by Jon DeRosa |
September 22, 2011 11:16 pm |
26 Comments
Tampa spanked a Scranton-New York mash up 15-8, and that score does not do the game justice. It was 12-0 after four innings. The American League East Champions are entitled to a sleeper after clinching last night.
From this game we should take the following, in decreasing order of importance: nobody got hurt, Bartolo Colon was terrible, and Jesus Montero went three for three with two walks after a couple of ghastly games. The only regulars in the lineup were Jeter, Swisher and Teixeira, and they all came out after the game was out of hand in the fourth. Mad props to the Scranton boys who scored eight runs in the final few frames.
If I didn’t mention it earlier, the Yankees are American League East Champions. Before the season, I thought they had little chance to take the East crown. During the season, they proved me wrong and stayed close to the top, but I still never thought they’d outclass Boston because Boston was murdering them head-to-head. So to win the East so early that the last series with the Sox means diddly squat? Inconceivable.
Happy to be wrong. Hope I’m as bad at prognosticating the Postseason results because I still can’t see this rotation getting it done. To me, we’re in 2004-2007 territory. A great season, a great run differential, but having to throw one bad starter after another in the Postseason. The good news is that in AL at least, looks like everybody is in a similar jam. The Yankees can coast home from here, win a couple of the remaining games, rest players liberally and still pick up the best record in the AL. That’s what they’ll probably do.
But of course, given the fact that they play out the string against Red Sox and the Rays, the Yankees will determine the Wild Card winner. Should the Yankees arrange the off-days for the regulars so that the Rays play Scranton four times and the Red Sox draw the Bronx Bombers for all three games at the Stadium? There are two possible reasons for doing this: 1) The Yankees hate the Red Sox and want to ruin their season as early as possible. 2) The Yankees fear the Red Sox and want to avoid them in the ALCS if possible.
Going out on a limb, I think the first one is purely a fan’s reaction. Yankee fans would love to stick to the Sox, but for the Yankee organization, I hope it’s low on the priority list. If it came down to the last day of the season, and everything else was set in stone, and the Yanks could twist the needle by starting Brackman in the final game at Tampa, I could see that happening. But not some week long choreography.
But the second one deserves consideration. The Yankees are 4-11 against the Red Sox. CC Sabathia has struggled in all five tries against them this year. Of all the teams in baseball, they seem the most comfortable against Mariano. The most able to lay off the cutters outside the zone anyway. As a scaredy cat fan, I think they should do whatever possible to end Boston’s season now so that they don’t have the chance of losing to them in the ALCS.
Luckily, the Yankees are not comprised of scaredy cat fans. When I was a player, I certainly was not upset to see a top team knocked out of a tournament before we had to deal with them. But I also didn’t get too worked up about it one way or the other. If a team wants to consider itself a true champion, they’ve got to have the huevos to take out all comers. Whatever lineup Girardi puts out there should just try to win every game they play, and let the chips fall where they may.
Give guys rest. Line things up for the ALDS. But manipulate the final week of the season to push a floundering team out of the Postseason in favor of an equally good surging team? Pass.
Think it’s been weird for Sox fans to root for the Yankees? One of my Sox buddies was cheering with no problem cause he said the alternative was hockey season. Another Sox friend, however, refused to budge. I thought he just didn’t want to give me the satisfaction. Then he said, “What makes you think I want to watch these bastards anymore?”
Point taken.
A month ago, did anyone think the final series against Boston would be essentially meaningless for the Yanks? Dag.
Here’s the lineup:
Derek Jeter SS
Eduardo Nunez 2B
Mark Teixeira DH
Nick Swisher RF
Andruw Jones LF
Jesus Montero C
Jorge Posada 1B
Brandon Laird 3B
Greg Golson CF
September is the month when baseball’s long marathon breaks into a sprint known as the pennant race. For some teams, it’s an opportunity to take a victory lap, while for others, it’s a time to either go to the whip or hold on for dear life. However, not every team finishes the year by charging hard toward the finish line. Just as many end the season bringing up the rear, seeking a merciful end to a long summer of losing
The ultimate stigma for a baseball team is a 100-loss campaign. Among the 2,446 major league seasons played by the existing 30 franchises, only 140, or less than 6%, have ended in such ignominy. Unfortunately for the Houston Astros, 2011 was such a year. However, long-time fans should be willing to cut the organization some slack. In the club’s 50-year history, this was the first time it suffered 100 defeats, leaving the Colorado Rockies and Los Angeles Angels as the only two franchises to never pass the century mark.
