10/11/06 rant

10/10/06
New Levels of Incompetence

In my articles thus far, I have used size 14 print in my initial rant, and size 12 in my minor rants. To accommodate the sheer length that my initial rant will in all likelihood attain, I have made both sizes smaller.
Before I get onto the Yankees and the 4,000 things that went wrong with them, I’ll pay lip service to the other series’ to feign objectivity. You, the reader, will be completely fooled by this and walk away from my article smiling, saying things aloud like “he is a really complete writer. He gets every angle, covers everything, and does not pay undue attention to MLB, NFL, and the Yankees in general”. Absolutely.
I do not know what hideous sickness convinced me to pick the Padres in the series over the Cardinals. Oh wait, yes I do. Twas the hideous sickness called “fan-hood”. The Cardinals need to lose. They need to lose quickly, painfully, and badly. But I should never have *picked* them to lose. This is a lot like my March Madness bracket this year. Oh how stupid I am (just because Syracuse is Big East doesn’t make them good. *smacks self over and over and over*). I knew the Cardinals would win but I picked the Padres because I wanted them to win. The Cardinals need to disappear. Pujols' funky batting stance needs to disappear. Chris Carpenter needs to disappear. Tony La Russa really needs to disappear. Yet they did not, because they were playing the Padres.
Last year, the NL West got a team in the playoffs despite horrifically stinking. This year, they got two teams in the playoffs, not in spite of, but because they horrifically stink. With so many bad teams, their records managed to eventually cancel each other out until two terrible teams from a terrible division from a terrible league managed to get into the big shabang. They both lost quickly. Surprise surprise.
Meanwhile, the Twins got embarrassed. Violated. Strung up on the flag pole *in* their underwear. They were so thoroughly beaten it is hard to believe this team once looked formidable. How did they ever win a game Santana did not pitch? Speaking of Santana, even he was out pitched, at home no less. So much for everyone’s favorite MVP candidate. The A’s didn’t really score that much; Twins hitters simply looked awful. Justin Morneau and Joe Mauer did nothing until it was too late. So much for everyone’s second and third favorite MVP candidates (everyone always loves the Twins until they get into the postseason, and then we remember they are still the Twins).
Barry Zito is making his off-season payday bigger with every playoff start like that. I hope he now crashes and burns, so that when the Yankees inevitably pursue him, he will cost them less. He is a head case who will never survive in NY, and hopefully they only waste $10000000 on him instead of $12000000. Man that’s a lot of zeros. Can you imagine making that much and claiming you get minimum wage? Yeah well Torii Hunter can. And we saw what happened to his team. Once upon a time when he was relevant, Latrell Sprewell made similar comments. His teams fared no better. That should be a warning to overpaid athletes everywhere: stop complaining about money. The karma will kill you. You get absurd amounts of money to play a game.
Yet all of this pales in comparison to the ultimate underachiever, Alex Rodriguez.
Now the article changes. Now I become two people. First, I will give the fan’s take. What the die-hard Yankee fan who can’t believe what he just saw is saying about this team and what should happen. Then, I will give a more rational answer. This is not to say that everything said by a fan is unreasoning—quite the contrary, the fan knows best because the fan is the customer. But sometimes fans get a tad zealous.

A-Rod

The Fan’s Take:

Oh how we loathe you, A-Rod. Oh how we roll our eyes when you come up to the plate. Oh how we are not surprised when you look like a 5 year old swinging wildly at his dad’s best curveball. Oh how we aren’t surprised when you stare at a meaty fastball headed right down the center of the plate. Oh how much we want to get rid of you. Oh how we know it won’t happen, because baseball does not work like that. Oh how we rue the day when living memory has passed and your numbers are the only things to speak for you, and analysts proclaim you the greatest player of all time. Oh how wrong they will be. You are not even the greatest player of your generation, not even the greatest player on your team, for goodness’ sake.
The Yankees lost because A-Rod came up with the bases loaded instead of Scott Brosius. Brosius will barely be remembered in history books, but he was a better playoff performer than you, oh blue lipped, perfectly proportioned, blonde highlighted, pretty boy. Go back to Texas and play on last place teams where numbers in the regular season mean everything. Go ahead.

