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Forgive me for not giving Murray Chass’ recent series of articles regarding how the Yankees handled Jason Giambi‘s contract more burn here. But for a thorough account and good analysis of it all, check out Jay Jaffe’s latest post.

Okay, enough clowning around with the Red Sox…at least for the next five minutes. Yeesh, Alex Rodriguez isn’t even due to report to the team until the weekend. Meanwhile, his teammates seem content to let him fight this war with Boston by himself. The big news for the Yankees is the arrival of The Big Unit, who was in camp yesterday, working out, and talking with reporters. Kevin Brown, was there too, and he told Newsday he’s worked hard to cure the back injuries which hampered his performance for the entire 2004 season.

Hey, guess what? The Red Sox really don’t like Alex Rodriguez. Yesterday, Trot Nixon told the Associated Press:

When people ask me about the Yankees, I tell them about (Derek) Jeter and Bernie Williams and (Jorge) Posada. I don’t tell them about Rodriguez. … He can’t stand up to Jeter in my book or Bernie Williams or Posada.”

There’s more. Nothing shocking, just more fuel to the fire. Nixon thinks Rodriguez is a phoney, pure and simple. John Harper wonders what the point of harping about Rodriguez is:

Question to Nixon: Why do you care whether A-Rod is a true Yankee? If you’re worried so much about the Yankees, worry about Randy Johnson, and pray that as a lefthanded hitter, Terry Francona doesn’t make you face him.

The Sox as a team don’t just seem to hate A-Rod, going back to the fight with Jason Varitek last year and then the infamous slap at Bronson Arroyo‘s glove in the playoffs; they seem positively obsessed with the guy.

But why are they talking about him in February? Shouldn’t they be happy just to bask in the glory of their historic championship? If you didn’t know better you’d swear the Sox actually lost again last year, and all their talk about A-Rod is just a sign of their frustration.

Rodriguez has replaced Clemens as the man everyone loves to hate on the Yankees. Harper likens him to Pedro Martinez. So, how many games do the Sox and Yanks have to play against each other this season before there is another fight? And is there any question but that Rodriguez will be in the middle of it?

It was horrible, cold, blustery and rainy yesterday in New York. But this morning, the boids is chirping, the sun is out and it is supposed to get up to the mid-fifties this afternoon. Knowing that our favorite ballplayers are begining to report to their respective training camps, all I can think about it Biz Markie singing, “It’s Spring Again.”

While Derek Jeter, Tino Martinez, Jorge Posada”, and newcomer Carl “The Italian Stallion” Pavano settle in to their spring rituals, the Yankees eye talking contract extension with Hideki Matsui sometime before the season begins.

Yankees come and Yankees go, but one thing remains the same: Bernie Williams is still the teams’ centerfielder. Now, if you look at his defensive statistics over the past four seasons, or if you’ve simply watched the games, it’s clear that he isn’t a defensive asset any longer. Regardless, he’s still my favorite Yankee (Mariano Rivera is number two). And Bernie, bless him, isn’t ready to conceed to old age just yet. According to a bit in the Daily News:

The Yankees’ center fielder bristled at talk of retirement at a clinic for young players in Venezuela, saying his experience will help carry him through despite a decline in some of his physical talents.

“I’m still not thinking about retirement,” the 36-year-old told The Associated Press. “I’m going to play as long as my physical abilities allow me to. I still feel very good physically.”

Or as George King notes in a mini-Yankee preview:

Extremely prideful, Williams is bent on proving he can still play at a high level.

You go, you old goat, you.

Steroids is the talk of the town in baseball these days. Jose Canseco’s new book has generated an expected amount of controversy. Later this year, Boston Herald columnist Howard Bryant will release a book about baseball in “the juiced era.” Will Carroll has his own book on performance-enhancing drugs due out this spring. 60 Minutes is featuring a profile on Canseco this coming Sunday, and according to Cliff Corcoran, Bryant will appear in the segment. Be sure to check out for it.

