I remember the first time the Yankees played the Angels in New York in 2004. Early in the game, Benjie Molina was up and hit a soft grounder to third. Alex Rodriguez fielded the ball but couldn’t get it out of his glove. He double-then tripled-clutched. By the time he got rid of it, he was behind the pitchers mound. He still got Molina by plenty. He could have practically run to first and beat him.
It looked unintentional on Rodriguez’s part but the effect was comic. Only Molina was not laughing and he gave Rodriguez a piece of his mind when the Yankees’ third baseman came to bat.
Is Beltre worth $9 million? Yeah. If you believe in most of the fielding metrics, anyway. Beltre was worth more than $9 million last season when he was hurt and spent five weeks on the disabled list. Usually — when he’s not hurt and not spending weeks on the DL — Beltre is worth far more than $9 million.
You’re going to see this deal referred to as a steal in some quarters. Unless you’re a doctor with an intimate knowledge of Beltre’s current physiology, you really can’t know that. But the Red Sox had half-a-hole at third base, and now they don’t have any holes at all. It must be a good feeling, to know in early January that you’re essentially ready for a 95-win season.
To say that he can’t handle New York not only gives too much weight to a small sample size but requires a jump that conflates the pressure of in-game situations to be analogous to the demands of pitching for one franchise or another.
…Even if you grant that Vazquez gets worse under pressure and will pitch worse just by virtue of being a Yankee, he’s still likely to be better than league average and throw more than 200 innings. It would be extremely difficult to do that and not add significant value to a team regardless of how his performance is distributed by leverage.
And of course, there’s a big difference between “hasn’t” and “can’t”. I’m willing to say that Vazquez certainly hasn’t pitched well under pressure in his career, but not that he can’t. He clearly had a great year in Atlanta and some of that has been attributed to an improved change up, giving him a second pitch to miss bats with in addition to his curveball. FanGraphs shows that his curveball was what stood out last year, but his change up looked to be improved as well.
Finally, over at Lo-Hud, Chad Jennings, profiles the Yankees’ bullpen. “Jonathan Albaladejo could show up in spring training throwing 122 mph fastballs for strikes, and Rivera would still be the closer.”
The archetypal American abroad is perceived as loud and crass even though actually existing American tourists are distinguished by the way they address bus drivers and bartenders as “sir” and are effusive in their thanks when any small service is rendered. We look on with some confusion at these encounters because, on the one hand, the Americans seem a bit country-bumpkinish, and, on the other, good manners are a form of sophistication.
Granted, these visiting Americans often seem to have loud voices, but on closer examination, it’s a little subtler than that. Americans have no fear of being overheard. Civic life in Britain is predicated on the idea that everyone just about conceals his loathing of everyone else. To open your mouth is to risk offending someone. So we mutter and mumble as if surrounded by informers or, more exactly, as if they are living in our heads. In America the right to free speech is exercised freely and cordially. The basic assumption is that nothing you say will offend anyone else because, deep down, everyone is agreed on the premise that America is better than anyplace else.
…Like many Europeans, I always feel good about myself in America; I feel appreciated, liked. It took a while to realize that this had nothing to do with me. It was about the people who made me feel this way: it was about charm. Yes, this is the bright secret of life in the United States: Americans are not just friendly and polite — they are also charming. And the most charming thing of all is that it rarely looks like charm.
And so, on a snowy Sunday evening in New York, the Jets are playing for a playoff spot. It is the last regular-season game at Giants Stadium–the Giants were crushed in their finale last week and they are getting spanked again today in Minnesota. Now, stranger things have happened, so why shouldn’t the Jets win tonight? Still, this being the Jets–childhood memories of AJ Duhe, of Mark Gastinau and his 4th and 15 roughing the passer penalty, come back in a rush of disappointment–the smart money is on them finding a way to blow it.
I hope I’m wrong. I’m glad I don’t bet. And I’m even happier that I save all my angst for the Yankees, so no matter what happens, I won’t lose any sleep over the J-E-T-S, Jets, Jets, Jets.
In the language of jazz, the word “gig” is an evening of work; sometimes sweet, sometimes sour, take the gig as it comes, for who knows when the next will be. It means bread and butter first, but a whole lot of things have always seemed to ride with the word: drifting blue light, the bouquet from leftover drinks, spells of odd dialogue, and most of all a sense of pain and limbo. For more than anything the word means black, down-and-out black, leavin’-home black, what-ya-gonna-do-when-ya-git-there black, tired-of-choppin’-cotton-gonna-find-me-a-place-in-de-shade black.