Rational Thought:

Alex Rodriguez knows how to physically hit a baseball. He knows how to hit it to left field, right field, the field next door, the moon, etc. What he does not know is when to hit a baseball. He gives no indication that he will ever be able to perform when his team needs him. Maybe he will, maybe he won’t, but there are clearly some problems in the man’s head. Maybe it is New York—who knows. He gets a ton of scrutiny, and after a while you have to feel sorry for him. If he will never produce in NY, though, he needs to leave. If Lou Pinella can get him to produce...
Regardless, the fact remains that A-Rod tries hard and doesn’t come through. Will New York ever fit for him? Maybe, maybe not. How long are the Yankees going to wait to find out, and even if they determine he has to go, can they realistically get rid of him?

Division Series

The Fan’s Take:

In years long gone, the best teams won. They sent the team with the best regular season record to the World Series. That was it. That worked. Why? Because 162 games is a heck of lot more than 5, and it shows for more clearly who the better team is. The five game series does various things to baseball:
1) It makes it the ultimate me-first sport. Team baseball is useless. It is pointless. To win in the playoffs you need what the Diamonbacks had in ’01: two good pitchers, one good hitter, period. This is no team game anymore. This is a game where the guys in the lineup tell their pitcher to shut the other team down while we stare at our muscles and pose for endorsements. No game requires less teamwork than baseball as is, and such a short series turns it into a mess of egos. Look at the A’s. They have a good pitcher, a good hitter, and a spot in the ALCS. Of course, the Twins had that too, but the Twins got unlucky.
2) Speaking of which, the division series’ ridiculous number of games makes whatever you did in the regular season useless. Who cares if you were the second best team in your division? Who cares if you were the third best team in your league? Get one lucky, fluke of a game and the series is practically yours.
3) It doesn’t even make any sense. More games mean more money, and yet MLB doesn’t want it. Why? Probably so that every team has a chance. Yeah. And I could win the World Series of Poker. Technically, I could. But the chances are 9,000 to 1 against. Well the chances of your team winning are 7-1 against. Who cares if they are twice as good as the team they are playing against. That matters not. It is a roll of the dice.
4) For that matter, why don’t we just flip coins? Send the captains out there and have them pick sides, and then the ump flips a coin to see who wins, everybody cheers or jeers, and we move on. More efficient that way.
5) The Oakland A’s take the first half of the season off. Period. All the time. The Twins took it off this year. But they know that as long as they then sneak into the playoffs somehow, those games mean absolutely nothing. Being a wildcard doesn’t matter. Having no home field doesn’t matter. It is a freaking crapshoot, and the whole dang baseball world knows it.

Rational Thought:

There is an inherent fault in Baseball: the best team does not always win. This is obvious since the best team in the league has never lost fewer than 46 games. On average, the best teams loses 60 times. 60 times! How then, is one supposed to judge the season on a five game series? You can’t. It is stupid, it always has been, the best team does not win in the playoffs, the luckiest team wins. Seven game series are at least tolerable. Generally, in a seven game series, the better team will win—though it is still far from certain. But in a five game series, the Royals can win. Really. They swept Detroit in a THREE game series to end the season. And yet we are supposed to believe a five game series does any type of justice to the teams’ abilities?
This is why, in years long gone, the best teams won. They sent the team with the best regular season record to the World Series. That was it. That worked. Why? Because 162 games is a heck of lot more than 5, and it shows for more clearly who the better team is.


Brian Cashman

The Fan’s Take:

This bum never does a darn thing right. Randy Johnson for three years at $16 million a year, a guy with a 5.00 ERA? Carl Pavano? Jaret Wright? Kyle Farnsworth? There is no level of stupidity to which this man won’t fall.