Jason Giambi addressed the media yesterday at Yankee Stadium and, in case you haven’t heard yet, apologized for his behavior without specifically admitting to using performance-enhancing drugs. Tyler Kepner has a good write-up of the strange scene this morning in the New York Times. Joe Torre and Brian Cashman sat next to Giambi as he answered questions from reporters. Cashman told the Times:

“The biggest thing that I’ll be watching is not what takes place on the field,” General Manager Brian Cashman said. “It’s how he handles the process. It’s going to be a journey, and it’s going to be a long journey. Today will not end it. He knows that and we know that.”

Joe Torre added that Giambi will be the biggest question mark facing the team this spring:

“The effort will obviously be there,” Torre said of Giambi. “But I think we’re all curious to see how he’s going to recover from what he went through. He certainly looks healthier than he did last year.”

…”He’s going to have to understand that even in his home ballpark, on a regular basis, he may not get the response he wants to get,” Torre said. “I think he has to be tougher. In being human, there’s only so much you can do to say, ‘I understand,’ and go on about your business. It’s something he’s going to have to condition himself to do. But when he looks around, he’s going to see a lot of support.”

As Murray Chass reports, regardless of what Giambi says or does not say, it is highly unlikely that the Yankees will ever be able void his contract:

A person with knowledge of the contract said that before they signed off on Giambi’s seven-year, $120 million deal, the Yankees acquiesced to his request and removed all references to steroids from the guarantee language routinely included in contracts.

The Yankees were not innocents in this matter. They didn’t say to themselves: Delete references to steroid use? Well, all right if you insist, but why would you want us to do that?

They wanted Giambi badly enough that they relinquished the right to suspend him or stop payment on the contract or terminate the contract or convert it into a nonguaranteed contract if he was found to use steroids. No other words were deleted from that paragraph of the contract, the person said.

Mike Lupica, Bob Klapisch and Dave Anderson were less than impressed with Giambi’s performance. Tim Marchman, however, has a slightly different take:

It’s hard to tell exactly how Giambi let down the press. I’m a member of the press; I’m not offended or disappointed or surprised by his drug use. He didn’t harm me in any way.

If anyone has harmed the press, it’s been the press, which offered nothing more than innuendo as ballplayers swelled grotesquely in the 1990s. Our job is to cover baseball; the job of a ballplayer is to play it. Players owe writers nothing but the common decency and respect any person owes another. If Jason Giambi can avoid disappointment when I put whiskey in my body, I can avoid disappointment when he puts testosterone in his.

…The accounts Giambi has to settle are with his own conscience and his fellow athletes – not with you, not with me, and not with George Steinbrenner. These are not matters for press conferences, and it’s unfortunate that the Yankees would trot the man out in a deeply silly attempt to pre-empt what will be a richly deserved storm of bad publicity for their organization.

In speaking yesterday, Giambi has already done more than he needs to do. It speaks well of him. Apologies are at best more than the rest of us really need, and at worst more than we deserve.

For Giambi, it was an understandably uncomfortable start to his season. There is also little doubt that it will get worse for him before it gets better. The route to salvation, at least as far as he and the Yankees are concerned, lies in how he performs on the field.

Jason Giambi will meet with the local media today at Yankee Stadium. According to Tyler Kepner, the event is being carefully orchestrated by the Yankees (and will not be televised live):

Late yesterday, the Yankees announced that [the press conference] would be at Yankee Stadium, with strict ground rules. They have invited each newspaper that regularly covers the team to send no more than two reporters.

Giambi will meet with the print media in one location, and Cashman and Torre may be in the room with him. After that meeting, Giambi will speak with television reporters in a separate room.

Does this mean Giambi will be contrite and offer some sort of public apology? Local columnists Mike Lupica and Mike Vaccaro hope that is the case. No matter what he says, or how delicately the Yankees handle the proceedings, Giambi is still going to face a torrent of national media attention once he reports to spring training.

