The Futility Infielder

Like clockwork, the Prospectus Hit List is up at BP today, and it now features team logos for those of you who like them purdy pictures. This week finds the Orioles reclaiming the top spot from the Cardinals, with the White Sox not too far behind. The Yankees, thanks to their six-game winning streak, moved up eight spots to #9, thus winning the Platinum Pole Vault award (as opposed to the Golden Anvil award, which they won two weeks ago). The Dodgers, who went a dismal 0-6 on the week, fall three spots down to #21. Like the Yankees a couple of weeks ago, the Dodgers earned the ignominious distinction of being swept by the Royals, who are now 12-7 since Buddy Bell took over. Yuck.

I caught the double-whammy of my two teams losing one-run games last night. With rookie Sean Henn waking seven men, four of them in the unendurable second inning, they Yanks fell behind the Devil Rays 4-0 while George Stallings ("Oh, those bases on balls...") spun in his grave. Worse, Casey Freakin' Fossum no-hit the Yankees until the red-hot Hideki Matsui doubled in the fifth. Best known as one of the players traded for Curt Schilling, Fossum went 4-15 with a 6.66 last year for the Diamondbacks. Naturally, those sterling credentials qualified him for a stint in Tampa, but he's done okay for the Rays, and this was clearly his night.

By the time it was 5-0, I surrendered to the TiVo, letting it switch channels to record some teen show for my wife (she's a junkie for that stuff). As such I missed the Yanks' four-run rally in the eighth (including a Godzilla three-run homer; that guy should sprain his ankle all the time), turning back to see their futile attempt to tie the game against Danny Baez. It didn't happen, and like that, the six-game streak ende with a whimper.

Later I flipped over to the Dodgers-Padres game, where Jake Peavy and Brad Penny were locked in a thrilling 1-0 pitchers' duel. Unfortunately, my boys were on the short end. But even with Peavy dominating (he had 13 Ks on the night, a career high), the Dodgers had their chances. When I tuned in with one out in the sixth, Penny was pulling into second with a double; alas, he died at third. A leadoff walk by J.D. Drew in the seventh turned into a double play one batter later, a two-base error on Phil Nevin to lead off the eighth went for naught, and though the Dodgers put two men on with two out against closer Trevor Hoffman, this just wasn't their night.

Now with a seven-game losing streak, the mood out of L.A. has to be pretty bleak, especially with Eric Gagne's terminal stupidity putting himself out of action. The Dodgers have lost over 400 days to the DL thus far, and though they're a scrappy, likeable bunch, they're stretched far too thin. Yhency Brazoban, who did an admirable job covering for Gagne at the start of the year, is still technically a rookie and only a recent convert to the mound. He gave up four ninth-inning runs to the White Sox on Saturday, capped by a walk-off A.J. Pierzynski homer. Duaner Sanchez, who's only in his second full season, is now the team's top setup man; he let Sunday's game slip away to the Sox as well, though to be fair a fluky defensive play culminating in a bad call at first base provided the gasoline. That's the way losing streaks go.

But it's the offense that's really killing the Dodgers, particularly the loss of Milton Bradley. As I pointed out on the Hit List, the Dodgers are 7-12 and averaging only 3.79 runs per game since the centerfielder went down with a torn ligament in his finger; after last night that's now 7-13 and 3.60. Joe Sheehan actually picks up the topic of the sermon I'd composed in my head last night to discus the team's woes from there:

The Dodgers simply haven't been able to replace Bradley's bat. Consider that last night against Jake Peavy, as nasty a right-hander as there is in baseball, Jim Tracy had Jason Repko batting second, Olmedo Saenz in the five spot, and Jayson Werth batting sixth. Repko is barely a major leaguer, and he sports a .308 OBP (albeit with a "backwards" OBP split in a small sample). Saenz and Werth are platoon players, capable of contributing by smashing left-handers, but out of their element when asked to play a significant role against righties. Tracy's few remaining left-handed options, Jason Grabowski and Oscar Robles, have been awful and have little hope of improving. Like Repko, each is a marginal major leaguer.

When you have to play those three guys in your top six lineup spots against Jake Peavy, you're asking to be shut out. Add into this mix the horror show that third base has been for most of the season, Hee Seop Choi's devolution into a Two True Outcomes player, and the return of Cesar Izturis to his own body (2-for-his-last-46), and you have an offense that quickly went from championship caliber to being shut down by Jose Lima for eight innings. The Dodgers need Ledee, Bradley and Jose Valentin back from the DL if they're going to keep their season together.

...While I give lots of credit to Paul DePodesta for assembling a bench using cheap, even free, talent, one of the reasons you do that is so that you can easily get rid of players who you're wrong about. After a season and a half, it's pretty clear that Jason Grabowski isn't going to hit the way he did in the A's system. Robles might have been a good player in the Mexican League, but he's barely able to get the ball out of the infield in the majors. [Scott] Erickson should never have been employed, and is just a waste of roster space right now. Jayson Werth has a nice little run last year, but he needs a platoon partner. A month from now, we may be saying similar things about Antonio Perez and Mike Edwards, both of whom have gaudy stat lines driven by high batting averages, and who have temporarily solved the third-base problems.

