Past A Diving Jeter

And I have the tracklist:

1. As Long As You’re Not Jewish
2. No Neighbors, No Problems
3. I’m Bald
4. Jews Stole My Legs
5. God Bless America
6. Can I Have My Job Back?
7. It Was A Joke, I Swear
8. Red Sox Fans Ain’t Nuthin’ Ta Fuck Wit
9. I’m Sorry, Hank
10. Giant Ears
11. Let’s Go Mets

This post isn’t Yankees-related, nor does it reference bad journalism beyond the fact that it’s about Newsday. But…

Is it just me, or does Newsday’s columnist page look like a sex offender registry?

How the fuck is that possible? Why didn’t anyone tell me about this article?

The Yankees are an organization that thinks it can control everything, from the media to the climate.

This sentence is ugly. And not just regular-ugly. It’s Youkilis-ugly.

Did you know the dugouts in the new Stadium are air-conditioned?

Nope, but I do now. And I think that’s awesome.

And they are trying their damnedest to control the career of Joba Chamberlain, the prize bull in their stable, to the point that you’re surprised they even allow him to knot his own necktie.

I can’t begin to imagine why a team that thinks it has a guy with A+ ability might want to direct his career. Hopefully they’ve managed to get his ass to stop drinking in the car.

But there are circumstances even the Yankees can’t control, and yesterday’s 11-inning struggle with the Toronto Blue Jays, a game so long that by the time it ended it was almost Joba’s turn to pitch again, should serve as a reminder that trying to scientifically engineer a career is as foolhardy as expecting Alex Rodriguez to begin digging ditches in the offseason for fun.

64 words is a lot for one sentence.

Less than two hours after Joe Girardi had restated the Yankees’ plan for turning Joba into the Boy in the Bubble, Derek Jeter was limping around after a Ricky Romero curveball found the instep of his right foot.

Five innings later, it was Jorge Posada, hobbling after a wild pitch by A.J. Burnett and smarting from enough foul tips that he said he felt as if he had been in a boxing match.

Then, just before Robinson Cano finally sent everyone home happy with his 11th-inning single, it was A-Rod himself writhing around after a Shawn Camp fastball eluded his elbow pad and caused his left hand to go (momentarily) dead.

I think I see what he’s doing here. Is this supposed to be a comment on the Yankees being unable to prevent injuries to players? Because if it is, I’m convinced. Instead of all this innings limit shit, they should just release Joba and throw Sabathia out there every night. There’s no way to predict injuries! Who the hell are you to say that CC’s arm will fall off if he has to throw 45 straight games?

And it wasn’t until after the game that we learned Mariano Rivera’s priceless right shoulder had awakened up “cranky,” as 40-year-old shoulders sometimes do.

“Awakened up”? Really?

Still, they can’t survive the loss of their Big Four – Jeter, A-Rod, Posada and Rivera – and right now, it sure looks like the only thing that can stop them is injuries.

That’s right. There’s no way this team could possibly see October unless those four players all play the entire season. Especially A-Rod and Jorge.

But no one can stop injuries, not even the Yankees, despite their silly plan to restrict Chamberlain’s total regular-season innings to 160, which means from here on, he will pitch once a week, or less.

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/glossary/index.php?mode=viewstat&stat=495

His next turn doesn’t come up until Wednesday in Oakland, meaning he will have gone seven days between starts. “We’re just trying to be smart about it,” Girardi said. “We’re not trying to overwork him his first time in the rotation for the whole year. There’s a history that has been studied by our people and this is what we feel is best.”

http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/v/volqued01.shtml

The Yankees’ “studies” seem to have omitted guys such as Tom Seaver, Bob Gibson, Warren Spahn and Nolan Ryan, all of whom threw 200-plus inning seasons at tender ages and went on to long, essentially injury-free careers, and ignored many of his contemporaries, such as Justin Verlander, Tim Lincecum and Felix Hernandez, who have done the same early in their careers so far without incident.

Let’s ignore the Verducci Effect for a minute so that Edinson Volquez and Cole Hamels can rest up. Matthews also seems to have overlooked the metric fuckton of pitchers who were overworked as kids and were washed up before they turned 33. Guys like Don Drysdale, Catfish Hunter, Vida Blue, Fernando Valenzuela, Dave Stieb and Pedro Martinez, to list some pitchers Matthews may recognize.

