Bleacher Creature Feature

#10: Notes on a Sunny Sunday in May

5 May 2002

---The game was painful enough to watch, but was made worse by a bunch of people -- two women and two guys, not together -- who kept complaining about how crude and uncouth the Bleacher Creatures were. I'm sorry, but sitting in the right-field bleachers and complaining about the crazy loud people is like going to the Botanical Gardens and complaining that there's too many flowers. The women claimed to have sat in the bleachers before, though we were skeptical of this claim. The men said this was their first time, and also their last. Good riddance, say I, as they sucked all the air out of the bleachers.

Look, the rowdy folks are harmless, they're having fun, and they're there to enjoy themselves. They also provide entertainment -- crude entertainment, admittedly, and at roughly a third-grade intellectual level, but entertainment nonetheless. They also are most definitely paying attention to the game -- the women seemed to think that they were too busy being crass to note what was going on. Mind you, the most substantive thing the two of them discussed that was actually baseball related was the state of Shane Spencer's tush.

The men, meanwhile, were the stereotypical preppie loser types who didn't exactly endear themselves to us when one of them asked Terri where she got her Yankees scrunchy because he promised to buy his girlfriend a Yankees souvenir "but I don't want to spend a lot of money." Nice.

Best part, though, was that they left after the eighth inning, so they entirely missed the (ultimately futile) four-run rally, including Beautiful Bernie's second home run of the day, which was hit to the bleachers.

---We were hoping there'd be more razzing of Bernie Williams, who was voted one of the 50 Most Beautiful People in the World by People magazine this week. However, every time he did something, Terri and I were sure to proclaim, at a loud volume, that it was beautiful.

Okay, we're a little too easily amused....

---There were many things wrong with the Yankees in this game, but only one of them was relevant: David Wells was awful. And it wasn't just that it was a bad outing. He was throwing strikes, but they were very hittable strikes. This has all the signs of a finesse pitcher who's at the end of the line.

Power pitchers tend to last longer because either a) they lose velocity and become finesse pitchers (viz. David Cone) or b) they keep throwing fast until their bodies break down (viz. Nolan Ryan). Finesse pitchers, though, have nowhere to go once they slow down or lose some effectiveness. So far, Wells has only been dominant against lower-tier teams.

I've said it before: he's 38, he's overweight, he's got a history of back and foot problems. And now this. I fear for his ability to last through the year, and I hope that -- if he is as bad off as today indicated -- Joe Torre doesn't make the same mistake he made with Cone in 2000, to wit, sticking with him far past his usefulness. (The Yanks would've won over 90 games if Torre had taken Cone out of the rotation when he was proven to be dead and gone instead of constantly torturing all of us by throwing him out there to get clobbered every fifth day out of a misguided sense of loyalty.)

---One of the rumors floating around (I first encountered it in an article in the Newark Star-Leder by Dan Graziano that Eric Fallas posted to a Yankees list I'm on) is that the Yanks are considering dealing for an outfielder, and Ted Lilly would be a principle part of that deal. The names discussed are Brian Giles, Cliff Floyd, and Larry Walker.

Of all of them, Floyd is the only one worth getting, and none of them are worth giving up Lilly. The Yankees have a dangerously old starting rotation. Andy Pettitte's already down, and he's the youngest of the top five. Roger Clemens, Wells, and Orlando Hernandez are all big injury risks. Sterling Hitchcock has been abysmal in his last two rehab starts, and he wasn't any great shakes to begin with (his contract made even less sense to me than Wells'). The Yankees need Lilly far more than they need another outfielder -- even Floyd.

Hell, last year, the Yankees needed Floyd. They had two offensive black holes in Chuck Knoblauch and Paul O'Neill (who, as great as he was over his career as a Yankee, was a shadow of his former self in 2001), and the backups included Spencer (who was only there half the year), David Justice (who is really a DH at this stage in his career, and he also had an off year last year), and Clay Bellinger (a weak-hitting converted infielder whose sole benefit is as a spare part). This year they have four solid outfielders, including one genuine superstar in Beautiful Bernie. They've got two very strong prospects in Columbus. The Yankees have outfield depth for the first time in a long time, even with the drag effect of Gerald Williams (hell, they've won all their recent World Series without a real left fielder). It's not worth the risk of losing Lilly to fix something that isn't yet broken.

