Daily Archives: September 28, 2009

The Yankees have already accomplished all of their goals for the 2009 regular season. By sweeping the Red Sox over the weekend, they clinched both the AL East title and the best record in the American League, the latter of which gives them home-field advantage throughout the playoffs. Their clinching win was also their 100th of the season; Joe Torre’s Dodgers rank second in the majors with 93 wins.

Even before Sunday’s clincher, the Yankees had shifted their attention from a singular focus on winning each game they played to longer-range considerations regarding postseason readiness. One could even argue that their focus began to shift when they began skipping Joba Chamberlain’s starts in August.

This week’s final regular season home series against the last-place Royals is thus a curiosity at best for those interested in the Yankees’ post-season roster construction and two teams’ marginal bench players and relievers (the Yankees’ lineup tonight omits Jeter, Teixeira, Rodriguez, Swisher, and Matsui in favor of Ramiro Peña, Juan Miranda, Eric Hinske at the hot corner, and Francisco Cervelli). At worst it’s a complete and utter waste of time that serves no purpose other than to expose the Yankees to a potentially disastrous injury.

Due to some curious scheduling, the Yankees last faced the Royals in the second series of the season way back on April 10-12 (Yankees took 2 of 3 in K.C.), and now face them for the second and final time this season in the season’s penultimate series. In between the Yankees have emerged as the major league’s best team while the Royals primary accomplishment has been avoiding being the worst.

The Royals had made steady improvements under new general manager Dayton Moore over the last three seasons, but 2009 has seen them stagnate then regress. Zack Greinke and Billy Butler have had long-awaited break-out seasons at ages 25 and 23, respectively, Greinke being the obvious choice for AL Cy Young and Butler ranking among the league leaders in extra-base hits, but that is the sum total of the positives. In my Royals preview in April I listed the team’s assets as:

. . . two front-of-the-rotation starters in 25-year-old Zack Greinke and Gil Meche, 30; one of the best closers in baseball in Joakim Soria, who will turn 25 next month; two top hitting prospects who are already in the major league lineup in 25-year-old third baseman Alex Gordon and soon-to-be-23-year-old DH Billy Butler; and two of the game’s top minor league prospects in first baseman Eric Hosmer and third baseman Mike Moustakas, ranked numbers 18 and 21, respectively, by Baseball Prospectus’s Kevin Goldstein.

Beyond Greinke and Butler, Meche had a brutal season (6-10, 5.09 ERA, and all of his peripherals heading in the wrong direction) and was shut down after 23 starts with shoulder inflammation, Gordon hit the DL in mid-April with a torn hip labrum, missed three months, and was so bad after returning that the team demoted him just two weeks before rosters expanded (since returning he’s slugged just .392). Moustakas hit .250/.297/.431 in High-A ball. Hosmer hit .241/.334/.361 in a season split between A-ball and High-A. Soria, a closer on a team that never wins, had a typically strong season save for the month he spent on the DL with a rotator cuff injury. The light at the end of the Royals’ tunnel is dimming.

The Yankees missed Greinke in April and will miss him again this week, instead catching Luke Hochevar, former Brave Anthony Lerew, and former Ranger Robinson Tejada. Shying away from the likely contract demands of the superior players available, the Royals made Hochevar the top overall pick in the 2006 draft. At age 25, has a 5.75 ERA in 46 major league starts, though he did turn in a quality start against the Yankees last June. Hochevar also made his major league debut against the Yankees in September 2007.

Hochevar will face Chad Gaudin, who could sew up his spot as the long-man on the Yankees’ postseason roster with a good outing tonight against a terrible offense (4.24 R/G, second-worst in the AL).

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One down, three to go:

We’re proud to present the following excerpt from Pete Dexter’s new book–his seventh novel–Spooner. This section picks up the story when Spooner is in high school. We just got through Spooner’s adventures on the football team where a sadistic coach named Tinker terrorized a fat kid, Lemonkatz. Spooner’s mother, Lily, is furious with the coach, as she is with many things in life, especially those things that are Republican. Then, young Spooner turns to baseball.

From Spooner:

By Pete Dexter.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Later that year Spooner began his career in organized baseball. The coach of the baseball team was Evelyn Tinker, who in addition to being held almost blameless in the Lemonkatz boy’s injury was now rumored to be collecting sixty bucks a week for the newspaper column, this in spite of Lily’s public campaign to have him fired, and being as Spooner was not old enough yet to have voted for Richard Nixon, this joining of Tinker’s team constituted the single most disloyal thing a child of Lily Whitlowe Ottosson’s had ever done.

How could he?

The question hung in the air at 308 Shabbona Drive, unspoken, like another dead father.

The answer—not that the answer mattered—was that Spooner had stopped at the baseball diamond on the way to the shopping center after school, and watched through the fence as Russell Hodge pitched four innings of a practice game against Crete-Monee, striking out twelve of the thirteen batters he faced. It was a tiny school, Crete-Monee, six hundred students, kindergarten through twelfth grade, and two of the players were only thirteen years old. The smallest one—who wore number thirteen, and was the only batter Russell Hodge did not strike out—was plunked between the shoulder blades as he turned away from an inside fastball, and cried.