And they overlook the case history of Joba’s teammate, A.J. Burnett, who also was babied early in his career but still has suffered one injury after another.

So much for scientific “studies.” If a guy is going to get hurt, he’s going to get hurt, and no amount of coddling is going to prevent it, because at some point, they all have to go out on the field and play.

Unless that guy is Carl Pavano.

And then, anything can happen. And besides, if the Yankees are so concerned about limiting Joba’s innings, why’d they ever take him out of the bullpen?

Shit like this is why nobody reads Newsday.

It all raises the specter of something darker, for instance: Are the Yankees and Joba hiding an injury and hoping to nurse it along by using him as little as possible? Or do they suspect something about Joba that compels them to treat him as if he’s made of glass and envelope him in Bubble Wrap between starts?

No, dumbshit. They’ve just got good enough memories to recall two can’t-miss young pitchers named Mark Prior and Kerry Wood.

And, would they be this cautious with him if they were, say, 51/2 games behind the Red Sox rather than 51/2 games in front.

Shouldn’t that end with a question mark?

“We know how important the standings are,” Girardi said. “But we’re not going to get caught up in a moment. This is a plan for five, 10 years down the road. We’re not going to risk his health.”

Worried about your health? Then don’t play. Wednesday, in the course of a relatively uneventful ballgame, the core of the team, and the Yankees season, nearly went down.

Unfortunately, injuries are part of the game, a part not even the Yankees can control.

And that’s why the Yankees have now banned batting helmets.

A few quick notes on this weekend’s sweep, which I actually managed to watch most of (fuck you, Cablevision):

- Over four games, Boston managed to put up a line of .174/.300/.250.

- Their season OPS dropped ten points.

- 5 XBHs in four games is a bad strategy if your goal is to win baseball games.

- We all overreact way too hard when pitchers aren’t totally fucking lights-out.

- Future Hall of Famer John Smoltz sucked so hard that he got DFA’d. Even worse, he’s bald.

- Future diabetes spokesperson David Ortiz is a fat cheating liar. While I don’t give a fuck about the steroids or the lying, I’m real pleased that Red Sox Nation has to shut the fuck up now.

- While he put up his team’s best performance in Thursday night’s game, Dustin Baldroia managed only a .298 OPS during the next three days.

- Pete Abraham made a funny.

- This ancient Space Moose comic tells the story of Dustin Pedroia’s childhood. Little Dusty is played, appropriately, by Bald Dwarf. Older brother Brett is portrayed by Space Moose himself.

- And finally, I want to thank Mark Teixeira for providing me with a logical explanation for his nickname, as apparently only like three of you see what I see when I look at his face.

A self-portrait:

Moving sucks, but it’s finally almost over. Internet and TV should happen on Friday, so I should actually be able to post shit after that. I know you’re all disappointed, but fuck you.

<3, crotch

As we slowly approach the midpoint of the season, it’s important to look back at the dumb shit that’s happened already in order to write terrible blog posts. While doing this, I noticed that events from this season keep reminding me of stuff from years gone by. Through innumerable hours (0.7) of painstaking research, I have developed an equation that beautifully expresses the current state of the Yankees organization:

Joe Torre – nosepicking – cancer – 6th inning naps + Alzheimer’s = Joe Girardi

I know, I know. I was shocked too. But there’s really a lot of support for this theory. First off, both managers overused key players out of stupidity. They both gave way too many innings to shitty relievers. And they both make a lot of fucking retarded decisions.

Think about it. Look at Joe Girardi. Picture him in your mind. Now add 30 years, 50 pounds and a shitty green tea ad campaign.

Try not to throw up.

First off, I need to point out the fact that Joel Sherman was right about something:

Please let’s not begin another round of Joba to the eighth inning talk after the eighth-inning meltdown Thursday night by the Yanks in Fenway. Unless you have a machine to clone Chamberlain.

Because in case you hadn’t noticed, Chamberlain currently is the Yanks’ second best starter. And nobody trades in their No. 2 starter to become a set-up man. You want to get back to me when (and if) A.J. Burnett ever starts pitching like an $82.5 million man or Chien-Ming Wang starts pitching like a major leaguer then maybe – maybe – we can have a conversation.