The most absurd thing in the Star-Ledger article is the expression of surprise that Spencer and John Vander Wal are platooning, as if this constitutes a failure, where anyone who has actually paid attention to the careers of these two will see that they were born to platoon. Spencer's been hopeless against righties but murder on lefties throughout his career, and the exact reverse has been the case for Vander Wal. That anyone was considering them as anything other than a platoon and/or a temporary LF/RF tandem while Rondell White makes his annual trip to the DL is absurd.

Mind you, things could be different come mid-June, but right now, dealing for another outfielder -- especially dealing Lilly -- makes nothing remotely resembling sense.

---Speaking of the outfield, things are looking up in that regard anyhow. I was rather stunned to realize that the second best OPS (OBP plus SLG) among the regulars belongs to Spencer, who's at .907. (Best is the torrid Alfonso Soriano, at .945.) Beautiful Bernie has continued his climb out of mediocrity -- with his 2-5 effort today, he brought his BA up to .250, his SLG up to .380 (both hits were solidly hit home runs -- and one of his outs was a scorcher to left-center that would've been a double if anyone other than the excellent Mike Cameron was playing center field), with his OBP remaining solid at .379 (Bernie leads the team with 22 walks). Rondell finally showed signs of breaking out of his prolonged slump today with two singles, a walk, an RBI, and a run scored. And Vander Wal has been respectable at .294/.357/.392.

---The final score of today's game looked much better than it was. It was 10-2 going into the ninth, but the Yanks rallied for four runs, before Derek Jeter (who was functionally useless -- 0-5 with two strikeouts, and he dropped a ball that would've been a very useful force out, leading to two runs) struck out to end it.

The reason why the Yankees rallied was because this wasn't a "save" situation -- so, rather than bring in Kazuhiro Sazaki to close down the Yankees, Lou Piniella instead brought in Paul Abbott to pitch the ninth.

Does this make any sense? Because Sazaki was being "saved" for a situation in which he would get an arbitrary statistic added to his personal count, he was not brought in. Instead, Abbott was thrown out to mop up, and got his ERA ballooned.

The obsession with only using closers in save situations is one that baffles me -- mainly because the importance of the save statistic is minimal. I mean, if I'm playing the Devil Rays, sure, I'll bring in Abbott to mop up, but against a team like the Yankees, you want every advantage. Why not put in your best? Why take the chance? As it is, they closed the lead and made things a lot closer than they had any right to be, simply because Piniella didn't want to "waste" Sazaki -- except, he's letting the save statistic dictate his strategy rather than using statistics to determine the best allocation of his resources -- and doesn't it make more sense to bring in the guy with the 0.00 ERA to get the Yankees out than the guy who'd given up over 30 runs in 25.1 innings going into today?

This is standard operating procedure in baseball these days, but it makes no sense when you actually think about it. The importance of closers has exploded out of all proportion to their actual value. Piniella should've either kept Arthur Rhodes in (he struck out the side in the eighth) or brought in Sazaki for the ninth.

---The Yankee defense continues to be abominable, and until the team starts hitting better, it will continue to haunt them. Today's game could've been closer if some defensive miscues hadn't led to more runs.

---Despite all this, the Yankees remain one of the best teams in the league, even if they didn't look it today. They're fifth in OPS, fifth in runs scored (and only three runs separate them from the #3 team, the Twins), fourth in hits, first in walks, second in home runs, second in ERA, fourth in walks allowed, first in strikeouts (with a whopping 232, a full 24 K's ahead of Cleveland), and second in runs allowed.

This is another reason why panicky trades of long-term prospects for short-term solutions are stupid things to do right now. The season's only a little over a month old, the team hasn't played up to their potential, and they're still among the three or four best overall teams in the American League.

If the Red Sox are playing over their heads (as I suspect they are, though I freely admit that could be wishful thinking on my part), things will probably look a lot different come the All-Star Break.....

NEXT: Life in the Bleachers

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