Tino Martinez, who according to Buster Olney’s recent book “The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty,” used to be a master clubhouse motivator, told the Daily News that Giambi’s teammates will be behind him:

“Hopefully, he says he’s healthy and he’s feeling good,” Martinez said. “He’s a great hitter. He’s got a great eye and he still has the ability to put up big numbers. I don’t know what he’s going to say, but I know the guys on the team are ready to get him over here and get going and get the first couple of days out of the way because I’m sure those are going to be the hardest, with the media and stuff.

“He’ll be accepted just fine by the team. He played with these guys last year; they know him. The thing about it is, because of all the controversy, people don’t really realize he’s a great guy off the field and in the clubhouse as well. I’m sure everybody is pulling for him. I know I am. I want him to get back and have a great season, because I want to win a championship again and obviously he can help us.”

It’s like Martinez never left.

There is less than a week before pitchers and catchers report to Yankeeland, which means the puff pieces are about to begin. Hey, it’s better’n’nada, right? (Well, at least for a few weeks anyway.) While Pedro Martinez made headlines in New York today for reporting to camp early, several Yankee veterans, including including Mariano Rivera, Flash Gordon, Gary Sheffield, Tino Martinez, and Derek Jeter, are already working out at the Yankees minor league complex. Jetes and Alex Rodriguez may not be best friends any longer, but Jeter isn’t about to stoak any sort of feud with Rodriguez. They will be pitted against one another by the local press, but I doubt they’ll ever become another Reggie and Thurman. Never mind that soap opera anyhow. The Glimmer Twins will move to the sidelines in the next few days when Jason Giambi is expected to address the media for the first time since the end of the 2004 season. Man, talk about one uncomfortable situation. Yeesh.

To the everlasting delight of Red Sox Nation, Yankee fans as well as Yankee players, are still haunted by the 2004 American League Championship Series. Recently, Alex Rodriguez and Gary Sheffield have spoken about how long this winter has been for them, licking those nasty wounds and all. The memory of the loss won’t go away for a long time, either. However, the sting will begin to ease some once the 2005 begins. Jorge Posada, for one, is eager to get going. According to the Daily News:

It was tough to swallow what we went through,” he said. “The sun has come up and we’ve got to go at it again this year. I’m excited about the moves we made, I’m excited about the rotation. I’m really, really happy with everything, but I’m going to miss Javy (Vazquez), we became really good friends. He was the one who went. It’s tough to see that.”

Which begs the question: Will Carl Pavano fare better or worse than Javier Vazquez did last year?

Peace to Repoz for linking these boss cartoons from Korean artist Choi Hoon. Here are your New York Yankees in action, past and present.

Winter is not my favorite season. But my trick is to get sick of it before everybody else does. That way when I turn the corner and start thinking in a spring-state-of-mind, it doesn’t bother me how much snow, or lousy weather we still have to endure. I’m ready. I’m ready for the buds to start showing on the trees, I’m ready to start seeing skirts, and some flesh move around the city again. I’m ready for rebirth, dog.

I usually make the move anywhere between late January and mid February, and this year, I made the transition this past weekend. The weather in New York was in the mid forties, and the sun was shinning. Em and I strolled through Central Park on Saturday and had the windows to our aparment cranked open the past two afternoons. I announced to her that winter is now dead to me. She that, “That’s fine, don’e forget your scarf.” No, no, it’s still winter, of course. But the switch went off inside me. I could smell a faint hint of spring, which means a faint small of dirt, which means…well, what else could it mean: baseball’s almost here. Truthfully, it’ll be hear before we know it as pitchers and catchers report to the camps around the major leagues next week.

Hot Dog.

The Yanks may have forgotten about brining Ramiro Mendoza back now that they have extended an invitation to the veteran southpaw Buddy Groom to jern the team in spring training. If he makes the squad, he’ll ink a one-year, $850,000 deal. Boy, if you could just turn the clock back three or four seasons, the Yankees would really have a powerhouse bullpen, with the likes of Felix Rodriguez, Steve Karsay, Tom Gordon, Paul Quantrill, Mike Stant Stanton, Groom, and of, course, Mariano Rivera holding down the fort. As it is, Groom gives the Yankees the left-handed specialist they lack. He may not be as impressive as Steve Kline, or the imposing B.J. Ryan, but he’s probably a step-up from Stanton.