Now that that’s out of the way, I just want to say “FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK.”

Here’s how to fix this:

• Put Hughes back in the rotation.
• Trade for Tony Pena Jr. Put him in the bullpen.
• Build an altar at home plate. Sacrifice Wang to the Baseball Gods.
• Ban bunting by everyone who sucks less than Brett Gardner.
• Soak Damon’s glove in pine tar.
• Put the entire team on a diet of protein and steroids. If the entire roster gets caught it can be spun to look like some kind of conspiracy.
• Threaten to have Burnett killed if he doesn’t start earning his checks. If he’s dead, the team doesn’t have to honor his contract.
• Dispose of Berroa and Veras. Doesn’t matter how.

And, most importantly:

• Stop saving Mo for the 9th inning. It is a complete waste of the team’s best pitcher, and it’s fucking stupid. (And shut up about six-out saves. If Mo can get past Youkilis/Bay/Lowell, any no-talent piece of shit should be able to retire Shrek/Vagitek/Baldelli. Except maybe Veras.)

Discuss on twitter. I actually check that.

Ian O’Connor has uncovered the newest scandal to rock the Yankees’ clubhouse: their pitching coach may be a bigoted piece of shit. Behold:

Dave Eiland, pitching coach, stepped into the postgame buzz with a message for any Yankee arm traumatized by the unforgiving nature of the world’s first $1.5 billion Wiffleball field.

Ian: Maybe you don’t know this, but it’s damn near impossible to hit a Wiffle ball more than about 120 feet. You basically picked the exact opposite of the right thing to say. Nice work, dipshit.

It went something like this:

Rub some dirt on it.

This may not be such a great idea. The Mets’ trainers have been treating players with mud all season, and I don’t think that’s working out so well.

“You’ve got to be mentally stronger,” Eiland said. “You can’t let the ballpark beat you.”

“Don’t let it stab you, either. This is the West Bronx, after all.”

Yes, Eiland’s staff is for men only.

This is the kind of disgusting discriminatory bullshit that we, as a nation, should all be past by now. Women have been playing – and excelling at – major league baseball since 1947, when Jackie Robinson finally broke the gender barrier. Lynn N. Ryan taught us that women could pitch just as well as men back in the 1970s. But somehow these lessons have been lost on the Yankees roster; Shelley “David” Duncan has gotten a few tastes of the big show, but is mostly neglected and left to rot down at AAA.

“If you make a good pitch that goes out of the ballpark,” he said, “you can’t let it affect your next pitch or the next hitter you have to face. You have to put it behind you and be mentally strong.

“If you’re not mentally strong enough to handle it, you can’t pitch here.”

You have to take an IQ test to crack the Yankees’ rotation. Eiland wept when Mussina retired.

This was no indictment of Chien-Ming Wang or any other survivor of the Yankees’ 8-6 victory over Texas, a development made possible by a spirited midgame comeback and a 320-foot home run from Melky Cabrera in the eighth.

Little-known fact: Chien-Ming Wang lectures at MIT during the offseason. Phil Hughes is one semester short of graduating from Bronx Community College.

Cabrera’s victim, C.J. Wilson, didn’t get the Eiland memo. With mammoth ice packs wrapped around his beaten left shoulder and elbow, the Rangers’ reliever sat in the losing locker room and spit tobacco juice all over the absurdity that is the new Yankee Stadium.

After 20 minutes of this, Wilson bellowed, “ME LIKE THROW.”

“It looked like it was a straight-up fly ball,” Wilson said of Cabrera’s winner. “It was like the ball that [Johnny] Damon hit in the first. I was like, ‘Oh, pop-up.’ I didn’t really react.”

And then?

“And then I was like, ‘Oh crap. I forgot where we are.’”

“When snacktime is? Me want Jell-O.”

The Rangers were trapped inside Coors Field East, where good pitches often die a slow and painful death. Babe Ruth’s daughter said the old man might’ve hit 100 dingers in a single season here, inside The House That Ruthless Men Built, and maybe she sold her old man short.

And here O’Connor shows us that he’s so lazy he can’t even get the stadium’s nickname right. (You may recall that Mike Vaccaro caught us that its proper nickname is “The Lightweight Cylindrical Bandbox That Lonn Built”.) Ian: This is why you write for some shitrag in New Jersey.

