shows where the furthest-hit balls in this decade’s Derbies would have landed in Yankee Stadium. A several of them would have landed safely in the left field bleachers, a section that’s only been reached once during a game, and one would have hit off the wall behind those bleachers.

Unfortunately, none of the seven hitters responsible for the blasts in that video will be participating tonight. In fact, if you look at the top home run totals over the 2004 to 2007 seasons, Lance Berkman is the only member of the top 10 who will be taking his hacks tonight, and the next participant on the list is Justin Morneau all the way down at 27th.

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Joe Pos takes a look.  Peep, don’t sleep.

Over at New York magazine, Will Leitch weighs in on the latest Alex Rodriguez circus:

As we watch A-Rod’s tabloid excoriation across our tabloid media this week—He’s having an affair with Madonna! No, it’s only spiritual! He dates strippers and bodybuilders! He’s a bad dad!—it’s worth considering that the breakup that has landed A-Rod in his predicament isn’t necessarily the one with his wife, Cynthia; it’s the one he had with Scott Boras last October.

Over the past sixteen years, Boras was the one constant in A-Rod’s life. A-Rod’s job was simple: Hit baseballs a very long way. Boras, his agent, managed his money, public image, contract negotiations, you name it. Then, when negotiations with the Yankees went haywire, he dumped Boras, and Madonna’s longtime manager, Guy Oseary, was hired to remake A-Rod’s image. Which has happened now, spectacularly.

You can say that again.

Rob Neyer has a fine appreciation of Bobby Murcer’s career today at ESPN:

After playing briefly for the Yankees in 1965 and ’66, Murcer was one of the very few major leaguers drafted into the military during the Vietnam War. Inducted into the army during spring training in 1967, he missed all of that season and the next while serving as a radio operator. Murcer worried that his career was over, but would later tell author Philip Bashe, "What I thought was going to be a horrible experience was really a positive thing for me in the long run. I learned responsibility and, obviously, a little bit of discipline. When I got out I was ready to proceed with my baseball career on a much more mature level."

No kidding. Murcer, who had struggled in the majors before going into the army — understandably, considering that he’d been a 160-pound teenager — got off to a brilliant start in 1969. He homered on Opening Day and drove in three runs. He homered in his next game, too. When Murcer hurt his ankle in late May, he was leading the majors with 43 RBIs.

He cooled off after getting back into the lineup, but still led the club with 82 runs and 82 RBIs. Also that season, Murcer finally moved into Mantle’s old spot in center field. Murcer, like Mantle, had been a shortstop in the minors, and he’d stuck there during his first stints with the Yankees. But in 1969 they moved him to third base, an experiment that lasted five weeks and included 14 errors. He spent the next months in right field, and finally moved to center in late August; the transition was complete, and in 1972 Murcer won a Gold Glove (something Mantle never did).

In 1971, Murcer’s first great season (and his best), he played in his first of five straight All-Star Games. They didn’t all come with the Yankees, though. In 1974, Murcer became the highest-paid Yankee ever — his $120,000 salary topped the $100,000 earned by Joe DiMaggio and Mantle. But Murcer hit only 10 home runs in 1974, and shortly after the season the Yankees traded him to the Giants for Bobby Bonds.

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Andy Says:

"If we want to make the playoffs, we have to be better," said Pettitte, who took the loss Sunday. "We stink right now for the most part. As a team, we’ve kind of stunk it up here lately, so we need to play better."

…"We’ve got to find a way to put it all together for an extended period of time with our pitching and our hitting combined," Pettitte said. "It seems like right now, we’re feast or famine."
(N.Y. Daily News)

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Hustle Buck Tater.