On a day like yesterday, with the Yankees finishing one of the ugliest series in any postseason, I sometimes think about a five game stretch in 2006. Because of a makeup and a shared off day, the Yankees and Red Sox played a five-game series in Boston. Five games in five days, and they were tied when the series started.
When it ended, it was a heady time to be a New York baseball fan. The series was dubbed The Boston Massacre in New York, and each game was tense---even the blowouts were tense. The Yanks swept the BoSox, and all was right in the Bronx. They were tied with the Mets for the best record in baseball.
One similarity with the 2006 edition of the Yankees has with this season's is getting booted from the playoffs by the Tigers.
(Sigh) So...the second- or third-best offense in baseball forgot how to hit? A question like "What happened?" is mostly meaningless. Is Jeter that necessary?
Dan, if haven't been paying attention, Jeter broke his ankle in Game 1, and is out until February or March. Also in Game 1 was the 9th inning against Jose Valverde, the Detroit closer. The Yanks scored four runs off Valverde in the bottom of the 9th to tie the game. Sounds cool, right? Well, they lost in the 12th, but there's a more startling thing I'm getting at.
If you take away that four-run eruption against that one pitcher in that one inning, then the Yankees scored 2 (fucking two!) runs in all the other innings combined. Games 1-4, minus the Valverde inning, reads like some kind of bad dream: 2 runs on 19 hits, 36 strikeouts, 3 errors.
It's not a whole lot better with the Valverde inning back in: 6 runs on 22 hits, 36 K, 3 E. That's for four games. Besides the number of strikeouts six runs on twenty-two hits isn't impossible for a single game line (gotta have lots of double plays, or everybody gets multiple hits, but it's possible).
Cano hit under .100! A-Rod benched! For two straight games!! Swisher and Granderson and Russel Martin (and A-Rod and Cano) combined to hit under .200. Five starters of a murderers row type lineup looking overmatched time after time after time. It was just awful to watch.
Yankee fans want World Series victories, but those are rare and difficult, and as fans we're spoiled. Yankee fans can comprehend and get over losses, and watching the team try and fill holes accordingly can be cathartic. But embarrassment is not something that sits well with the Yankee faithful. The Mets have taught their fans to be ready for the occasional embarrassing moments, but us ol' pinstripers suffer that kind of garbage rarely.
Now fans and sportswriters in New York want A-Rod out, but "want", while accurate in a sense, may not be the right word. It's more of an expectation. They are sure he's gone, off to the Dodgers or the Marlins, or, as Lupica put it, "some other dumb team willing to overspend on his aging circus".
Maybe next year he can have an MVP caliber season in the Bronx. Or has the A-Rod endgame finally materialized?
It was ugly, no doubt about it, but when Jeter broke his ankle (going for a ground ball?!) I just figured they weren't meant to win it. For me, the capper was when CC himself, that god of dependability, that true ace, screwed the pooch in the last game. That sealed it. I'm a firm believer that from game to game, one team is meant to win and one is meant to lose - to me, that's just the way it works. Maybe that's illusory, but it gives you an insight as you watch. Like, when your team rallies in the late innings, and your star hitter smashes a drive toward the gap that might drive in the winner from first, but it's run down on an excellent play in the outfield, that to me is just the forces at work. There's nothing you can do about it.
ReplyDeleteI don't think Hughes winning Game 3 was all that outlandish an expectation, and he pitched well enough, but got pulled for Phelps awful damn early. If the Yanks could have found their bats in time, and if CC hadn't thrown so many innings already - well, there's no telling, literally none.
I've made this point on Yankee blogs, to no avail: truly the best any (rational) fan can hope for is to be in position at the end of the year to sniff the flag - being in a spot to even talk about how close you got - that's what you want and hope for. Baseball playoffs are the worst kind of crapshoot. This year, the Yanks were in a team slump at exactly the wrong time, and if you'd been following them this year, you knew they were going to have to scramble to get their offense going again.
A-Rod ... I don't know what's going to happen, or even what I want to happen. The Yanks are generally disinclined to pay players to play on other teams, so it doesn't seem likely he'll be anywhere but in Pinstripes. Let's not forget he broke his hand in - June, was it? - on a pitched ball, and had no power after he came back. For me, he's still a well-above-average third baseman, obviously not worth the contract Hank hung on him in '07. The market for third basemen is exceedingly thin, and Alex would make a very nice addition for some team in need. Could that be the Yanks, maybe?
Also, I want to say, there was a time during George Steinbrenner's heyday, that I thought the only thing worse than the way the Yankees were run was how they were covered in the media. Well, the Yanks have been run with at least passable skill since 1994 or so, but the way they're covered still sucks a dead moose. Is the media-buying public in NY so jaded or so gullible that it comes anywhere near to believing that claptrap? I'm convinced that New York baseball writers all have inferiority complexes that they feel desperate to compensate for. They're that bad.
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