2008 Woodie Awards
The Yankees: the Harvard of baseball
Peter Locke
Issue date: 3/28/07 Section: Sports
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When driving on a highway, everything works fine most of the time because there is a tacit agreement between people to not go completely crazy. You stay in your lane, and I will stay in mine. Anything else means disaster. The free agent market in Major League Baseball these days is similar, when one person goes bananas, everyone else feels inadequate for not going bananas enough. All the sudden, the proverbial banana has hit the fan and Jason Marquis picks up a 21 million dollar contract. Blame that on media, blame it on rabidly entitled fan bases, blame it on whomever you want. It happens.
About 6 years ago, the Yankees began to change the landscape of baseball by buying All-Star teams. They were able to largely because of their massive amount of capital, and every year a new Jason Giambi, Alex Rodriguez, Mike Mussina, or Randy Johnson would stroll into camp, hair cut and clean shaven (in Johnson's case, with a "neatly trimmed moustache"…I love that). Every year they were competitive, but as has been printed a million times, they weren't a team. Torre, in good conscience, couldn't ask a single player in their entire lineup to lay down a sac bunt…not because he didn't want to…but because everyone of them had All-Star reputations and egos to protect.
Good teams don't work that way. It's been proven for most of this decade, much to my delight, by the Yankees themselves. The teams that win the World Series do it on pitching, baserunning, and defense. The Marlins, Angels, D-Backs (which, by the way, is as idiotic as the Devil Rays calling themselves the D-Rays), Cardinals, and White Sox all won titles this way. And even the Red Sox, the team that fits this mold the least, played that way in the postseason with Dave Roberts' stolen base to keep hope alive (baserunning), Foulke and Schilling's great postseasons (pitching), and merely having Doug Mientkiewicz on the postseason roster (commitment to defense).
The Yankees got away from the small ball and team chemistry that was the hallmark of the Paul O'Neill and Scott Brosius era. They fell into a silly trap of big names and a seemingly infinite supply of money that GM Brian Cashman is currently trying to repair. But the question is, why the hell don't other organizations look at this as a failed model? Because they clearly do not.
About 6 years ago, the Yankees began to change the landscape of baseball by buying All-Star teams. They were able to largely because of their massive amount of capital, and every year a new Jason Giambi, Alex Rodriguez, Mike Mussina, or Randy Johnson would stroll into camp, hair cut and clean shaven (in Johnson's case, with a "neatly trimmed moustache"…I love that). Every year they were competitive, but as has been printed a million times, they weren't a team. Torre, in good conscience, couldn't ask a single player in their entire lineup to lay down a sac bunt…not because he didn't want to…but because everyone of them had All-Star reputations and egos to protect.
Good teams don't work that way. It's been proven for most of this decade, much to my delight, by the Yankees themselves. The teams that win the World Series do it on pitching, baserunning, and defense. The Marlins, Angels, D-Backs (which, by the way, is as idiotic as the Devil Rays calling themselves the D-Rays), Cardinals, and White Sox all won titles this way. And even the Red Sox, the team that fits this mold the least, played that way in the postseason with Dave Roberts' stolen base to keep hope alive (baserunning), Foulke and Schilling's great postseasons (pitching), and merely having Doug Mientkiewicz on the postseason roster (commitment to defense).
The Yankees got away from the small ball and team chemistry that was the hallmark of the Paul O'Neill and Scott Brosius era. They fell into a silly trap of big names and a seemingly infinite supply of money that GM Brian Cashman is currently trying to repair. But the question is, why the hell don't other organizations look at this as a failed model? Because they clearly do not.
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