HoraceClarke66: A Miller's Tale

 By HoraceClarke66...

Even though he was a lawyer, Yankees manager Miller Huggins was not always the sharpest tack on the bulletin board. In 1929, for instance, he became obsessed with the health benefits of tanning, and general exposure to the sun, or sun lamps.

Within a few weeks, Huggins had a mysterious black mole on his face. Within a few months, sadly, he was dead.

 

But whatever Huggins lacked in medical understanding, he made up for in baseball smarts. It didn’t take until August of 1925—the first year that Lou Gehrig had more than a cup of coffee with the team—for Hug to put Babe Ruth and Gehrig back-to-back in the Yankees’ lineup.

 

Didn’t matter how good a hitter Yankees outfielder Long Bob Meusel was—and he was a very, very good hitter. Didn’t matter that Long Bob was a righty, and that Ruth and Gehrig were lefties.

 

Miller Huggins, though shamefully deprived of algorithmic printouts, figured out that two of the greatest hitters the game has ever seen should be hitting back-to-back, belly-to-belly.

 

For your New York Yankees of the 21^st century, it seems to have taken Aaron Boone and his boss three years to figure out that Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton belong back-to-back in the lineup. Granted, this has often been impossible due to the fragile nature of both sluggers, who more often resemble Steve Kemp and Nick Johnson than Ruth and Gehrig. But still.

 

Last night, the YES men informed us that the Yanks are 9-0 in games in which both Judge and Stanton homered. This is, I realize, an awfully small sample size. But it’s hard to argue that we shouldn’t continue the experiment.

 

And speaking of sample sizes, we have a very large one in the case of Gary Sanchez. The YES men also informed us last night—at the behest of Brain? Who knows?—that Sancho is batting just .199 over the last four years, the lowest average by any player with at least 1,000 at-bats in that time. Even in this batting average-scorning age, that just won’t do.

 

I agree with our Peerless Leader that it’s time for a moratorium on the Sanchez piñata. And as I’ve written many times already, when Sanchez first came up—and right through the 2017 playoffs—I thought he looked like a young Johnny Bench. Great arm, great power, and even a prodigious ability to frame pitches. 

 

What happened? Maybe Sancho is the most stubborn or thickheaded player who ever lived—but I suspect the fault lies more with a coaching and training staff for whom he is not an outlier but par for the course. Something needs to be done about that.

 

In the meantime, I wish him well wherever he’ll be traded. Maybe the Brain will even insist on getting a player in return.