100-Loss Seasons by Franchise Source: baseball-reference.com
No team has lost 100 games more often than the Athletics, who caused fans in three different cities to suffer through 16 seasons of milestone futility. In the National League, the Phillies lead the way with 14 seasons at 100 or more losses, which might explain why Philadelphia has a reputation for being so ornery. Between the two clubs, the city of brotherly love has been witness to 25 years of historically bad baseball, so you probably can’t blame its residents for not believing in Santa Claus.
Longest Current Streaks Without a 100-Loss Season Source: baseball-reference.com
It took 50 seasons for the Astros to finally drop 100 games, which is noteable because the franchise broke into the National League along with the New York Mets, who lost a record 120 games that year. In 2003, the Tigers gave the Metsies a run for their money, but pulled up short at 119. Even in losing, those Tigers left something to be desired.
Among American League teams, the Yankees enjoy the longest stretch without a 100-loss season, an honor it almost forfeited in 1990. That year, the Bronx Bombers lost 95 games, the most since going down to defeat on 102 occasions in 1912. In the National League, the Dodgers and Cardinals each boast an even longer active streak without a 100-loss season. Both teams last passed the century mark in 1908, which just so happened to be the year the Chicago Cubs won the World Series. Since then, the Cubs have failed to win another Fall Classic, while the Dodgers and Cardinals have gone on to lead the National League in pennants.
Losing Seasons by Franchise
Source: baseball-reference.com
The Astros weren’t the only team to establish a new mark for futility this month. When the Pirates lost their 82nd game on September 15, the franchise increased its record long run of losing seasons to 19. Only 50 games prior, the Pirates enjoyed a share of first place in the N.L. Central, so at least their fans had the chance to dream just a little. The Orioles weren’t as kind to their followers. By the All Star break, it was clear that Baltimore was headed for its 14th consecutive year below .500, which not only extended an organizational record, but also brought the franchise within one of the Red Sox’ and Athletics’ American League leading string of 15 subpar seasons.
Not surprisingly, the Yankees streak of four consecutive losing seasons is the shortest in the American League (the Diamondbacks, in 97 fewer years, have only had three straight subpar seasons). The Pinstripers also own the distinction of having the lowest percentage of below-.500 seasons in the major leagues. On the other end of the spectrum, the Rangers have had the highest percentage of losing campaigns (62.7%) among teams in existence for at least 50 years. Meanwhile, no franchise can compare with the Phillies aggregate level of futility. In the 129 years since the team entered the National League, 72 seasons, or 55.8%, have ended up below .500. Once again, the nastiness expressed by Philadelphia sports fans makes all the sense in the world.
It’s easy to cheer for winners. That’s why bandwagons get so full this time of year. However, we shouldn’t forget all those other teams that get run over and left for dead along the victory trail. After all, in competition, success requires someone else’s failure. So, here’s to the losers. Just don’t let them play for my team!
I started going to Yankees games with my dad when I was four. I was shepherded to the outside gate to have French fries and Diet Coke before we found our way to our seats on the first base side of the diamond, close enough to the action that an errant throw on a double play could hit us in the head.
We walked past the same toothless usher who always guarded the section 71 seats at the old Yankee Stadium, and I would harass the same first baseman, Tino Martinez, for game balls until he retired and yielded his annoyance to Jason Giambi. Attending so many Yankee games, roughly twenty a year, was why I fell so hard for the sport. But even watching every game, part of the time starry-eyed under the stadium lights and the rest of the time in front of my kitchen TV set, didn’t completely satisfy me. I wanted to play.
