Feeding a hungry ballclub.
Saturday, April 18, 2020
Last night, Rudy Giuliani and Sean Hannity made plans for their next Yankee outing
He was talking about the Yankees!
Listen: I am not making this up. What follows is my best reconstruction of the sparkling conversation between America's Mayor and Sean Hannity, the de facto White House Press Secretary. Turns out, Rudy was envisioning the crowd at Yankee Stadium sometime soon.
Rudy: Twenty thousand people! We'll each be separated by a couple of empty seats.
Hannity: You'll like it. That way, you won't have to hear me talk all the time!
Rudy: It'll be just like normal, except fewer people in the stands.
Hannity: You should see this guy. Mr. Mayor here always gets the best seats in the house, right next to the Yankee dugout!
Rudy: They'll space everyone out, so people can do their 'social distancing.'
Hannity: You'll love it. You won't have to hear me talk all the time!
Rudy: Maybe thirty thousand.
Hannity: When I go to games, I talk all the time. That's the way I am at games. I just talk all the time.
Rudy: Maybe sitting one seat apart.
Hannity: You'll love it. You won't have to hear me talk all the time!
Oh, the joys of confinement. Every day, we learn something new.
Virtual Baseball: Gray Just Misses No-Hitter, Tanaka Misses Start. Stanton Missing.
Virtual Sonny Gray, pitching for the Cincinnati Reds tonight, came within two outs of pitching a no-hitter versus his former team, the Virtual New York Yankees. Instead, Gray had to settle for a one-hitter, though he went on blank the Yanks by a score of 4-0.
D.J. LeMahieu managed to thwap a ball through the Reds infield for a clean single with one out in the ninth, bringing a cheer from the 318 people who remained in attendance at Virtual Yankee Stadium. Another 21 were treated for frostbite on this chilly April evening.
366 more were treated for food poisoning, although Yankees creature Lonn Trost described that as the usual, early-season average.
Gray was masterful tonight, striking out 11 and walking only three. Currently 4-0, he leads the NL with a 1.27 ERA. Asked what made the difference between his performances in the Queen City and the Bronx, Sonny replied:
"No disrespect intended, but with the Yankees, going to the pitching coach meant having to talk to this big, fat, stubborn fuck who just wanted you to throw the pitches he liked. I find that there is a different attitude here in Ohio."
The Yankees, at 12-7, remained in second place in the American League East, four games before the sizzling Tampa Bay Rays. But concern continued to grow over New York's starting staff, as rumors flew that Gerrit Cole had been seen weeping at a Manhattan hospital, while Masahiro Tanaka was forced to miss his start tonight while the team's crack physicians attempted to insert "lots a stuff" back into his elbow.
In his place, prized Yankees rookie Deivi Garcia got his first start of the year and went a strong five innings, allowing just two runs and four hits.
But the real story of the game was Gray, who shut down the Yankees from wire to wire. Particularly frustrated was rookie centerfielder Estevan Florial, who struck out all four times he faced the Reds pitcher.
"No, I don't have any worries, because someday, someday, bang-zoom, he's going to hit that high ceiling!" Manager Ma Boone told reporters afterwards.
Meanwhile, Giancarlo Stanton remained missing in the New Mexico desert today. When the Yankees tried to give reporters a briefing on his status, they were interrupted by the dean of the press corps, Brian Harper, who told club officials:
"Frankly, we just don't give a shit. Nobody cares that much about him."
Deputies continued to search for the slugger, but confessed that their hopes were beginning to wane. And that they, too, were bored.
File under
Virtual Baseball
Friday, April 17, 2020
Hoss--also this day in 1951
Mick's first game, sporting number 6.
Shepard and Mick both started the same day? Amazing.
Eddie Murray voted all-time Yankee opponent at first base
The final tally (of 234 votes):
Eddie Murray (51): 22%
Miguel Cabrera (45): 19%
Harmon Killebrew (44): 19%
Rafael Palmeiro (27): 12%
Kevin Youkilis (24): 10%
Rafael Palmeiro (27): 12%
Kevin Youkilis (24): 10%
Boog Powell (21): 9%
George Scott (11): 5%
Mike Hargrove (3): 1%
Scott Spiezio (2): 1%
For whatever it's worth, Murray's career record against the Yankees isn't that incredible.
