Same with Showalter: He could have walked Jeter in that final Yankee Stadium game. There was one out, a man on second, and the human GIDP known as Brian McCann following Jeter in the order. A lot of managers would have told his pitcher to put Jeter on base. Buck didn't.
Here's an exciting thought: Next year, the Yankees will be led by A-Rod, Teixeira, Carlos Beltran, Jacoby Ellsbury, Martin Prado - some sure-to-be-disappointing free agent - and whatever old-timers can be snapped up from the salary dump scrap heap. I bet Chris Young returns! Yippee!
Are we supposed to sit around, debating whether the Yankees should re-sign Chase Headley? Is that what we should do over the next month? Because I'm out. I'd rather debate whether the front office should be boiled in peanut oil or olive oil. What kind of feathers should go best on the tar?
I feel like I'm holding a wet paper bag filled with dead kittens.
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with peanut oil one can cook at a much higher temperature. just say'n...
Why would any Yankee fan ever hate Buck Showalter? Without him there would have been no glory years of the late nineties and early aughts. You don't think that the bumbling Gene Michael by himself had the vision to draft and nurture those young players when Steinbrenner was itiching to trade them all? That was Buck. And then he was forced out for his trouble. He's clearly one of the smartest and most personally authentic men in baseball--everything the current Yankee management is not and will never be.
So I repeat--why would any Yankee fan even think about hating on Buck Showalter?
Buck's hatred of the Yankees burns with the heat of 1,000 suns and maybe that's just being reflected back on him by some fans.
I can see why Buck hates so much, and not just due to the Yanks. He built us up, then was fired and Torre got to bask in the dynastic glory Buck built. Then on to Arizona where he built another great team from total crap. Lost that job too and the next guy won the World Series. Now watch him lose in this post season, get fired, and have some other manager come in and win a World Series or two.
Buck may be the first MLB manager to go postal. You heard it here first.
I see no evidence that Buck Showalter hates the Yankees, much less with the heat of a thousand suns, in your purple-prose portrayal. Do you have any evidence or quotations to buttress this raging hyperbole?
here're a couple but there is certainly more. we gossip about Buck all the time around the watering hole.
http://bleacherreport.com/articles/646600-buck-showalter-blasts-derek-jeter-boston-red-sox-are-the-orioles-in-trouble
http://hardballtalk.nbcsports.com/2013/08/31/buck-showalter-spoke-with-bud-selig-regarding-his-comments-about-the-yankees/
Two reasons:
1. Showalter was so angry after being fired by the Yankees that he refused to watch any of the World Series, which they won under Torre.
2. In 2005, when Buck was managing the Rangers, on the last game of the season, the Yankees were locked in a race for home field advantage with the Angels. With the Rangers leading 4-1 in the third, Buck pulled Michael Young, Mark Teixeira and Hank Blaylock - the heart of the Rangers batting order - basically conceding the game, which the Angels won. Joe Torre, later, was stunned that Showalter would do such a thing.
http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/TEX/TEX200510020.shtml
That's preposterous. There is nothing in either of those comments that remotely registers a burning hatred with a thousand suns, blah, blah. Those are just routine competitive observations--Jeter did jump away from inside pitches to get calls, and argued EVERY time he was called out on strikes, as though there's no such thing as called strike three on Derek Jeter. And Buck's comments about Rodriguez and luxury taxes were pretty perfunctory--and accurate, considering the team's subsequent reckless and futile spending spree.
What do you expect Showalter to do--manage with a Yankee hat on and constantly go on about how much he misses New York?
Your grapes have gone pretty sour if this is the best you can dig up to support your reckless and asinine assertions about Showalter. The Yankees would be lucky to have him now--but the front office is too stupid to hire anyone with that much intelligence and talent--it would be a shock to the ingrained culture of ineptitude.
duque--That's really a couple of minor potato peels from the bottom of the barrel. Without Buck Showalter, the Yankee franchise would never have gotten out of the Steinbrenner gutter of the late eighties/early nineties--Derek Jeter would have been buried in the minor leagues in favor of Felix Fermin (it was Buck who put starch in Stick's spine about Jeter and other young players), and Williams, Rivera, Pettite, and Posada would all have been traded, as George wanted to do on more than one occasion.