* * *
Dad caught on to my baseball passion and coached me through Little League. But I was afraid of the ball and no good as a hitter. I stood at the rear of the batter’s box and rarely took the bat off of my shoulder. I had trouble keeping my eye on the ball and vividly remember one at-bat on a Friday night under the lights at Loshe Park in Sleepy Hollow, NY. It was my third time up and I was facing a flamethrower, my friend Nick. I chopped the ball to shortstop and was out by a good ten feet. No runs scored on the play, but my friends and teammates cheered for me making simple contact, which sums up what kind of ballplayer I was. I still wanted to play.
Dad bought me a metal pole advertised on ESPN, the one that had a ball fixed in a black padding. I worked on hand-eye coordination by batting the ball at torso level over and over again, while it coiled around the pole like a tetherball and returned to its original position. I was decent at hitting a ball when it was stationary, but that didn’t help me when it was moving, in a game, so when I finally gave up playing, Dad wasn’t disappointed, probably because I wasn’t either. But he saw what baseball meant to me.
Later that year, he tested something on me he had never tried on my older brother, Jackson, who was indifferent to the game but appreciated the spectacle of the ballpark—the heckling fans, the salesmanship of the hot dog vendors and the cheering after a home run. He took me to his fantasy draft.
* * *
My father was involved in the first fantasy league ever, and plays in what’s left of that league still today. He brought me into the world of fantasy sports through an expensive ($260 in, up to $1500 out) league of adult men (with a wealth of baseball knowledge) when I was almost ten, roughly six years ago. The league (originally called the Rotisserie league but now aptly named “AARP”) was the focus of one of the ESPN 30 for 30 documentaries, “Silly Little Game,” and the creator, Dan Okrent, still plays. It almost instantly became an obsession for me.
Draft day was even better than the trips to Yankee Stadium. We developed a ritual of grabbing a Quizno’s sandwich before heading off to scrape together an underwhelming roster using the SI Baseball Preview sheets. Dad guided me with tips for the auction, telling me to speak up and pronounce my bids with confidence, encouraging me to stare my opponents down, look them directly the eye when I bid to try to get them to drop out. He used a ten-year old boy to try to intimidate his opponents.
We didn’t have a useful strategy, despite his twenty plus years of experience. Maybe it was to make it fun for me, but our overall approach was not exactly a recipe for success: he told me to identify a couple of superstars and pay “whatever it takes” for them, and allowed me to keep the expensive superstars left over from our roster the year before.
Our incompetence wasn’t limited to the drafting of the players. We traveled to the ESPN offices on 34th Street in Manhattan for our first draft together, only to hear from the deadpan security guard on the second floor that he “had no idea of any draft at ESPN.” A phone call later, we realized we had returned to the site of the previous draft but that we were across town from this year’s draft location – the commissioner’s apartment. Amid the chaos of drafting by cell phone from a bus for the first thirty to forty minutes, Dad made good on his promise to buy any superstar whose name I would recognize; Todd Helton for $40? Maybe. David Wright for close to the same amount? Surely. Carlos Delgado for $45? Why not? We didn’t have a list of sleepers, or even a list of players we wanted, but it really didn’t matter at the time.
One league led to another. To my friends, my growing obsession, fueled by my interest in sabermetrics and the acquisition of MLB Season Pass and NBA League Pass subscriptions on our TV at home, looked an awful lot like a gambling addiction. My pal Max teased me. “You know it’s a growing problem, how much money you bet on sports?”
But it was just a deeper way of connecting to the game, incentive to watch as much baseball as I could, and a little reward for all the hours I devoted to it. I had watched the sport through the prism of the Yankees, which meant the AL East. Soon after I began playing fantasy baseball, though, I found myself flush with knowledge about the NL West. The money was a factor in my love of fantasy leagues—free leagues were much less interesting, after all, with owners regularly dropping out—but what appealed to me most is the chance to match wits and baseball knowledge with grown-ups.
* * *
Dad and I talked fantasy baseball while watching the Yankee games during dinners and my Mom suffered through the discussions. I continued to bounce ideas off him – “How does Ryan Howard for a cheap Aroldis Chapman sound?” – and we kept the Fleder Mice in conversations through our successes and our failures. He taught me the importance of keeping cheap speed (hello, $3 Angel Pagan), and how clean innings from a relief pitcher can pile up to provide more value than a starting pitcher who works every fifth day (meet a $2 Rafael Betancourt, and compare him to a $30 Josh Johnson) and as a result of the anecdotes of Roto wisdom he provided, I grew fascinated with the ins-and-outs of both the fantasy game and baseball itself.
