The Futility Infielder

Part two of the Yankee post-mortem to which I contributed is up at All-Baseball.com. This portion deals more with the Yanks' off-season priorities, who should be on the way out (I hold that Kevin Brown and Mel Stottlemyre should be, no surprise to any regular readers), how much they can spend, as well as the omnipresent (but nonetheless overestimated) Steinbrenner factor.

One of the lengthier sections of our roundtable concerns what to do with Bernie Williams. With the team targeting centerfielder Carlos Beltran, Williams' days patrolling the middle range of the Bronx outfield would seem to be numbered. Coming off of an off year (.262 /.360/.435 with 22 homers and 70 RBI) that still represented a slight improvement on 2003 (.263/.367/.411), his decline as a hitter is indisputable, and it's clear that he's lost a step or two on defense as well. Much as I've enjoyed Bernie, my unsentimental gut feeling is that the Yanks should use his solid postseason to get value for him while they still can, even though they'll end up eating a good chunk of the $15.5 million he's owed for next year and the following year's buyout.

With Jason Giambi a poor bet to survive a full season playing first base, the alternative is having either Williams or Giambi sit on days that G can't play the field -- unless Bernie learns to play first himself (not a great shot, as Cliff Corcoran argues). Even for a team as wealthy as the Yanks, keeping one eight-figure salary on the bench that many times a year is a waste of resources. And while Williams had a better season than Giambi and bears a bona fide pinstriped pedigree, he's 36, fragile, unable to throw worth a damn, and unlikely to reach 30 homers, 100 RBI, and a .400 OBP again. A healthy Giambi, who will be 34, is still a better bet to return to some semblance of the productivity which saw him average 41 homers a year over the past four prior to 2004. His contract is an albatross that will cost the Yanks at least $65 million from 2006-2008 (and actually more, because the average annual value raises the Yanks' luxury tax liability), but he's only making $11 million next year, and they need to squeeze value out of his pact while they can.

Also on the Yankee topic, fellow roundtable participant Alex Belth Bronx Banter guest columnist Chris DeRosa has a fine piece about the "C" word, character, as it pertains to the 2004 Yankees and the Buster Olney-driven comparisons to the dynasty which came within one out of four straight World Championships. A sampling:

So as Yankee fans, we must endure the insults graceless winner Curt Schilling tossed at Alex Rodriguez. We must live with Bob Klapisch’s postmortem, in which he wrote, “…the images of the Yankees’ lack of heart were everywhere…” in game 7. These are just the wages of fandom; you take the lows with the highs.

...[W]riters’ observations about the Yankees’ alleged character problem lack credibility when you know from experience that they were perfectly ready to write it the other way. If Mariano Rivera, whom we generally agree is not a gutless loser, has a better inning in game 4, then the Yankees would have been gritty pros, and the Red Sox would have been underachievers who talk too much. The sports media present a world in which only one team in thirty has heart, and they’ll let you know which one it is right after the last out of the World Series.

DeRosa's fine post goes hand in hand with what I was saying the other day about streakiness -- the arbitrary labels we hang on players and events over these small samples of games is just silly, and the failure of such formerly clutch gods as Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera in this year's playoffs only serves to illustrate that point. The Yankees didn't lose because they choked or lacked character, they lost because a damn good Red Sox team beat them. Narratives about hungry clutch heroes may sell papers, but they're evidence of collective mental laziness on the part of writers and fans who need fairy tales to make sense of the world.