From the Babe to Matsui
Larry Granillo explores how the Yankees’ World Series victories have been covered by the New York Times through the years.
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kottke.org posts about New York Yankees
The New York Yankees, the Microsoft of baseball
Greg Knauss on how the New York Yankees are like Microsoft.
But, wait… Two-thousand was — the last time the Yankees managed to win a championship. And it was awfully close to the last time that that Microsoft managed to produce a version of Windows that anybody cared about. And, hey, both the Yankees and Microsoft have long histories of dominating their professions, and of using that dominance to run up huge payrolls with — let’s be honest here — a near-decade of lackluster results.
It’s an uncanny resemblance.
The economics of the new Yankee Stadium
Ticket prices at the new Yankee Stadium are so high that if a New Yorker wants to watch a Mariners/Yankees game from the best seats, it would be a lot cheaper to fly to Seattle, stay in a nice hotel, eat fancy dinners, and see two games.
Option 1: Two tickets to Tuesday night, June 30, Mariners at Yanks, cost for just the tickets, $5,000.
Option 2: Two round-trip airline tickets to Seattle, Friday, Aug. 14, return Sunday the 16th, rental car for three days, two-night double occupancy stay in four-star hotel, two top tickets to both the Saturday and Sunday Yanks-Mariners games, two best-restaurant-in-town dinners for two. Total cost, $2,800. Plus-frequent flyer miles.
(thx, david)
An unlikely baseball record
The number of pinstripes on a Yankees jersey varies with the size of the player…the bigger the man, the more pinstripes on the jersey. With the Yankees’ recent signing of CC Sabathia, a rather large gentleman, ESPN’s Paul Lukas wonders: will Sabathia have the most Yankee pinstripes in history?
You’re embarking on a new field of study here, so we have to make up our own rules and standards as we go,” he said. “For example, depending on how a jersey is tailored, the number of pinstripes at the top and at the bottom aren’t necessarily the same. Also, the space between the pinstripes has changed a bit over the years, and the pinstripes themselves are thinner today than in the old days.
(thx, djacobs)
Moneyball works
Every year or so, the same question is asked: how is the Moneyball strategy working out for the Oakland A’s. This year’s answer is: pretty damn good.
Additions like [Frank] Thomas, motivated by this incremental approach, help explain why the A’s have won so many games in recent years even though they’ve consistently traded away or declined to re-sign their top players (Jason Giambi, Miguel Tejada, Tim Hudson, etc.), who demand top dollar—and largely on the basis of past performance. In short, Beane has bought low and sold high repeatedly and systematically, and as a result the A’s have won more games this decade than every team in the league except the Yankees (whose team payroll is routinely two-to-four times larger than Oakland’s).
Check out the current positions of the A’s and Yankees on the salary vs. performance graph.
Bruce Bukiet is back with his annual
Bruce Bukiet is back with his annual mathematically modeled prediction of how the upcoming baseball season is going to play out. His results should be taken with a grain of salt; last year he picked the Yankees to win 110 games (they only won 94).
Speaking of the Yankees, Derek Jeter always seems to get a lot of credit for those four World Series victories in five years but a quick look at the OBP stats for those years shows that Bernie Williams was the engine driving that offense. Jeter’s a little overrated maybe?
I’m no Yankees fan, but I got
I’m no Yankees fan, but I got a little sad reading this article about Joe Torre’s possible departure from the team after 12 years. It seems like the individual leader gets too much credit for successes and is assigned too much blame for failures these days. Surely the team’s poor hitting and pitching was a big contributing factor that Torre couldn’t do much about?
(Last night’s game was great, BTW. The way those fans almost willed the Yankees back into the game while Cleveland held fast was fascinating to watch.)
Ben Fry has updated his salary vs.
Ben Fry has updated his salary vs. performance graph for the 2007 MLB season…it plots team payrolls vs. winning percentage. The Mets and Red Sox should be winning and are…the Yankees, not so much. Cleveland and the Brewers are making good use of their relatively low payrolls.
A night at the ballpark
You know that “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” song? They should add another verse, something like:
Take your glove to the ballgame
and if you don’t, you’re an idiot
We went to the Yankees/Red Sox game at Yankee Stadium with David and Adriana last night and in the bottom of the third inning, Yankees second baseman Miguel Cairo hit a line drive just wide of the foul pole in left field. As I watched the ball coming towards us, I thought a million things — it’s foul, it’s gonna drop into the seats way in front of us, never gonna get here, what’s the count now, is it time for cheese fries yet…almost everything except for “holy shit, it’s coming right at me” — and then stuck my bare hand straight up in the air, leaned slightly to my left, and dropped the ball.
Dropped isn’t the right word, really. Deflected the ball off my bare hand is more accurate. It bounced into the seats behind me and then rolled down under Adriana’s seat. After a brief scramble, some meatheads who were ambling by on their way to beer, pretzels, or the can stuck their paws in and made off with the ball. A Yankees fan who observed the whole thing got up in Meg’s face, framed by her faded Red Sox hat, and yelled, “ha ha, Boston fans can’t catch!” His truth stung almost as much as my rapidly swelling hand. David scored the play as an error, Box 324, Seat 3.
But the most entertaining play of the night by a fan who was not me award goes to the fellow in the yellow shirt who, emboldened by too much Miller Lite, dashed out onto the field, arms raised triumphantly, soaking in the cheers of the adoring crowd. Out came security from all corners of the field and the crowd redirected its enthusiasm from the hunted to the hunters, cheering for blood. “Hit em!” the guy behind me was screaming, “HIT EM!!”
Security eventually converged on the would-be outfielder and he adopted the surrendering posture of a man who knows he’s had his fun, palms in the air, head down, not running anymore, almost sinking to his knees. And — BAMMM! — this security guard, a former linebacker by the looks of him, comes flying in from the blind side and wallops the guy, knocking him to the ground in a full-on lay-out tackle. The crowd roared at the guard’s tackle and cheered lustily as the gladiator was removed from the coliseum.
Wow, Johnny Damon goes from the Red
Wow, Johnny Damon goes from the Red Sox to the Yankees. It’s looking like that Boston championship was a one-shot deal.
Watching the World Series last week, Meg
Watching the World Series last week, Meg wondered, “why White/Red Sox and not Socks?” I knew that if we waited long enough, the Internet would come up with the answer. Bonus: the NY Yankees were once known as the Porchclimbers. Those rascals!
New York City, redemption, and the 2005 New
New York City, redemption, and the 2005 New York Yankees. “Jason [Giambi] was redeemed, and his legend is assured now as the star who wanted more, who lost everything to greed and arrogance, and who recovered his glory, which is now vastly more appealing for the fact that it’s tarnished. It’s a real New York kind of story.”
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