Steven Goldman has a fine appreciation of Alex Rodriguez, and the third baseman’s impressive 2004 campaign in the most recent edition of The Pinstriped Bible. Looking at the numbers, maybe Rodriguez didn’t have an off-season after all:

The funny thing about Rodriguez having something to prove is that in 2004 he was largely consistent with his own standards and probably turned in the best offensive/defensive season ever by a Yankees third baseman. The first thing to note is that Yankee Stadium is a much tougher hitter’s park than Ameriquest Field in Arlington. The park formerly known as The Ballpark in Arlington gifts right-handed hitters with a lot of home runs. Yankee Stadium doesn’t do much for hitters at all, other than giving a mild boost to left-handed home run hitters. Decades after the left field “Death Valley” has shrunken to what Bill James called “Life Support Valley,” the ballpark in the Bronx is still a pitcher’s best friend.

At home, Rodriguez hit a good-but-not-stunning .280/.365/.492. On the road he batted .293/.386/.534, which is what he had been doing in neutral parks all along. As a Ranger in 2003, he batted .282/.384/.577 on the road but bulked up to .314/.407/.652 at home. Yankee Stadium doesn’t do that for anyone. It’s the Joe DiMaggio story writ small.

According to Joel Sherman in the New York Post, the Yankees may offer Ramiro Mendoza a minor-league contract. What’s old is new again. Joe Girardi and Luis Sojo are part of Joe Torre’s coaching staff, and Tino Martinez and Mike Stanton are back with the team. Who is next?

Although I read Malcom Gladwell’s piece on the nature of choking in sports, I had not read his wildly popular first book, “The Tipping Point,” when I picked up his second effort, “Blink.” I didn’t get too far into “Blink” before I understood why Gladwell is so well-liked; he’s a gifted writer, with the rare ability to make complicated ideas approachable to the average reader. His prose is conversational and lively, his enthusiasm contageous. “Blink” examines when we should and should not trust our initial reactions. As Gladwell writes in the introduction:

“Blink” is concerned with the very smallest components of our everday lives–the content and origin of those instantaneous impressions and conclusions that spontaneously arise whenever we meet a new person or confront a complex situation or have to make a decision under conditions of stress. When it comes to the task of understanding ourselves and the world, I think we pay too much attention to…grand themes and too little to the particulars of those fleeting moments. But what would happen if we took our instincts seriously? What if we stopped scanning the horizon with our binoculars and began instead examining our own decision making and behavior through the most powerful of microscopes? I think that would change the way wars are fought, the kinds of products we see on the shelves, the kinds of movies that get made, the way police officers are trained, the way couples are counseled, the way job interviews ar conducted, and on and on. And if we were to combine all of those little changes, we would end up with a different and better world.

Gladwell has been criticized for being a populist and watering-down sophisticated ideas, but I think his greatest strength is engaging his readers and stimulating thought and conversation. At least that’s what “Blink” did for me. It just got my mind racing, making connections between improvisational acting and basketball*, casting actors in a movie and the dynamics of personal relationships. I loved it. I don’t know if it’s a perfect book, but it’s a great read, and it has served as a catalyst for lots of great conversation.

I wrote Gladwell, told him that I appreciate his book, and shared a story about how changes in the process of film editing relate to decision-making. I won’t lie, I also was just dying to ask him if he thought the Yankee playoff collapse last fall could be considered choking. He wrote back, told me he was a huge fan of “Moneyball,” and that he didn’t think the Yankees had choked. In fact, he suggested that baseball is not a sport that lends itself to choking in a team sense like football or basketball do. If Bernie Williams is slumping that won’t necessarily impact how Derek Jeter performs. (Individual situations like what happened to Steve Blass or Chuck Knoblauch are different.)