That's about the size of it. Where manager Jim Tracy has been successful in the past is in putting his players in positions in which they can succeed; in other words, knowing the difference between a role player and a regular. He doesn't have quite the luxury of protecting those role players right now. The Dodgers desperately need Bradley and company to get healthy so that the lesser lights don't outstrip their limitations.

Fortunately, the NL West-leading Padres don't appear to be going anywhere fast; they were 5-12 coming into the series after a torrid 22-6 May. While they pack a stronger 1-2 punch at the top of the rotation in Peavy and Adam Eaton, the Dodgers have a more rounded group, at least when healthy and with Erickson stationed someplace where he can do no damage, like Norway. Stay tuned.

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Hitting the books, I've had a nice time perusing Cecilia Tan's The 50 Greatest Yankee Games, a volume that's sure to start more arguments than it settles. With nearly 16,000 games spread over more than a century to choose from, selecting 50 is no easy task, especially coming from a history that includes 39 pennant winners, 26 World Champions, and so many marquee names. Babe Ruth is here, and so are Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Reggie Jackson, and Derek Jeter, but lesser heroes such as George Mogridge, "Sad Sam" Jones, Bobby Murcer, Bucky Dent, and Jim Abbott get their time in the spotlight as well.

Tan's select 50 span almost exactly 99 years, from Jack Chesbro's heroics on October 10, 1904 to Aaron Boone's pennant-winning shot of October 16, 2003, which isn't to say that the Yanks come out on top in every game. Among the ranks are such notoriously bitter defeats as the 1947 World Series game in which Bill Bevens came within one out of a no-hitter, Game Seven of the 1960 World Series, in which Bill Mazeroski hit a walk-off homer, the 1983 game best remembered as the George Brett Pine Tar incident, and Game Five of the 1995 Divisional Series in which the Seattle Mariners' eliminated the Yanks. Even the Chesbro selection is a defeat; the hurler's ninth-inning wild pitch cost the Highlanders* the pennant against (of course) Boston. Tan is obviously a Yankee fan, but she's shrewd enough to recognize when history trumps pinstriped glory; along those lines, Game Seven of the 2001 World Series (the "Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty," as Buster Olney called it) stands as a rather glaring omission.

In this highly subjective task, Tan tries to strike a reasonable balance between individual accomplishments and team greatness, though that balance comes at the expense of mere garden-variety see-saw thrillers (such as this comeback against the Indians and the nine-run ninth inining against the A's in '98, personal favorites that were among my recommendations when Tan solicited them). No-hitters, even the lost ones, abound: Mogridge, Jones, Monte Pearson, a pair for Allie Reynolds, Don Larsen, Dave Righetti, Andy Hawkins, Abbott, Dwight Gooden, David Wells and David Cone. The hitters are here as well: Ruth calling his shot (or not), Gehrig hitting four homers, Mantle nearly hitting one onto River Avenue, Reggie hitting the trifecta against the Dodgers, Dave Winfield and Don Mattingly battling for a batting title down to the last day of the season, Jim Leyritz restoring hope in the 1996 World Series, and a handful of guys hitting for the cycle.

Defense get a bit of short shrift, however. While Billy Martin's World Series-saving catch of a Jackie Robinson popup in 1952 and Derek Jeter's now-legendary play against the A's in the 2001 Divisional Series are here, I'd have saved room for Graig Nettles's acrobatics in the 1978 World Series, particularly in Game Three, when he made several diving stops to cover for a less-than-sharp Ron Guidry. Tan relegated that one to her "Other" 50, but as a Dodger fan first and foremost, that memory still feels like an icicle jab to the heart a quarter-century later.

Tan's done a great deal of research for this book, drawing not only from familiar accounts but also interviews with about 30 former Yankees, including oldtimers like Yogi Berra, Jim Bouton, Jerry Coleman, and Whitey Ford. If her delving into Yankee history isn't on the level of Steven Goldman's (spoiled we are by high standards, no?), she's nonetheless able to inject new insight into some of these oft-told tales, and her book serves as a pretty solid thumbnail sketch of Yankee history via this subjective sample. I only wish she'd had the space to include the box score from each game. Let's face it; no matter how famous or obscure an old ballgame is, that wonderfully concise package of numbers adds so many dimensions to the retelling of these tales that to omit it is virtually an injustice.

Oh, and about that asterisk (*) above. Officially, the Yankees were known as the Highlanders from 1903 through 1912. Tan notes in that Chesbro chapter that headline writers and sportswriters were already calling them the Yankees by that season, and does so herself throughout the chapter. Since that was the first time I've heard of the informal interchangibility of the two names going so far back, it sent up a flag. My initial attempts at researching this met with no more authoritative confirmation of this than a Wikipedia entry; the venerable Mr. Goldman, an authority on all thinks Yankee, was not available for comment. However, in pulling out The New Bill James Historical Abstract, I came across the Patsy Dougherty entry on page 698. Dougherty, a Boston outfielder, was traded to New York early in '04, and James reports that the headline "DOUGHERTY NOW A YANKEE" was the first known instance of the team being called such in print. So there you have it.