Half a dozen times Spooner started to leave but couldn’t, waitingaround to see one more pitch, and in the end hung on the wire fence more than an hour, leaving diamond-shaped imprints on the underside of his forearms, wrists to elbows, taking the measure of Russell Hodge’s throws.

It came to him as he watched that Russell Hodge pitched in much the way he played linebacker, which is to say blind with rage. But it was more difficult in baseball, a game that had very little maiming, to sustain a murderous rage than it was in football, even for Russell Hodge, and after an inning or two Spooner thought he saw him working to conjure it up, sucking from the air every bit of resentment he could find. Giving Russell Hodge his due, even in a practice game against little Crete-Monee, he brought himself again and again to a state just short of foaming at the mouth—furious at the batter, at his own catcher, the umpire, who, behind the mask and protective vest was only Mr. Kopex the math teacher, furious even at the ball itself—and by the end appeared to have lost all his stuff.

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For Part One of this Interview, click here:

Bronx Banter:  A Day in the Bleachers. I just read this book for the first time, I want to say about six months ago. I think one of my favorite things about it – obviously I knew about the game, and I knew about The Catch and the other things that come to mind – but I think one of my favorite things was your description of the atmosphere of the game. Looking back fifty years ago, what was it like seeing a game in the Polo Grounds in the ’40s or ’50s?

Arnold Hano:  Well, what it was like seeing a game in the bleachers was the camaraderie. [Showing the covers of three different editions of the book.] When the book first came out, it was a book for fans, about fans. And then the next edition, it’s Willie Mays and fans. And then the next edition it’s just The Catch. But the cover of the first one is truer. This is truly what the book is about.

BB:  Right, right, definitely. It almost seemed like the book was about the fans, and, by the way, Willie Mays made a nice catch.

AH:  That catch, which I spent a lot of time on, took up nine pages in a hundred and sixty page book. And I don’t know if you know about the $700 edition of the book…

BB:  Yes, I read something about that. There was a limited print, and you had signed them all.

AH:  Four hundred copies.

BB:  The other thing, too, about this book is that now, that device that you used, using the game kind of as a prism through which to illuminate either a season or an era or a career, that’s a fairly common device now. But then, I don’t think so, is that right?

AH:  You’re telling me about devices. I wrote a book. I wrote a book about a day, and this is the day.

BB:  What I love about this book is that you’re writing the book and you’re telling what’s happening on the field, and Vic Wertz comes up to bat, and then suddenly you have a two-page segue on Vic Wertz.

AH:  Or on home runs hit by other people for long distances.

BB:  Exactly, exactly.

AH:  Well, I had to fill some space!

BB:  I think that now that’s pretty common. A lot of people use that.

AH:  Part of what E.L. Doctorow said yesterday on television is that writers don’t really realize what it is they’ve written. Critics tell them what they’ve written, but he said, “The result is I never read critics. They tell me things about the book…”

BB:  That perhaps aren’t there, or aren’t intended to be there.

AH:  So when you ask me about a device, I don’t know from the device in this case. I wrote a book about a day, and I filled it in with background stuff. I had to establish myself as writing a book with some reason, so I established myself as somebody who’d seen all these other things. And to that degree, I was an historian of this… thing. But that’s getting beyond where I wanted to go with it. I think of this as a nice little book. Other people think it was something else, but I think it was a nice little book.

BB:  Well, like I said, I don’t know if this was your intention as you wrote it – and it doesn’t sound like you had big intentions – but what I got from it is, I know about that catch, and I knew about that before I picked up the book. But your description of the fans in the bleachers, of what it was like on the field, in the stadium, that’s what I got out of it.

AH:  When I used to go to ballgames, of course, you don’t do this anymore, I used to go very early so I could watch fielding practice. And until a few years ago, I did not know they had suspended fielding practice. I bet the players’ union has done that because they don’t want somebody to break a finger.

BB:  Sometimes you hear people complain about that. You’ll be watching a game and someone will throw to the wrong base and someone will say, “Oh, well, they don’t have fielding practice anymore, and the only time they do that is in spring training…”

AH:  Although when you see a guy like Omar Vizquel pull a backdoor double play. Do you know about that at all? Kenny Lofton was at bat when he was with the Dodgers. Men on first and second and I think there was nobody out. They sent the runners and Lofton hit a one-bouncer to second base. Well, Lofton is about as fast going down from the plate to first base as almost anybody. So when Ray Durham fed Vizquel for the force play, Vizquel had Lofton in his sights, and he knew that he was not gonna throw out Lofton. So he whirled and he threw to third. The guy who had been on second base was playing his first game in the major leagues. He rounded third and goes two or three steps and there’s Pedro Felíz with the ball. The most embarrassed baserunner in the history of baseball – who was sent back to the minors that night! A backdoor double play! It was a 4-6-5 double play. I had never seen it before, and apparently he’s done it more than once. And apparently before that play, a few days before, he had reminded Felíz that this was something he might do. Television followed Vizquel off the field at the end of the half inning, and as he reached the first baseline he broke into laughter. He was so pleased and charmed with what he had just done. It was just a great moment. Now there’s somebody who didn’t need fielding practice.

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