Fantasy baseball appealed to me like nothing else I’d ever done, and playing the silly little game made me realize what my dream job in life would be. But with 30 General Managers in MLB and close to 7 billion people in the world, the odds are stacked against me. Even if I shorten the odds by accounting for only the roughly 300 million people in the U.S., my chances of actually running a big league team when I’m older are slim.
I continue to play the fantasy game for the same reason Dan Okrent invented it and my dad participated in the first place. When you can’t play baseball any more, because of arthritis or fear of the fastball, and when you get bored of watching your Cubs lose every year or your Yankees cruise to the postseason almost without fail, and when you itch for your favorite team to make a blockbuster trade, you can turn to your imagination. Dad may not be heaven-bound for creating a Rotisserie monster, but I love him for showing me how to play. And without jumping to conclusions, it looks like we’re going to finish in first place in our AARP league this year.
Nick Fleder is a high school junior who roots tirelessly for the New York Yankees. Fantasy sports are currently his only form of income.
The Yanks beat the Rays in the afternoon game today, 4-2, thanks to good pitching from seven different pitchers and some offensive muscle via Robinson Cano, and in the process secured a postseason spot – not that this had been too much in doubt the last few weeks. Frankly, I wouldn’t mind seeing the Rays get a few wins in this series just to make the Red Sox sweat some more – there ain’t no Schadenfreude like Red Sox Schadenfreude – but as the night game went on, and the Sox lost, and the Yankees were poised to clinch the AL East, the whole enchilada… well, no complaining about that. It was 4-2 Yanks again, thanks to C.C. Sabathia and old pal and pinch-hitting hero Jorge Posada.
It was reassuring to see C.C. Sabathia looks slid after a few disconcertingly unsteady outings. The Big Man went 7.1 innings, allowed two runs, walked 2 and struck out 6. He did exit the game with the score tied at two, the bases loaded, and one out – but that’s what David Robertson is for. He entered and needed just a single pitch to get Ben Zobrist to ground into a double play and end the inning.
The excitement came in the bottom of the 8th, when Nick Swisher doubled, Mark Teixeira walked, Robinson Cano was intentionally walked, and then – somewhat to my surprise – Jorge Posada pinch-hit for The Jesus. You could hear a million Yankees fans, with the Al East title within reach, thinking “wouldn’t it be great if…” – and then he did. Okay, not a grand slam, the most dramatic possible outcome; but a nice two-run single that gave the Yanks the lead, the game, and the division. I don’t know how many more big ABs Posada has with the Yanks, but I’ll bet you can count them on your fingers.
I was one of those people who, before the season started, did not think the Yankees wouldd make the playoffs – I just thought they didn’t have the pitching. I’m not embarrassed by that prediction (unlike, say, my AL Central prediction, which I will aggressively suppress), because the Yankees’ staff, A.J. Burnett aside, has over-performed all year. No one expected Freddy Garcia, Bartolo freaking Colon, or Ivan Nova to be as good as they were- not Brian Cashman, not Joe Girardi, not even Garcia and Colon themselves. The team’s success is a testament to those guys, to the offense, and to the bullpen, with a hat-tip to Girardi – who drives me crazy at times, as all managers drive all fans crazy at times, but damned if he hasn’t pulled another good bullpen more or less out of his ass. Anyway, I thought they’d be good, but not this good, and whatever happens in the playoffs I am happy to’ve been wrong.
So many of this season’s big memorable moments have been about their aging greats – Jeter’s 3,000th, Mo’s 602nd, and now Jorge’s clincher, which while not supremely important – the Al East was not much in doubt – felt like a nice last hurrah. The old guard’s going out in a blaze of glory.
And you know, if the Rays were to win tomorrow…that’ll be just fine.
by Jon DeRosa |
September 21, 2011 9:30 am |
7 Comments
Enter Sandman rang through Yankee Stadium on Wednesday night, even though Mariano was in Seattle. Metallica was in town and a few of my friends went to see the show. They grabbed a few beers for the subway and made their way uptown.