In 192 games, he hit .270 with 28 HRs and 100 RBIs. In Yankee Stadium, over 100 games, his numbers are .269, with 14 HRs and 49 RBIs.
Still, a truly great first-baseman who terrorized us whenever coming to bat. Bill James calculated him to be the fifth best 1B of all time. Sporting News called him 77th on the top 100 of all-time.
What if? The Orioles drafted Murray in the third round of the 1973 draft. The Yankees first round pick that year was pitcher Doug Heinold. They selected SS Mike Heath in the second round and pitcher Howard Shoff in the third.
Finally: His 19 grand slams rank fourth all time. (The leader is A-Rod with 25.)
How Not to Learn From History.
By the by, the regular phalanx in the Yankees broadcast booth for that game was joined by Alex Rodriguez, looking splendiferous as usual in one of his sparkling new suits.
A-Rod, always excited to be accepted as a real boy, was going on and on about how wonderful Aaron Judge was, with all his skills, his splendid body, "and less than 10 percent body fat!"
He felt that MLB was foolish not to "spend tens of millions" to make Judge the face of baseball, "the face of all American sports!" He also predicted Aaron would hit "500 or 600" home runs.
Enough.
There's been far too much pressure placed on Judge already, what with the "Judge's Chambers" section and all that. He's handled it very, very well, and you know me, I love Aaron Judge more than the sweet, dark mystery of life its own self.
But he's only human. We've seen the limits of Judge's splendid body, and we had already by the time A-Rod was gushing on. We'll be very, very lucky if he gives us 5-6 good years before breaking down completely—and that should suffice.
He's not going to hit 500-600 home runs. He's not going to be anything more—if we're lucky—than a perfectly fine outfielder who works hard at his game, has a lot of field smarts, seems to be an upstanding citizen, and maybe, in just the right year, helps his team to a world championship.
That's all ye can ask for in this game today, and all ye need to have.
Isn't it enough for Alex Rodriguez that he drove himself to distraction—and his body and reputation over the brink of destruction—in trying to live up to impossible expectations? Why try to torment others?
Given his natural abilities and hard work, A-Rod might have spent his whole career as a Gold-Glove shortstop with a mere 300-400 home runs and a plaque already in Cooperstown. That only thing that stopped that from coming true was his own demons.
"Less than 10 percent body fat!" Sheesh!
Yeah, Alex, keep on fetishizing the body athletic. Learn nothing, know nothing about what the gods, JuJu and otherwise, allow us to attain and what they do not.
History.
Courtesy of the YES broadcast of last season's 5-3 win over the Boston Red Sox on this date a year ago, April 17, 1951, marked Bob Sheppard's debut as an announcer at Yankee Stadium.
Here is the lineup he introduced, in the home opener against the 1951 Red Sox:
Jackie Jensen, LF
Phil Rizzuto, SS
Mickey Mantle, RF
Joe DiMaggio, CF
Yogi Berra, C
Johnny Mize, 1B
Billy Johnson, 3B
Jerry Coleman, 2B
Vic Raschi, P
Ho-hum, just another home opener with five future Hall of Famers in the lineup, and 11 MVPs between them. Also, the guy who would be 1951's Rookie of the Year, Gil McDougald, was on the bench.
Yanks won, 5-0, as Raschi pitched a complete game shutout, Jensen homered and doubled, and Mantle, DiMaggio, and Berra also drove in runs.
You know, sometimes I think maybe we forget how lucky we are...
Virtual Off-Day: Injury List Grows. Stanton Still At Large.
Returning to New York after a successful first Western swing, the Virtual Yankees had to confront a problem that plagued them last year: injuries.
Luke Voit, after one of his best games at first base yesterday, was reporting a pull in his trilateral sephardic cortex, while catcher Gary Sanchez, off to only a .176 start behind the plate, was diagnosed with a jesuitical left selenium.
"None of it looks too serious. But they have to be watched," Manager Ma Boone said after getting the trainer's report.
Meanwhile, there was confusion over whether or not Gerrit Cole had had his right arm examined, after a plane ride back from Dallas which he reportedly spent doubled over in pain, clutching his shoulder and demanding more shots of vodka to ease the agony.
"Yeah, yeah, sure, he had an FYI," Yankees creature Randy Levine, cornered while out catching flies at lunchtime, told a reporter.
