Bleacher Creature Feature
#36: Spring has Sprung
14 March 2003
It's been a fairly quiet spring in terms of baseball news coming out of the Yankees' spring training complex in Tampa. There've been the usual rash of owies, injuries, strains, and other stuff (including yet another mystery wrist ailment for Nick Johnson). The most worrisome news is that Jose Contreras is having trouble getting his groove. Luckily, Jeff Weaver has been lighting the world on fire, so it's looking increasingly like the rotation will be Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte, Mike Mussina, David Wells, and Weaver, with Contreras working out of the bullpen until the inevitable injury. There's enough creakiness in this rotation that I'm sure that one or more of the starters will be going down at one point or other, and if too many go down, the Yanks have a few perfectly adequate fifth-starter types that can make the journey from Columbus. Hideki Matsui seems to be pootling along nicely with his entourage of Japanese media, and all seems to be coming together baseball-wise.
Sadly, this means that sportswriters are having a field day with utterly irrelevant minutae that have nothing to do with baseball and is being blown out of proportion to their actual relevance to whether or not the Yankees will finish atop the AL East again. First we had the Derek Jeter/George Steinbrenner stupidity, then we had the Wells stupidity, both utterly ridiculous situations that were blown obscenely out of proportion by a fourth estate desperate for headlines. This is even lower on the imbecility scale than the Jorge-Posada-on-the-trading-block nightmare. All I have to say on the subject is that, as great as Ball Four was, it has sadly resulted in an avalanche of whine-all tomes that try to disguise rambling stupidity as telling it like it is. And the fact that Wells tends to shoot his mouth off is breaking news on a par with the announcement that the Berlin Wall fell.
My absolute favorite is the attempt to paint the 2003 Yankees as a return to the Bronx Zoo of the 1970s and how this team isn't the same batch of pros from the mid-to-late 1990s juggernaut, and that the "team chemistry" has been diluted, and a great deal more tripe.
One article -- I think it was a Boston Globe piece -- pointed out that we're a far cry from the 1998 squad, which defined professionalism, and that this 2003 team can't possibly live up to. Instead, what we've got is a team that has just brought in a heavily hyped Japanese import that is being followed by hordes of Japanese media, signed a talented Cuban defector, has a third-year middle infielder who has to live up to lofty expectations, and worries about the effectiveness of Mariano Rivera after the events of the previous season.
There's just one problem: what I have described was also the 1998 team. Hideki Irabu and Orlando Hernandez were the two hyped imports, as opposed to Matsui and Contreras, the third-year player was Jeter instead of Alfonso Soriano, and the worry about Rivera was the psychological aftereffect of his giving up the home run to Sandy Alomar Jr. in the playoffs in '97 instead of his shoulder.
In other words, I ain't worried. This is a non-story that will probably go away once the season starts and there's actual baseball to talk about.
Any discussion of "team chemistry" is one I generally skip as laughable. "Chemistry" is almost always used as a meaningless datapoint for a team's success and a convenient excuse for a team's failure. It's been particularly entertaining when used to discuss the world champion Anaheim Angels, who fielded virtually the exact same lineup in both 2001 and 2002. Funny how nobody talked about what great chemistry they had when they finished 75-87, a very distant third to the record-breaking Mariners.
* * *
So how do things look? Not bad. I'd feel better if the roster was divested of the expensive dead weight of Sterling Hitchcock (who has had a dreadful spring) and either Rondell White or Raul Mondesi. The rumor mill has San Diego interested in one of the two outfielders, now that Phil Nevin is down, which might make a nice fit. The Padres have a surfeit of young arms, one of whom might be pried away in exchange for Raul or Rondell, making everyone happy. The Yanks could use a young arm or seven, and they need to clean out the logjam in the outfield. Juan Rivera needs to be playing every day to show whether or not he's the real thing, and if that makes Raul the world's most expensive defensive replacement, then so be it. The Yanks can afford it.
I'm going to start getting back into doing these suckers more regularly, so next time, look for my Guaranteed Inaccurate Predictions!
NEXT: "Play Ball!"
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