Rational Thought:

Brian Cashman has given the Yankees a veritable All-Star team. The problem with these particular All-Stars is that the majority have not been All-Stars for years. He gets them old, washed up pitchers, and sluggers who know how to hit but not how to win. Cashman can evaluate talent pretty darn well; but Matsui, A-Rod, etc., apart from being somewhat no-brainers, are also somewhat terrible. Matsui is a guy who will give you good stats and terrible results. He is easy to strike out if one has a live fastball, and he gives second basemen around the league double play balls all the time. Acquisitions like Giambi and Sheffield seem good until you realize that the Yankees are paying them ludicrous amounts of money for two good years and then a washed up, old, bench player.
Nevertheless, the team Cashman has not-so-exquisitely put together (he does have a $200000000 payroll to work with... wow. Many a zero there) should win. Cashman’s problem is he hates change. When asked if A-Rod or Torre might be moving out after their embarrassing loss to the Tigers, Cashman replied as if it was is stupid question, wondering why they would possibly want to get rid of either of them.
Maybe because your team just got embarrassed and they were two huge reasons why. If you don’t win, why go out with the exact same team and expect to win next year?


Joe Torre

The Fan’s Take:

He sucks. Completely.

Rational Thought:

He sucks. A lot. Joe Torre clearly knows how to keep a cool head over the long regular season, and he is adept at appeasing the massive egos involved with the Yankees $200 million payroll. But he does not know how to manage the game of baseball at all.
Let’s just count a few of the many and vast mistakes he made this series:
1) He took out Wang in the seventh inning of game 1, when Wang was on a roll and the entire Yankee team was bulldozing the Tigers. It would never be the same again. Every Yankee fan with a brain was screaming at Torre as he walked out to the mound. It was one of the dumbest moves I have ever seen a manager or coach make in any sport. Torre has a history of pulling starting pitchers way too early, but this was unbelievably bad. Not surprisingly, Mike Myers gives up a home run, Scott Proctor has to work out of trouble, and the Yankees completely hand the high ground to the Tigers.
2) He batted A-Rod 6th in the line-up. What? That’s a great way to inspire confidence in a shattered mind. Make sure he knows he is pitiful enough to only deserve the sixth spot.
3) He played Matsui instead of Melky. I don’t know how much of this is Torre versus Cashman—Matsui makes way more money than Melky—but Cabrera is a far superior outfield, a faster base runner, and had far more experience at the plate this year. In addition, Melky is capable of doing all the things a team needs to do in the playoffs—moving runners over, making tough outs, not grounding into double plays, etc. Not to mention the fact that he is a switch hitter.
4) He dropped A-Rod to 8th in the lineup. Oh. Yeah. Great confidence booster there.
5) He did not play Giambi, the Yankees top home run hitter, in the final game. And it isn’t like Giambi is all or nothing. He can walk with the best of them. He is the best of them.
6) These and other such awful moves had the Yankee team as a whole disordered and lacking in passion. You could just see that the Yankees almost did not care. That is supposed to be Torre’s forte, and he failed even there.

This list doesn’t even include his destruction of the bullpen during the regular season. All of their relievers were good for the first half, but tired and died and stunk towards the end of the season. Why is this? Because Torre beats them all into the ground, by pulling his starters in the 4th inning when they have perfect games going and their pitch count is up to 37.
Despite all of this, Torre is defended by some of his players. Well... duh. Players love Torre. He is easy on them, lets them get lazy, doesn’t care if they play hard, and does his best not to step on any toes. Of course the players like him. Jaret Wright even came out with the ridiculous “he doesn’t swing a bat or throw a pitch” line. Well, if that were a valid excuse, no manager should be fired—ever! (After all, Grady Litle wasn’t the guy who was throwing gas in game seven of the 2003 ALCS). Gary Sheffield, the most honest, least politically correct player on the team—though he won’t be on for long—had the following to say about Torre’s decision-making:

"I think that (putting A-Rod eighth) affected the morale and psyche of the entire team, not just A-Rod. I'm not making any excuses, but everyone was wondering what was going on. It made it a real weird day. You would like to be treated with a little respect, I don't care who you play for.

"We were worrying about all of that stuff, and we still had a game to play. If I'm on the other side, and all of a sudden they're putting Rodriguez eighth and putting me or Jason on the bench, you wonder what's going on. Those guys [the Tigers] were asking me about it. I think it boosted their morale. It gave them confidence they didn't have.”

Amen, Sheff. Torre should be gone, won’t be gone, and now we all—Yankee fans and haters alike—get to watch Torre screw up yet another talented team for one more year—at least—through horrible over-managing.