Asked if he meant to say that Cole had had an "MRI," Levine replied, "Actually, he had a MYOFB," and placed his hand over his crotch for added emphasis.
No word still on the whereabouts of slugger Giancarlo Stanton, although New Mexico authorities reported that, judging by its hoofprints, the horse he was thought to be riding had traveled past "plants and birds and rocks and things" and was approaching "sand and hills and rings."
"Well, at least in the desert there ain't no one for to give him no pain, that's for sure," New Mexico state trooper Dewey Bunnell told the press.
File under
Virtual Baseball
Thursday, April 16, 2020
Before the Courthouse, Stan's, and Parking Lots
Shown below is Baseball's One True Cathedral on April 19th, 1923, the day AFTER Opening Day:
The subway was there but this is before the Bronx Courthouse was built, before any of the businesses we know today such as Stan's and the Bowling Alley, and before any attempt was made to build any ... parking lots.
I'm really not sure why the place was filled to capacity on Day 2 of the season (refrigerator magnet day?), but look at all the cars in the adjacent lots ... all of the parking towers had yet to be built to accommodate the crowds.
Please also look also at all those open, grassy spaces and just how big that outfield was.
Soon we'll be back there.
Please stay safe, everyone.
RIP Damaso Garcia
Another link to the Golden Age of Shitty Yankees Trades, gone.
"Garcia, who played for the Dominican national team, was signed by the New York Yankees as an amateur free agent in 1975 and first made it to the majors in 1978. He was traded in the 1979 offseason to Toronto along with Chris Chambliss and Paul Mirabella for Tom Underwood, Rick Cerone and Ted Wilborn."
The IT IS HIGH plan to save baseball in 2020
The reality is that, until a vaccine is available, fans cannot be packed into stadiums, and well-intentioned plans for "bubble" leagues in Arizona and Florida suffer too many complications.
What can America do to save the national pastime?
Relax, everybody, I got this. Here's the 7-point plan:
1. Ditch the traditional 30-team season until mid-2021.
2. Siphon from MLB rosters four "all-star" teams - the Reds, Blues, Greens and Purples. They will reflect regions of the country - the Northeast, the South, the Midwest and the West Coast.
3. Players will be paid according to a scale negotiated by the union and owners, reflecting TV revenues for a reduced season.
4. The four richest men in America - Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates - will "own" the teams. Each multi-billionaire can manage on the field or hand the games to celebrity surrogates, such as A-Rod and Jared Kushner.
5. The four teams will face off every Saturday and Sunday, with two games played each day, over a 21-week season. Games will move from city to city, played in near-empty stadiums, before a few hundred socially-distanced fans, chosen by lottery.
6. Rosters will continually be updated, with the billionaires adding stars and subtracting injured or under-performing players. Those players will be scapegoated in daily briefings by the President.
7. The winning region will receive meat, electric power and medical supplies. The losing region can wait to be saved by Jennifer Lawrence.
Virtual Yanks Get Away With One on Get Away Day in Texas. Stanton Tracked in the Desert.
The Virtual Yankees managed to pull out a wild one in Arlington on the last day of their three-game set against the Texas Rangers, winning 10-9 in 11 innings.
New York's much-ballyhooed free agent, Gerrit Cole, was hit hard for the first time all season. Texas second-sacker Rougned Odor connected for a grand-slam against Cole, and he was also touched for a long home run by rookie Steele Walker.
Cole, who was seen to repeatedly grasp his right shoulder and wince while out on the mound, denied that there was anything seriously the matter with his arm, and said he would just ice it and consult with team physicians when the Yankees made it back to New York.
Put in a 6-1 hole early on, the Yanks rallied on some timely hitting from Mike "Walkie" Tauchman, making his first start on the season, Gio Urshela, and Luke Voit, who has been largely overshadowed at first this season by Mike "Blimpie" Ford.
Urshela had a crucial, ground-rule double to tie the game at 7-7 in the top of the eighth, while also making several outstanding plays in the field. Tauchman hit two triples, stole a base, and robbed Elvis Andrus of a home run with a great catch above the wall in left. But it was Luke Voit's two-run bomb that gave the Yanks what proved to be an insurmountable, 10-8 lead in the 11th.
Tommy Kahnle managed to make Voit's bomb stand up, despite surrendering what was ruled an inside-the-park home run by Shin-Soo Choo.