Big shade fell coolly only on a few. It never got to James Thomas Bell, or Cool Papa Bell as he was known in Negro baseball, that lost caravan that followed the sun. Other blacks, some of them musicians who worked jazz up from the South, would feel the touch of fame, or once in a while have the thought that their names meant something to people outside their own. But if you were black and played baseball, well, look for your name only in the lineup before each game, or else you might not even see it there if you kept on leanin’ and dreamin’.
Black baseball was a stone-hard gig. Unlike jazz, it had no white intellectuals to hymn it, no slumming aristocracy to taste it. It was three games a day, sometimes in three different towns miles apart. It was the heat and fumes and bounces from buses that moved your stomach up to your throat and it was greasy meals at fly-papered diners at three a.m. and uniforms that were seldom off your back. “We slept with ’em on sometimes,” says Papa, “but there never was ‘nough sleep. We got so we could sleep standin’ up or catch a nod in the dugout.”
This picture was taken up in Vermont by loyal Banter reader Lorin Duckman.
So, what’s the plan for tonight? It is snowing in Manhattan and midtown is gearing up for the usual madness tonight. I’ve always been a homebody on New Year’s Eve. Even when I was younger and more inclined, and I was never big on jumping around town like a mo mo. Nah, chilling at home with the Mrs and our kitties, a good meal, some old movies, and I’m straight.
we should not be so surprised that New York is bargain shopping in left field, avoiding the likes of Matt Holliday and Jason Bay. They are at the other end of the win curve, and it doesn’t make much sense to spend a lot of money there either. The marginal value of the 101st, 102nd, and 103rd win in terms of playoff odds is really quite small. And that’s approximately the upgrade that Holliday would represent over the current production that Gardner offers in left field.
The Yankees have entered the prime area of significant diminishing marginal utility. They are so good that adding another high quality player doesn’t help them that much in 2010, and because of the long term contract that is required, they’d be risking future flexibility to add wins that may actually matter for an upgrade that just isn’t necessary.
It’s a rational decision made by smart people who understand just how good their roster currently is. In the past, New York has pursued every big ticket free agent on the market because they represented a real, tangible improvement in their quest to bring home another championship. Given how well Brian Cashman has put together this roster, though, a big ticket left fielder is superfluous. He’s right to keep his money locked up. They just don’t need another good player.
When I was in sixth grade my mother went to visit her family in Belgium for a week which brought my father north from Manhattan to stay with us in our small two-bedroom apartment in Westchester. Though he was recently sober, any prolonged period of time with my father was uncomfortable. I remember him sending me to the deli with a note–written in his careful script–giving me permission to buy him a pack of smokes.
Fortunately, the week was brightened considerably by the presence of one of his old film business pals, Mike Fox, a British camera operator. We knew about Fox because he shot the flying sequences in the first two Superman movies; he was also on the National Geographic documentary about Africa with my old man in 1966, the trip where my parents met.
Fox was short and round (that’s him shielding his eyes next to the camera). He wore thick glasses that made his eyes look huge. He told us jokes, did an array of accents–Indian to Uh-merican–bought us junk food, and sang songs. The one chorus he sang over and again was “Ape call, a-doubliaba, Ape Call, doubliaba.”
We thought it was hysterical. He remembered the song from the Fifties but couldn’t recall who’d sung it. I wasn’t sure it actually existed, but that didn’t matter. It was still funny. When I think back on that visit from Fox, I always hear Ape Call. For years, it stuck in the back of my head as something to seek out.
Cut to 1997 when I met Alan, a huge record head, who lived in Midwood, Brooklyn. One day, he invited me to his house to show me his collection and to make a mix tape–that’s right, a tape, as in cassette (it was the only one we’d ever make, by the second session we were burning cds). I figured I wouldn’t waste any time so I mentioned the longshot, some song about an Ape call. Without batting an eye, he goes, “Sure, that was a novelty record by Nervous Norvus, who had a hit record with a song called Transfusion.”
He had Transfusion on 45 but not Ape Call. But it turns out he had Ape Call on a twenty-five year-old cassette recording of the Dr. Demento show. Dude found it in about three minutes…and a friendship was born.
Fox wasn’t making it up after all, though I liked the way he sung it better.
Looks like it’s Jason Bay to the Mets. Big Mike Francesa gets the scoop. Gritty, Gutty day for the king of New York sports talk radio.
