The Futility Infielder

With the wounds inflicted by the Yankees' loss to the Red Sox still fresh, I was invited by Christian Ruzich of All-Baseball.com to contribute my thoughts to a roundtable along with Alex Belth and Cliff Corcoran. The first portion of our lengthy post-mortem, dealing with the nuts ad bolts of the ALCS loss, is now up on A-B, with the rest to follow on Monday.

Since the three of us have been in close touch all year and have become good friends, we've shared our ideas about this Yankee team frequently, and I think we see much of what went wrong similarly. One thing that's driven us nuts is Derek Jeter's bunting. Jeter laid down 16 sac bunts in the regular season, one less than in his previous five seasons combined. His bunts in Game Four and Game Five hamstrung the Yankee offense at crucial points in those ballgames, and while they were hardly the only reason the Yanks lost, they make convenient focal points to examine where it all went wrong.

Also on the All-Baseball site, the inaugural Internet Baseball Writers Association awards have been announced. The IBWA, of which I am a member, is a group "founded in 2004 in order to help raise the visibility of Internet-based baseball writers. If that doesn’t sound noble, keep in mind that the BBWAA was formed to get better press box access, and look where they are now," writes Ruz. Thirty-seven writers participated.

Looking over the highest-profile results -- Barry Bonds, Vlad Guerrero, Johan Santana, Randy Johnson winning -- I suspect there's more unanimity for the big winners than will be seen from the BBWAA, and that the Big Unit will miss out on his sixth Cy Young thanks to his pedestrian-looking 16-14 record. The difference, I strongly suspect, is that the IBWA voters are better-versed in sabermetric performanace analysis and understand that it's the runs, particularly how few Johnson allowed, that really matter. The Internet Baseball Awards, which are run by Baseball Prospectus and voted on by a broad base of about 1500 readers, show a similar skew.

My own ballot, for those of you who missed it, is here -- I had Gary Sheffield over Vlad, a choice that only three other colleagues made and that I've admitted reflected a bit of my Yankee bias and late-summer absorption in his fascinating career path.