Daily Archives: November 28, 2008

These guys were very good together in this movie.

Maybe DeNiro’s funniest comic performance. And the last time Grodin was great.

The answer to “what went wrong?” is surprisingly quick and easy: Jorge Posada got hurt, and the team couldn’t compensate for that loss because they were too busy compensating for other problems.

That was the conclusion of my postmortem on the Yankees 2008 season. Note that I’m not blaming Posada’s bum shoulder for the Yankees’ failure to make the postseason for the first time since 1993, but rather the combination of Posada’s injury and the team’s other failures, most significantly Robinson Cano’s collapse. Had Cano been productive, the Yankees very well may have survived the loss of Posada, but the combination of the two simply took too many runs off the board.

Heading into 2009, we’re hearing very encouraging reports about Cano’s off-season training regime in the Dominican Republic and his continued work with hitting coach Kevin Long, but little about Posada. With Jason Giambi and Bobby Abreu departing as free agents and the team focusing on improving their pitching rather than replacing those runs on offense, the Yankees will need more than a comeback season from Cano to return to the postseason, they’ll need a full contribution from Posada as well, and if Posada’s shoulder hasn’t recovered enough to allow him to catch his usual slate of 140 or so games, they’ll have to find a much more productive replacement for him than Jose Molina, who is a fine defensive catcher, but a miserable hitter.

Here are the men who started behind the plate for the Yankees in 2008:

OPS+ adjusted for position except for *

Entering the season, Chad Moeller’s career line (.224/.284/.346) was not significantly better than Molina’s (.243/.279/.345), both men were the same age, and Molina had hit well for the Yankees down the stretch in 2007 and had a hot streak for them in April of this year, so it’s really only in hindsight that the choice of Molina over Moeller seems like an obvious mistake given Moeller’s 60-points advantage in on-base percentage. Still, as the season progressed and Molina’s bat failed to restart following his late-April hamstring injury, it became increasingly obvious that the Yankees needed to try someone else behind the dish. The late-July trade for Ivan Rodriguez, who was hitting .295/.338/.417 for the Tigers, seemed like a brilliant solution to that problem. The Yankees didn’t miss Kyle Farnsworth given the strength of their bullpen and the 6.75 ERA he posted with Detroit, but Rodriguez was never given more than three starts in a row, didn’t hit when he did played, and was largely abandoned down the stretch, starting just five of the Yankees’ final 18 games.

Moeller and the now 37-year-old Rodriguez are both free agents this offseason, but looking at the catchers remaining in the Yankees’ system, the organization is surprisingly strong and deep at the position over the long-term, thanks largely to its efforts of the past couple of years:

*on May 1, 2009

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The streets are in a rage today. Everyone is going somewhere to buy something or sell something or steal something.

Traffic is snarled and parking tickets are being written in bunches: One car in a crosswalk, two up on a sidewalk and three in a bus stop.

“These people don’t care,” a parking cop says. “Double parked, tripled parked and some of them block the whole street. We try to keep emergency lanes open and people move the barriers to park.”

It almost makes you feel sorry for the parking cops.

“We need a way to show these people who is really in charge,” the parking cop says.

Yeah, almost.

Even though most New Yorkers can’t work up a holiday-shopping rage it is interesting to watch. It’s like seeing an enemy fan being hauled out of Yankee Stadium by a dozen cops. It may not be right, but you quickly come to terms with the fact that justice can take many forms.

The parking cop gets on the radio and calls a tow truck to Broadway and 56th Street.

Another car in a bus stop. A BMW with Massachusetts plates. Perfect.

Justice is served.

Hub Fans Bids Kid Adieu, John Updike’s fan-in-the-stands piece about Ted Williams’ final ball game is one of the most anthologized and famous stories in all of sports.  It first appeared in The New Yorker and it is now re-printed on-line at Baseball Almanac.  

I admire Updike’s elegant writing and observations but actually I prefer Ed Linn’s behind-the-scenes account of the same afternoon that was featured in Sport magazine.  But the ultimate Williams profile has to be Richard Ben Cramer’s Esquire article, What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now? (1986):

Ted Williams can hush a room just by entering. There is a force that boils up from him and commands attention. This he has come to accept as his destiny and his due, just as he came to accept the maddening, if respectful, way that opponents pitched around him (he always seemed to be leading the league in bases on balls), or the way every fan in the ball park seemed always to watch (and comment upon) T. Williams’s every move. It was often said Ted would rather play ball in a lab, where fans couldn’t see. But he never blamed fans for watching him. His hate was for those who couldn’t or wouldn’t feel with him, his effort, his exultation, pride, rage, or sorrow. If they wouldn’t share those, then there was his scorn, and he’d make them feel that, by God. These days, there are no crowds, but Ted is watched, and why not? What other match could draw a kibitzer’s eye when Ted, on the near court, pounds toward the net, slashing the air with his big racket, laughing in triumphant derision as he scores with a killer drop shot, or smacking the ball twenty feet long and roaring, “SYPHILITIC SON OF A BITCH!” as he hurls his racket to the clay at his feet?

And who could say Ted does not mean to be seen when he stops in front of the kibitzers as he and his opponent change sides? “YOU OKAY?” Ted wheezes as he yells at his foe. “HOW D’YA FEEL?…HOW OLD ARE YOU?…JUST WORRIED ABOUT YOUR HEART HA HA HAW.” Ted turns and winks, mops his face. A kibitzer says mildly: “How are you, Ted?” And Ted drops the towel, swells with Florida air, grins gloriously, and booms back:

“WELL, HOW DO I LOOK?…HUH?…WHAT DO YOU THINK OF TED WILLIAMS NOW?”

If and when you have the time do yourself a favor and check out both of these classic pieces.