I’m opposed to boozing on the subway because booze leads to piss and you’re S.O.L. when nature calls underground. More than that, groups of drunkards can get aggressive and, at times, violent, and I’d rather not be confined in tiny box cars with them when that happens.
So I wholeheartedly support police presence down there for the big crush of ball games and concerts. When my friends got busted I had no sympathy for them when the started to tell the story. But the story didn’t end where I expected it would.
One of them had an unpaid citation (of which he has no recollection) and he got to spend the next 19 hours on a tour of the New York City correctional facilities. He spent the night in lock-up. By the time he finally got to see a judge, around the noon the next day, she took one look at the case and sent him home with time served, seemingly annoyed she even had to say that much.
I think he should have been punished. There are a limited number of cops and just maybe they could have been doing something more useful at that moment. But in the end, he didn’t even pay a dime, for either citation and how much money did he cost the system by being processed? The way this went down seems like a terrible waste of everybody’s time and money.
The fact that I lived through my experience at “L.A. Law” and had an on-screen writing credit to show for it gave me a seal of approval: “You worked for Steven Bochco? You’re just the guy we’ve been looking for.” It didn’t seem to matter that I’d just hit town and barely knew my hip pocket from a teakettle when it came to screenwriting. That’s how much clout the man had.
Steven made the call that got me in the door with his mentor, Bill Sackheim, at Universal. Sackheim was an embraceable curmudgeon who’d been through the wars in both TV and movies, writing westerns for Audie Murphy and Joel McCrea, producing and co-writing “Rambo,” and dealing with the nightmare that was Sally Field in her “Gidget” days. It didn’t take long for me to realize that time spent with him would be an education, and believe me, I needed educating, especially in the art of constructing a story for the screen.
But while I was trying to develop an idea for a Sackheim project about newspaper reporters, I got a call from a young “Miami Vice” writer named Mike Duggan. I’d met him at Jacob Epstein’s 30th birthday part, and here he was not three weeks later, telling me his boss was looking for someone to help write a two-parter about boxing. Once again the stars were aligned.
In less than two hours, I was in “Vice’s” offices–Building 69 on the Universal lot–meeting Dick Wolf, who was running the writing staff. The very same Dick Wolf who would go on to create “Law & Order” and all its spinoffs. He’d come over from “Hill Street Blues,” where he had clashed famously with the brilliant but erratic David Milch. In his spare time, he was producing two movies he’d written. I don’t know when he slept, but he always walked around grinning like the kid who got the most toys at Christmas.
I shook hands with Dick, and then he introduced me to an amiable, prematurely gray guy who was just about to leave: Kerry McCluggage. Kerry was “Vice’s” supervising producer that afternoon; two days later he was named president of Universal Television. Just like that, I was on a first-name basis with one of the most powerful people in the business. When I’d bump into him on the lot, he’d always say hello and ask about the show, as if I really knew anything about what was going on.
On that first Saturday, however, all that mattered was making a good impression and getting the assignment. I spun a couple yarns about Muhammad Ali and then a few about Don King, and I knew I had scored when Dick showed me the story for the first of the two boxing episodes and asked what I thought of it. I pointed out a few things he had wrong and he didn’t try to debate me, didn’t even flinch; he just fixed them. Then he said, “Okay, we need the script by Tuesday.”
Dick looked at me, still grinning, but there was a question in his eyes that I have to believe involved whether or not I would run out of his office screaming when I heard the deadline. He was asking me to do a rush job, but I’d spent 16 years in newspapers doing rush jobs. This would simply be one for higher stakes.
“Fine,” I said.
“Then you do acts two and three. I’ll do one and four.”
The race was on. I hustled back to Le Parc, where I was staying again, and started hammering away on my Olivetti. I didn’t stop until Tuesday morning when Dick swung by the hotel and I ran out the front door to hand him what I had written. A couple of hours later, he called to say I had passed my trial by fire.