Choo's ball rolled all the way to the wall after Estevan Florial, making just his second start as a Yankee, tried to make a shoestring catch and failed.
Florial had a tough day at the office, also going 0-7 with five strikeouts.
"I'm not worried about that kid," Manager Ma Boone said afterwards. "That one—he's got a high ceiling."
Asked about Cole's arm discomfort, Boone replied, "What, his arm's bothering him? Huh."
Meanwhile, the Yankees reported that state police in New Mexico were hot on the trail of missing slugger Giancarlo Stanton, who was last seen wandering into a desert there. Police reported that after a short distance, Stanton's footprints were replaced by hoof prints, before a sirocco blew away any trace of them.
"That says to us that he has apparently employed the services of a large, load-bearing quadruped," Yankees GM Brian Cashman said from the darkened room in the bowels of Yankee Stadium, where he is recovering after a pigeon scare the day before.
"Either that—or somehow, he has changed into a horse! My God, do you think such a thing is possible? What sort of world is it we're living in today???" Cashman continued, before Yankees creature Lonn Trost abruptly ended the press conference.
File under
Virtual Baseball
Wednesday, April 15, 2020
Did the Post just publish the most honest appraisal yet of Trump?
Today, the NY Post Photoshopped a bizarre front page of Trump. I studied it for several minutes, trying to figure out why it gnawed at me.
Then I remembered a photo from the Yankees' distant past.
And there it is, folks:
Donald Trump is George Steinbrenner.
Of course, it was always this way...
The constant turnover of assistants.
The insatiable thirst for attention.
The bluster and bombast, the micro-management.
The bluster and bombast, the micro-management.
The need to always win now, right now.
When things are going good, everything is great.
And when things go south, dear God...
Dear God.
The man who could have been Boss
Today, let us ponder the long, personal journey of Hank Steinbrenner.
The Times obit:
Asked why he preferred to be around horses more than players, Hank said, “Because the horses don’t talk back...”
Billy Madden at the Daily News:
Everybody liked Hank because he was not afraid to take jabs at his father and because there were no airs about him. He was anything but the prototypical rich man’s kid. He always wore a sport jacket, but almost never wore a tie. A chain smoker, there was a quiet intensity about him... The breaking point in ‘86, he would later say, was when, over the fervid objections of Woodward and Piniella, the Boss traded the Yankees’ No. 1 pitching prospect, Doug Drabek, to the Pirates for Rick Rhoden, a pitcher nine years his senior.
Tampa Bay Times.
“Maybe at times I’ll shoot from the hip too much,” Hank Steinbrenner said in a 2008 Tampa Bay Times story. “And that’s an influence from my day. But the biggest thing I learned from (his father) is winning.”
Bob Nightengale at USA Today.
He was bombastic, just like his father. There was no filter, just like his father. You want his opinion, well, you better not be afraid of the answer. Maybe the baseball world wasn’t ready for Hank Steinbrenner, and he ultimately decided to silence himself, but for almost a year in 2008 when he was vocal, exercising his authority for everyone to hear, man was he fun to be around.
An old friend and Redsock fan, now deceased, used to bombard me with dumpy, chain-smoker photos of Hank, his way of mocking the Yankees. Back then, it seemed a foregone conclusion that old George would hand down the team to his first-born son, a temperamental doppelganger, who would continue the tradition of shredding managers, overpaying for stars, and spewing rage quotes like tap water. The Yankees would be run by a colorful dullard, and fans would spend the next decade tearing out our hair - except for when we won. Somewhere out there, that Yankiverse exists...
Let's give Hank credit. He was smart enough to see that future and get out. To this day, I cannot summon one bad thought about him. He remained genuine, while the Yankees became a dead corporate machine, and - in terms of winning championships - a run-of-the-mill MLB franchise.
But today, I wish no bad thoughts upon Hal Steinbrenner, as well. He's lost a brother, and it looks as though the Yankees will lose their best chance at winning a championship in the last 10 years. The pandemic has a way of tamping down my outrage, and I hope it does yours, as well. If we're going to live to see another Yankee World Series, maybe this is time to get along.
I cannot help but wonder how the team would have fared if Hank had stayed. Still, I'm glad he jumped ship. He seems to have lived a happy life. May we all possess the forethought and courage to do the same.
Stay safe, everybody. We are going to be reading many more obits. It's the twilight of the gods...