“I could pee over the fence here,” Reggie Jackson said.

…

“I was praying it would come up short,” said Texas manager Ron Washington.

Now we know how guys train for Old-Timers’ Day.

I’m kind of upset about this, because Kepner has been the least awful of the New York baseball writers for quite some time. However, this line from his latest blog post has completely destroyed that.

I’ve always enjoyed listening to Mike Francesa on WFAN. He’s an insightful, provocative listen, and he knows his stuff.

Part of my brain exploded when I read that. The rest of that piece is perfectly logical, but I can’t get past the beginning. It has lessened his entire body of work.

Imagine you’re sitting around the table with your family at Thanksgiving. The bird is on the table, your father’s about to start carving it up when he suddenly stops and announces “You know, I used to rape the neighborhood schoolchildren.” He then starts slicing meat as if nothing has happened.

This isn’t quite like that. But it’s close.

Bonus: Thanks to this post over at Ruhi Rants for this fine example of Francesa’s insightful, provocative commentary.

I suppose it’s good that someone does. He really needs somebody to tell him to lay off the fried Twinkies and to go work out once in a while.

No Yankees are actually mentioned in this article. However, it’s stuffed so full of stupidity that I couldn’t help myself. I also doubt that it would’ve been written at all if the A-Rod story had never come out, which is how I’m justifying this. It looks to me like Ken just couldn’t bear to hear any more of his fellow Sox fans ragging on Big Popup.

I know I’m going to sound old here, and I don’t care.

Ten years ago, no self-respecting journalist would have speculated that a player was using performance-enhancing drugs without some form of proof.

Now, in blogs and chat rooms and other Internet vehicles, people blithely suggest that players such as the Red Sox’s David Ortiz are in decline because they no longer take PEDs.

Baseless accusations are an affront not just to journalistic standards, which evolve with new technology, but also an affront to standards of decency.

For all I know, Ortiz might have been a user; the Steroid Era, sadly, has taught us to view all players skeptically. But there is a significant difference between holding such a view privately and accusing a player publicly without any factual basis for such an opinion.

Ten years ago, no reporter would have dared make such a leap, fearing, at minimum, a stern rebuke from an editor and, at worst, a lawsuit.

Several times in recent weeks, radio talk-show hosts have asked me what I thought of the possibility that Ortiz was using PEDs.

The rationale for such questions?

The talk is “out there.”

Yes. Are you unfamiliar with radio? That’s pretty much how it works.

Well, I have no idea if David Ortiz used PEDs; probably no journalist does. I could not even make an educated guess, and it would be unprofessional of me to do so.

Here’s my educated guess, which I am totally within my rights to make as an amateur: Fuck yeah he did steroids. In fact, that’s my guess for every player who played higher than AA since 1995. This is based on the unquestionable fact that not using them when so many other players were would be incredibly stupid. And anyone who says that they would actually trade ridiculous piles of cash for self-respect is a liar. Dan Naulty is just a bitch.

Of particular note in this instance: Lou Merloni’s claims of steroid use safety classes during Red Sox spring training.

Here’s one thing I do know: Before steroids, players actually declined as they got older. Ortiz is 33. Maybe he is losing his skills. Maybe he just stinks.

But who wants to talk about that?

Ooh, I know! Every Yankees fan on Earth, that’s who. So let’s talk about that. For the sake of this argument we’ll assume that Shrek really is 33 and not 36 like I suspect. (See? That’s speculation again.)

The last big name slugger who dropped off a cliff like Ortiz was Jason Giambi, known steroid user. This happened at age 33, and only happened because he had to stop using. The next best example I can think of is Mo Vaughn, and he was 35. Albert Belle was done by 34, but he had hip arthritis. The next names that spring to mind for me are Rob Deer, Kent Hrbek and Dave Kingman, and they all sucked.

I understand — this is the world we live in. Anyone can have a forum. Anyone can say anything. In some ways, it’s the ultimate freedom of the press. In other ways, it’s a new form of tyranny.

Wow. Just wow.

If I were an innocent player, I would fight back. But I wouldn’t even know where to start.

If you were an innocent player, you’d be on the Long Island Ducks.