I should point out that the script Dick and I lashed together in three days wouldn’t be the one we shot. It would simply be something the production team in Miami could work off for casting, location scouting, and that sort of thing. While all that was being taken care of, Dick and I went to work on a rewrite that was a far better piece of work.
“Miami Vice” was in its third season when I showed up, and no longer had the heat it did when its stars, Don Johnson and Phillip Michael Thomas, made the cover of Time and established Crockett and Tubbs in the national lexicon. But I was still in tall clover. I didn’t even mind that I was working in a spare office full of the empty cardboard boxes that signified the previous occupant’s failure. Every time I finished rewriting a scene, I’d trot it down to Dick’s office. Halfway through the process, he looked at me (grinning, of course) and said, “I don’t know where you learned to do it, but you know how to get into a scene and out of a scene.” All those years of reading W.C. Heinz, Jimmy Breslin and Gay Talese, the masters of the scene in journalistic form, were paying off. They had always relied on the tools of drama–character, dialogue, the kinetic energy of the moment–and just as I had followed their lead in my newspaper and magazine work, now I was doing it in a medium where the scene was everything.
There were other links to my not-so-distant past as well. Our cast featured rowdy heavyweight Tex Cobb, Olympic champion Mark Breland, and the one and only Don King. I put words I’d heard King say in his character’s mouth, and he made a hash of them. Stuff like “afoxanado” and “low and scurrilous cad.” I even had him say someone was “matriculating on the veranda.” Everything was set up to make King look great. And he whiffed, the big goof.
Cobb was an infinitely better thespian, which should come as no surprise to anyone who remembers him in the Coen brothers’ “Raising Arizona.” My fondest memory of him, of course, is that he was the first man I killed on TV. But far more thrilling than that was hearing Crockett and Tubbs saying my words, and seeing the stylized shot of three killers swaggering through a gymnasium door with bad intentions, lit perfectly, with clouds of man-made fog wafting in for atmosphere. It was pure “Miami Vice.”
I got all those mental keepsakes, and a full-time job, too. Dick hired me as a staff writer, and then he and I set to work on the second of the boxing episodes. Or maybe we wrote part two first. Things were moving so fast that they blur in my memory. The one thing I’m absolutely certain of is how lucky I was as I sat in my office, now clear of boxes, and banged out my half of the next script. Without realizing it, I had hopscotched past thousands of writers who would have sold body parts and family members to be where I was.
We already knew that Ivan Nova has pitched well enough to be the Yankees number two starter. David Cone said on the broadcast tonight that young pitchers often start at home in the playoffs but that Nova has pitched even better on the road. So there’s that. And we know the kid makes us feel better than Bartolo, Hughes, Fab Five Freddy or A.J. Burnett. Against the Rays, he showed us why as he had a slider working, threw a sharp breaking curve ball and the heater was moving, clocked around 94 mph. He didn’t putz around and threw strikes. Mmm, mmm, good.
And when he ran into trouble, Nova didn’t panic. He gave up a lead off single in the top of the seventh, leading 5-0. Then a phantom hbp call put another runner on before Nova walked the number nine hitter to load ’em up. But he got Desmond Jennings out on a fly ball to Brett Gardner in left and then “escaped unscathed,” as they like to say, when B.J. Upton grounded into an inning-ending double play. Good thing too because although a five-run lead might sound like plenty, the Yanks left 637 men on base over the first six innings (for good measure they left the bases juiced again in the seventh and two men on in the eighth). Curtis Granderson did most of the damage with three hits, including two doubles, and four RBI. Eric Chavez also had an RBI base hit.
Nova lasted through two outs in the eighth, gave up a hit and Boone Logan got the final out. Luis Ayala came on to pitch in the ninth and the first pitch he threw was smacked right back at him. Ayala got a glove on it and the ball continued on past him. Robinson Cano moved to his right, slowed down to make sure his timing was right, fielded the ball, turned his body and side-armed the ball to first in time for the out. It’s a play that has become Cano’s signature move and man, does he ever look smooth making it. Always tops it off with a big smile too. After a walk, Jeter started a slick 5-4-3 double play to end it. Mark Teixeira with the beautiful scoop–and he had a couple of those tonight.