Buck made many gracious comments about Jeter in the last series against the Yankess and probably told his pitchers to go easy on him so he could go out in a blaze of glory--there's no other way to explain Jeter's sudden rise from the ashes of the past two months.
Your and KD's comments are monumentally peevish and small-minded--fan parochialism and tribal malevolence at their worst.
it's a fan's prerogative to take minor incidents, blow them out of all proportion, and be a totally unfair asshole while supporting multi-millionaires who don't give a hoot about them. and besides, I never said I hated Buck. I'm actually quite grateful to him, much the same as you, Bill. He just seems a little bitter is all and I just can't help poking him with a stick.
You're probably right - especially the part about the Yankees being better with him. But until this weekend, I haven't seen Showalter show anything but contempt for the Yankees over the last 15 years.
Well what did you expect--"Thanks, Yankees, for forcing me out after I rescued your sorry asses. I'll be eternally grateful. You're a swell bunch." Would that about do it?
With an annual gift during Hope Week. Yes, that would do it.
whoa, whoa, whoa, Bill from Manhattan. Yes, I do think Gene Michael, along with Bob Watson, did draft, sign and develop the players who went on to become Yankee champions, and while their management approach may have been more collegial and inclusive than King George, which may have opened the door for input from Showalter, I do not feel the Yankee manager of 1993-5 was responsible for "building" the dynasty.
I agree with you that Buck has been talking like a very wise philosopher the past couple of years, but it was not always so. He was quite a prickly pear for quite a while. The reason to hate is as irrational as anything to do with sports fanaticism: He's the leader of a hated rival. Simple as that. Further explanation not required.
Bill has raised some good points. Maybe it's time to do some soul searching on Yankee villains. I guess there's still Joe Maddon. But should we really hate Pedroia anymore, especially if he's hitting .250 and dragging Boston down, because Mookie Betts is in the OF? I mean, Curt Schilling has cancer; why poke any more pins into his cushion? The simple truth is that every team now has a few Yankee killers on it, and we can't hate everybody. This is Hell. WE ARE IN HELL.
Bob Watson did not draft any of the core five. They all came into the organization during the Michael-Showalter regime. But Michael had a history of being a bumbling Steinbrenner time-server; I'm convinced that it was Showalter's adamancy about developing young talent that stiffened Michael's spine in the face of Steinbrenner's moronic itching to trade all of them. Bernie Williams certainly corroborates that version--he has always said that it was Buck who saved his career in the face of Steinbrenner's impatience and the doltish nattering of the daily sportswriters: Bernie has no baseball instincts, he doesn't steal bases, he's not Mantle or DiMaggio--the usual cud-chewing of the sort to which Cashman panders to this day in his personnel decisions.
Showalter was a bright light at the end of a long, dark tunnel. Speak no ill of him. Especially as we crawl back into that same tunnel once again.
I'm Bill White states it with admirable concision. I will add only this: at the Yankees' Old Timers' Day, 2014, Buck Showalter got a louder cheer than either Joe Girardi or Joe Torre. It's heartening that the mass of Yankee fans know better than some of the self-proclaimed sages of the baseball blogs.
I can't stand Torre. Like I've said before, he'd be the Ringo Starr of baseball, except that Ringo was actually an inventive and much better drummer than people gave him credit for. Girardi is a meathead. Plus, it shoulda been Mattingly. Morons.
Buck gets my vote. Always has. Smart baseball man, good manager, that one Seattle playoff game pitching decision aside (and that took balls).
He approaches the game with the heat of 1,000 suns, purple prose and all.
Bill, you make good points and express yourself quite well with facts. I must resort to pleading my right to be irrational.
Fuck Buck.
And I've been a Dodger hater since 1955, and Mattingly can't change that.
I want a KC v. Pittsburgh World Series.
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