Virtual Yanks Show Rangers Who's King. Stanton In the Wilderness.
In tonight's virtual baseball, the Yankees got another outstanding six innings from rookie Mike King, whose feather-soft stuff eluded the Texas Rangers. King allowed just two earned runs and struck out eight, as the Yanks moved to 12-6 on the season with a 7-2 win.
Leading the hit parade were Miguel "El Matador" Andujar and Clint Frazier, who both homered. After the game, Frazier announced that he was no longer speaking to the press until they stopped asking him to name his cats.
Mike Ford also had an outstanding night at the plate, reaching base five times on three singles and two walks. He celebrated in the clubhouse afterwards with an extra Double Big Mac.
Meanwhile, the elusive slugger Giancarlo Stanton remained at large. Stanton, last seen moving through woodlands with a large-footed, hairy individual of approximately eight feet in height, was later spotted heading out into the New Mexico desert.
"We are very alarmed about what he is going to do for water," Brian Cashman, who spent all day frantically working the phones to Lloyd's of London told the press afterwards. "And about our premiums."
For Cashman, it was his first outside news conference since he narrowly survived an attack by an Albanian eagle, in a lizard misrecognition incident.
Cashmere told reporters that he has now fully recovered, physically and mentally, from the attack. When a nearby pigeon swooped in suddenly to scoop up a loose piece of a delicious Yankee Stadium RatDog, however, Cashman screamed, covered his head with hands, and threw himself into a fetal position on the ground.
He was later helped back to his office by longtime Yankees creatures Randy Levine and Lonn Trost.
File under
Virtual Baseball
Salutation
On April 14, 1955, 65 years ago, Elston Howard entered a major-league game as the first (known) African-American player for the New York Yankees.
This is a little belated, unfortunately, because I only just learned about it. But (almost) on this day, Howard replaced Irv Noren in left field, in the sixth inning of an 8-4 loss to the Red Sox up in Fenway Park. In his first major-league at-bat, Howard singled off Willard Nixon to drive in Mickey Mantle.
The Yankees were not, contrary to rumor, the next-to-last team to bring up or sign a black player. The Phillies, Tigers, and (heh-heh) Red Sox all came even later. But it was still pretty inexcusable.
Howard got the nod mostly because Yankees general manager George Weiss had run out of excuses, particularly when it came to Howard's impeccable character and good humor. Nonetheless, their foot-dragging probably cost Ellie a good 4-5 years of major-league ball—and a possible shot at the Hall of Fame. He got to the Bronx only after a stint on the legendary Kansas City Monarchs, and then a long slog through the Yanks' system that culminated with him hitting .330 in Triple-A.
Playing on the Yankees, and behind Yogi Berra, cost Howard more at-bats but he never complained, filling in wherever he could. He made a catch in left field that helped save the 1958 World Series for the Yanks, and in 1961—finally the starting catcher—he batted a career-high .348.
Howard became the first black MVP in the American League in 1963 (There had already been 9 in the NL.), won the Gold Glove in 1963-64, and had the highest lifetime fielding percentage of any catcher, ever, from 1967-1973. Finishing out his career with the Sox and the "Impossible Dream" team of 1967, he became only the sixth—and last—man ever to play in ten or more World Series.
(Fun facts: Howard also came up with the on-deck "doughnut" that meant players did not have to swing multiple bats. He also used a sharpened shinguard to cut the baseball for Whitey Ford in his later years.)
The first black coach in the American League as well, Ellie died of a longstanding heart condition in 1980, aged just 51. Red Smith wrote that "The Yankees' organization lost more class over the weekend than George Steinbrenner could buy in ten years."
Howard danced about with a broom at his after-school job when he heard that Jackie Robinson was signed by the Dodgers, knowing that he would have a shot at the majors. On the Yankees, he had to endure the casual, old-school racism of Casey Stengel, who called him "Eight-ball," and occasionally groused that "when I finally got one, I got the only one who can't run."
But he endured, as he always would, and triumphed. His Yankees teammates, at least, reportedly welcomed him with open arms, spreading the traditional carpet of towels to his locker after his first home run.
Howard himself reported that Phil Rizzuto, especially, went out of his way to look out for him, taking him around to restaurants and other hotspots while on the road, and showing him the ropes.
His number, 32, was retired by the Yankees in 1984.
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