I like Bay, he’s vanilla as Richie Cunningham but appealing enough. Nice player, too. Not exactly Olerud-level great, but who knows? I haven’t seen him play that much. This could work out great or it could be a disaster–Bay is a lousy fielder now playing in a huge ballpark that depresses home runs. You never know with the Mets. George Foster/Keith Hernandez? Which one of these? Either way, the Mets are better for having him–I hope it works out.
There’s an old saying: All power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The more I’ve learned, the less I believe it. Power doesn’t always corrupt. What power always does is reveal. When a guy gets into a position where he doesn’t have to worry anymore, then you see what he wanted to do all along.
I grew up in a family where you were expected to know certain things–about literature, movies, politics. Being literate was required. I wasn’t a big reader as a kid, but by the time I reached high school, I tried to catch-up, all over the place, reading SJ Perelman, John O’Hara, William Faulkner, Graham Greene, and Samuel Beckett along with healthy doses of Salinger and Vonnegut. Still, I felt like a know-nothing nobody because I hadn’t read Dickens or Moby Dick or The Bible. So I faked it. I read criticism. When somebody asked me about a movie that I hadn’t seen or a book I hadn’t read, I lied.
I’m past that mishegoss now. I don’t feel the slighest bit ashamed by what I haven’t read or seen. If there is an exception, though, it is Robert Caro’s seminal biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker. I feel that it is my civic duty as a New Yorker to read this massive book, cover-to-cover. I’ve picked it up at least a half-dozen times and found the prospect of reading more than 1,000 pages too daunting to handle. It’s not that the language is difficult–Caro’s prose is engaging and easy to read–but the amount of information is overwhelming.
Perhaps, for those of us who don’t have the staying power to read it all the way through, it is a book best read in spurts. Regardless, I will read it all one day. In the meantime, I don’t curse myself, and I think Caro is a fascinating guy, and a classic New Yorker, one of the handful of writers I’d most like to meet.
Mark DeRosa, that plucky, “gritty-gutty” delight with pop in his bat, has reportedly agreed to a two-year deal with the San Francisco Giants. The Yankees are still looking for a left fielder, or a part-time left fielder. According to Anthony McCarron in the Daily News:
“There’s plenty of time,” the official said. “There’s no hurry. And there are a ton of outfielders out there. We are just tweaking at this point. We’ll sign an outfielder between now and spring training.”
Two team officials said the Yankees have no interest in Jermaine Dye, whom they have been linked to in reports. Last week, Cashman said that even Xavier Nady, who is coming off elbow surgery, likely would be too expensive for them.
In 2009 Dye posted his worst offensive season since an injury riddled 2003. His power faded, as his .203 ISO was his lowest since 2004, and a .044 drop-off from 2008. His BABIP fell to .269, his lowest in a decade, apparently driven by an alarmingly low line drive percentage, 16.9, again his lowest since 2003. Defense has never been a strength, and over the past four seasons he’s posted a lower than -21 UZR/150.
There are some indicators, however, that Dye could bounce back from his poor season. While he hit fewer line drives, they turned almost exclusively into ground balls. His 43.6 fly ball percentage nearly matched his 2008 mark. Also nearly equal was his HR/FB ratio, at 15.6 percent, just a tick down from his 16 percent mark in 2008. Most of his power loss came in the gaps, as he hit just 19 doubles in 2009. Despite the down year he still hit 27 home runs. He also greatly increased his walk percentage, to 11.3 percent. Because of that he posted a .340 OBP, impressive considering his .250 batting average.
Considering the risks attached to Dye, combined with his poor defense, I wonder if the Yankees would also consider Eric Hinske. A much cheaper option, Hinske could probably post numbers similar to Dye in 2010, on offense and defense. UZR likes Hinske a lot more than Dye rating him positive at all but one position, third base, throughout his career. That doesn’t quite pass the eye test — Hinske seemed a butcher in the outfield last season, but I think it’s a safe bet he’s better than Dye.
The Yankees have played possum before, claiming to be finished only to swoop down at the last moment to nab a big ticket free agent. I don’t see that happening this winter, though, not with left field. They are already loaded and the free agent class of 2010 is ripe with talented options. I see them going with a guy like Reed Johnson or even Eric Hinske. If there weren’t willing to go two years, $12 million for Mark DeRosa, then Damon, Bay and Holliday are jut not in the picture.