I thought it would be fun to ask Gladwell some questions as he’s a big sports fan. However, with his book tour in full swing, he’s simply too busy to sit down to do the kind of extensive interview I usually like to do here. So at the risk of being flip, here’s six quick questions I recently asked Gladwell (for a longer conversation with him, check out Rob Neyer’s 2002 interview). I figure it’s best to be somewhat timely, instead of holding off for months. I hope it encourages you to consider reading “Blink.” When things calm down some for Gladwell, I’d like to continue talking with him about sports, so if you’ve got any questions you’d like me to ask, feel free to leave them in the comments section below.

BB: How did you come to write “Blink” and what is it about? Was it something that you had been mulling over for a long time?

MG: Blink is a book about what happens in the first seconds of any encounter. When you see someone for the first time, or hear a song for the first time, or have to make a decision in a blink of an eye, what happens? I got interested in the subject, weirdly enough, when I grew my hair out. I used to have short, respectable hair. Now I have a fairly wild afro, and the minute my hair changed my life changed as well. I started getting stopped by cops, and getting speeding tickets, and pulled out of airport security lines. Something was happening in that instant when people laid eyes on me that fundamentally changed the way I was perceived and treated by the world, and I wanted to understand what it was.

BB: You’ve got such an elastic mind, illustrating an intellectual concept with a wide variety of examples, from car salesman to food testers to scientists to musicians and improvisational actors. What draws you to using such an eclectic group of characters?

MG: Iím always interested in making the ideas Iím writing about seem relevant, and the best way to do that, I think, is to look for as many different manifestations of that idea as possible. So if I can explain something about what happened during the Diallo shooting by talking about autism (as I do in Blink) I think it helps to make the ideas seem more real.

BB: Youíve obviously got a knack for seeing things as others donít. Where does that come from? Did you grow up reading a particular writer or writers who did the same thing?

MG: I’m not sure where that comes from. It might be that Iím very accustomed to being an outsider. I’m the immigrant son of immigrant parents. I’m bi-racial. I’m left-handed. I’m only person to have grown up in Canada who neither skates nor swims. I suppose if you were to put all that together, you’d come up with the psychological portrait of someone who sees the world through a slightly different lens than others.

(more…)

Has anyone else noticed that it is getting lighter, earlier these days? I haven’t had to turn on the light this week as I’m getting dressed in the morning. Hot dog. We’re just a precious few weeks away from spring training, and Yankee star-power is already rearing its fabulous head. Here’s the latest on Yogi Berra, The Big Unit, Gary Sheffield, Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter. For a report on how the other half lives, check out the latest from Cliff Corcoran.

With spring training still weeks away, many fans are still catching up on their baseball literature. If fiction interests you, consider Lee Irby’s new novel, “7,000 Clams,”, a crime story about a bootlegger that features none other than the Sultan of Swat, Babe Ruth. I recently asked Irby, a history professor at Eckerd College, what drew him to writing the book.

Irby: One day at the library, I was doing research on what I thought would be a scholarly piece on the history of baseball in St. Petersburg. I decided it would be fun to delve into what the Yankees were up to when they hit town for the first time in 1925. In the St Pete Times I saw an article that mentioned Babe Ruth getting sued for $7,700 (I changed it to 7,000) by some bookies in NYC. The same story appeared in the New York Times; no Ruth bios mentioned it (that I found). I kept digging. During spring training in 1925, Ruth’s wife Helen came down to save the marriage (it didn’t work, they separated right after). He was drinking like a fish, sleeping around, and got pretty sick (he nearly died after he left spring training–The Belly Ache Heard Round the World). I figured all of that would work in a novel. I am a huge baseball fan. My father was a Yankees fan from the sticks of Virginia because my uncle, Red Irby, played shortstop in the Yankees farm system in the 1950s (he got to Triple A; he was good). Red, though, blew out his knee, drank and caroused, and yelled at his managers. Career over. Mine never got started. I loved the sport but couldn’t play it well.

BB: What kind of license did you take with the Ruth legend?

