For a Met fan, the season couldn’t have ended any better. Well, a little better; the Yankees could have not made the playoffs at all. With both teams making the post-season, the season couldn’t have ended any better for the Met fan. The Yankees getting bounced on the same day the Mets win their series.
Unfortunately for the Mets, the Yankees not beating the Tigers is a way bigger story in New York than the Mets advancing to the NLCS. After all, the Yankees have spent a billion dollars in the last five years and have as much to show for it as the Braves. The difference is, when Bobby Cox used to complain the 5-game division series format was unfair, Yankee fans laughed. Now, it’s the Yankee fan clamoring for seven-game series. After all, you can’t play 162-game season, and then get knocked out of the post-season in three losses, right? That’s just not fair. The best team has to play the hottest team (Meaning, the team who spent September choking away a 10 game division lead) in the league that has been fighting for their lives for the last few weeks of the season. It’s as asinine an argument coming from fans as it was coming from Bobby Cox. If you’re the best team in baseball, don’t lose three games to the fourth best team in baseball. Seems a simple formula. The Mets haven’t played a real baseball game since the All-Star break and they somehow managed to “gut out” a sweep against the wildcard.
I digress; the arguments for and against the wildcard are many. The wildcard is fantastic for baseball and the five-game series is perfectly reasonable. The more asinine story to come out of the Bronx before the ink was even dry on the scorecards is that Joe Torre was going to be fired for his “failure to win a championship.” His replacement? The only acceptable replacement in the eyes of Yankee fans: Lou Pinella. Was it a conspiracy to knock the Mets off the front page of the papers on Sunday or Steinbrenner being Steinbrenner?
I vote for the latter.
The Yankees are unmanageable. $200 million worth of veterans who don’t want to be coached, much less managed. What’s Joe going to do? Improve Giambi’s swing? Tell Damon to steal second? Make Bobby Abreu throw a dive? It’s not going to happen. Joe is at his best managing a young, hungry team who want to be better”¦ do you think it’s coincidence that Joe Girardi and Willie Randolph have had success (in varying degrees) this season doing exactly that?
Game 1 was the Yankees everyone expected to see. Game 2 was the Tigers everyone expected to see. Game 3 showed the weakness in the Yankees lineup. With a lineup that strong, it almost seemed everyone expected someone else to get it done. Meanwhile, Kenny Rogers, a surly Texan who’s spent the long end of four months getting called out for being awful in October (even by yours truly) went out there and pitched one of the great post-season masterpieces ever. His curveball was unfair, his fastball was on par, and his change-up was making people look silly. The emotion on the faces of the starting pitchers was a microcosm of the whole series. Kenny was out there fired up to prove a point. Randy Johnson was out there looking as though he had a golf outing to get to. The defense around Randy was lackluster at best and embarrassing at worst. Abreu, showing a flash of the Abreu who wore out his welcome in Philly, didn’t see the need to dive for a ball he probably could have caught. Robby Cano couldn’t be bothered to hustle the ball across the field. Gary Sheffield was starting at first for”¦ well”¦ I really don’t know why they let Sheffield start more than once. Meanwhile, the hungry guys who got them to the post-season (Melky, who’s going to spend next season getting shit on for Bobby Abreu, Andy Phillips, Craig Wilson) sat on the bench.
And now the blame gets placed squarely on Joe Torre. Never mind the Yankees haven’t not been in a postseason since he came on board. Never mind there are four rings under his watch. Never mind any of that. Because this system of “throw a ton of money at a bunch of free agents with no sense of anything other than flash and fanfare” doesn’t work, Torre is the one under the axe.
And it’s the worst thing they can do.
The Yankees office seem to have lost sense of what made them winners in the first place. Torre came in to manage a rebuilt team of rookies and young players. The highest paid player on that 1996 staff was Ruben Sierra at $6.2 million dollars. That first five years, the Yankees were defined more by their players than their salary. In recent years, in the desperate attempt to win another World Series, they’ve been throwing money at every huge free agent. Old guys who, for the most part, don’t have anything left to prove. Torre went from a baseball manager to a guy who massages the egos of high-priced ball players. And this system is never going to work. The Yankees aren’t a baseball team anymore, they’re a fantasy team.
My prediction: Joe’s job is safe. This is Steinbrenner bluster and nothing more. Why? Primarily because the core of Yankees from that 1996 team (Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, and Jorge Posada) love Joe. They’ve never really dealt with managers other than Joe, and if they’re given a choice of blowing the franchise up and rebuilding it, they’ll want Joe Torre to be their manager. The fans, mostly, won’t want Torre to go anywhere either. They don’t blame these problems on him. They blame it on the guy who’s become the poster-boy of Yankee over-spending.
And, as the focus shifts out to Queens for the next couple of weeks (months, if the Mets win) Steinbrenner is going to go crazy. It will be interesting to see what direction the Yankees go in. If they fire Joe, bring in Barry Zito, and pay Moose $20 million, it’s one direction. If they keep Joe, and actually start trimming the payroll, it’s the other.
Formula one has already been tested at a billion dollars. It hasn’t worked.