Irby: Very little, I hope. I tried to capture him, his spirit and his appetites, the best I could. I wanted a complete picture, warts and all. He was generous and selfish, larger than life and strangely childish. I followed him around through the St Pete Times. Everywhere he goes in my book, he went in real life during March 1925. The book climaxes at the running of the Babe Ruth Cup at Derby Lanes Dog Track. For his voice, I relied on his own book, Babe Ruth’s Own Book on Baseball, that was ghost written but probably from interviews with him. That helped with his cadence. It is a suspenseful tale that I imagined men and women would both like–I tried to put in everything but the kitchen sink. I spent four years writing it because I wanted the book to be well constructed. The plot twists and turns like a mystery; there is history for those who like it; a love story; hit men sent by Al Capone; and the Babe. I used slang from the Twenties so there are almost no “curse” words. I slaved over the details and sweated everything. The editor who bought the book at Doubleday, Jason Kaufman, was the editor for The Da Vinci Code, so I felt pretty good about my efforts. Lucky for me, Jason is a big Yankees and baseball fan.

(more…)

Bob Klapisch recently visited Alex Rodriguez in Miami and was invited to join the Yankee third baseman’s morning work out routine. Needless to say, Klapisch was left gasping for air, and impressed with Rodriguez’s drive. Further, he writes that, like Giambi, Rodriguez has a need to be liked. But, in a meeting with George Steinbrenner last week, Rodriguez was encouraged to worry less about being accepted in the Yankee clubhouse and concentrate on developing an edge, a mean-streak:

Steinbrenner told Rodriguez it was no longer necessary to defer to Jeter. Even though he rarely ventures into the clubhouse anymore, The Boss nevertheless zeroed in on the Jeter-A-Rod dynamic: It’s Rodriguez who has sought Jeter’s approval, not the other way around.

…”This is still Jeter’s team because he’s the captain, but my approach is not to be everyone’s best friend,” Rodriguez said. “My approach is to win championships. The only way to do that is to be myself, and to take care of my world. With my talent people will follow naturally.”

Watching the Yankees last year, it was obvious that Rodriguez deferred to Derek Jeter. While Jeter is the captain and a Yankee icon, Rodriguez is the superior player. If he needs to channel the inner-Reggie in him to play his best ball, so be it. It’d be sure to make the newspapers happy, but if winning is really the only important thing in Yankeeland, the end result will most likely make Yankee fans pleased too.

Tyler Kepner has an extensive profile on Jason Giambi in the New York Times today. According to Kepner, Giambi is a player who sincerely cares what people think about him. This leads Kepner to wonder how Giambi’s nice-guy personality with react to the jeering he will hear from fans everywhere in 2005:

When games start, he will face a season-long test of his mental makeup. Fans will be ruthless, and Giambi will care what they think.

“That’s both a strength and a weakness for him,” said Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics. “When you’re a major league player, it can be a character flaw. But it’s not a character flaw as a human being. He’s a good guy, and if it affects him, that’s because he does care.”

Will he run into trouble in the Yankee clubhouse?

“Jason’s a nice guy,” said Yankees reliever Mike Stanton, who was Giambi’s teammate in 2002. “He’s very personable, he’s intelligent, he’s got a good personality. I would think it would be tough for somebody to hold a long-term grudge on somebody you liked before it started.

“I’m not saying it can’t happen, but I think most of his teammates would probably say they just want him to get healthy.”

From a distance, former teammate Tony Clark thinks Giambi will pull through:

“The same commitment he had that made him a superstar in our game will be the driving force behind him excelling again,” Clark, who now plays for Arizona, said in an e-mail message. “It won’t be easy, but anything worth its weight usually isn’t. My hope for him is that through all of the adversity, he finds the strength he needs to have to be a contributor on the field and the inner peace to persevere off of it. I know he can do it.”

Jason Giambi, this is your life.

Jay Jaffe, the Peter Finch of baseball bloggers, looks at what the Yankees have done this off-season, and well, it makes him sick. Dayn Perry thinks the Bombers have done a poor job too, and I know that Steven Goldman, Cliff Corcoran and Larry Mahnken aren’t wild about what’s been going on in the Bronx either. But nobody goes for the jugular quite like Jaffe. Kick em in the grill, Jay.