The Futility Infielder

And now for a Futility Infielder first: it's time to get biblical. Like most observant Jews, I spent a good portion of last Thursday at services for Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement. I didn't go there with the intention of thinking about baseball, or at least no moreso than I usually do while listening to Hebrew chanting about 2,000-year-old rituals. Still, it wasn't too long before the subject crept into my consciousness.

At the heart of the Torah reading for Yom Kippur (please turn in your prayer books to Leviticus 16) is a passage detailing the ritual of the scapegoat which was central to the holiday in the days of the Temple in Jerusalem. In this ritual, two goats are chosen and presented to the High Priest. One is sacrificed to God in the proscribed fashion, the other is symbolically burdened with the sins of the community and then banished to the desert. Of course, with the local newspapers still buzzing with the Yankees' recent elimination at the hands of the Angels (not that there's anything biblical about them) and particularly, the failures of Alex Rodriguez, you can see why the topic rang a bell.

Rodriguez's punchless 2-for-15, 0 RBI performance in the five-game series was no small factor in the team's defeat. Right up to the final inning, when he represented the game-tying run and grounded into a double play to put the Yanks one out from elimination, A-Rod failed to deliver. His lapses at the plate were coupled with more in the field, where he made a key error in Game Two and hesitated on several other grounders, resulting in missed opportunities for outs along the way. Reportedly, the September 30 death of the uncle who raised him played a part in his poor performance, but really, it isn't necessary to explain it away. He's far from the first MVP-caliber player to come up short in a small sample size; even pinstriped gods like Ruth, DiMaggio and Mantle had their share of postseason flops.

And Rodriguez was far from the only offender in the Division Series. As a whole, the team hit just four homers and slugged just .392 (as compared to .451 in the regular season). The rotation averaged less than five innings per start. Prior to the final game, the Yankee bullpen had allowed eight earned runs in 13 innings, a 5.53 ERA (though they did freeze out all six of the baserunners inherited from the starters over the course of the series). Gary Sheffield and Hideki Matsui combined for just two extra-base hits and three RBI between them, former clutch god Bernie Williams had just one along with a critical missed hit-and-run that cost the Yanks a baserunner early in Game Five, and even the sainted Derek Jeter's two home runs were both solo shots with the Yanks facing significant deficits (five runs in Game Three, three runs in Game Five). One could point to a couple of bad calls made by umpire Joe West along the way, but the Yanks simply didn't play well enough to beat the Angels, and they got what had been coming to them since last winter's brutal hackjob of a retooling: an early exit from relevance.

As the season dawned, I decribed the Yanks as "a roster built with all the grace of a congressional spending bill fraught with dozens of tacked-on pork-barrel amendments... or the car Homer Simpson designed for his half-brother Herb." Smarter people such as Steven Goldman has opined that the Yanks' 2004-2005 offseason will go down in history as one of the worst in team history. The two big-money free-agent pitchers the team signed, Carl Pavano and Jaret Wright, both pitched below replacement level while being limited to a combined 163.2 innings between them, about 40 percent of what was expected from a pair whose track records were already spotty to begin with. The big-money ace they traded for, Randy Johnson, delivered a very un-Randy Johnson-like season, with an ERA more than half a run above his career average.

The team then used that profligate spending as an excuse NOT to sign centerfielder Carlos Beltran, even though Williams could no longer carry the position either offensively or defensively. They signed low-budget, low-OBP geezers like Tino Martinez, Ruben Sierra, and Tony Womack to be the supporting cast for a cracking good lineup. They patched over their bullpen's lack of an effective lefty reliever -- made glaringly apparent by David Ortiz in the now-infamous 2004 ALCS -- in favor of retread Mike Stanton.

Still, the team was projected by Baseball Prospectus' PECOTA forecasting system to win 95 games, and that's exactly what they did. After spending a half-season looking like they would indeed live up to my vision of a $200 million tightrope walker splattering -- they started by losing 19 games out of their first 30, and stood at 39-39 on July 1 -- the Yanks returned to their winning ways while sporting some ungainly patchjobs, going 56-28 the rest of the way. Despite the renewed optimism from Yankeeland, the truth of the team's quality lay somewhere in between those two poles, the .500 team and the .667 one. Good enough to make the playoffs with a bit of luck, but not immune to the possibility that they could be bounced just as quickly as they had arrived.

Baseball is a game of streaks, and it wasn't all that surprising that the team which roared to the finish of the regular season at 26-11, claiming the AL East crown on a head-to-head tiebreaker, should back that up with a most inconvenient cold one in the first round of the playoffs. Bad weather in New York played a part -- creaky Randy Johnson was ill-suited for the sodden Game Three conditions, and the next day's postponement gave the Angels bullpen a bit of extra gas in the tank. Bad luck -- the Bubba Crosby/Gary Sheffield collision in centerfield during the second inning of Game Five, leading to two runs -- did as well.

But really, I look at Game Five as Joe Torre's failure just as much as anybody else's. Torre's refusal to remove Mike Mussina -- in favor of Johnson, Chien-Ming Wang, Shawn Chacon, Whitey Ford, or anyone else -- after that two-run inning proved fatal. Moose, who had paired a good and an awful start after returning from elbow inflammation and had apparently gotten the good game out of his system in the series opener, yielded a pair of quick singles to Orlando Cabrera and Vlad Guerrero to start the third frame. To that point, he'd allowed just two hard-hit balls, a Garret Anderson homer which began the inning and then Adam Kennedy's collision-aided triple.

The important point was that Mussina wasn't missing bats. Only two Angels, Chone Figgins and Darin Erstad, had swung at and missed even one pitch. Three more strikes came on foul balls, two of them to Guerrero just before his hit. The rest were called strikes, eleven of them. Mussina was getting his share of calls from the home plate ump, but between that and the shaky defense, that's a razor-thin margin to be walking, especially once he'd already surrendered the short-lived lead. Unable to finish off the Angel hitters without letting them put the ball in play, he gave up two more runs on another single and two productive outs before the Big Unit came out of the bullpen. For Torre to have left Mussina out there to absorb five runs in an elimination game is to see the Yankee manager's wishcasting -- this is the Moose of old, he's healthy, and he's going to come up big, because he's a veteran and a Yankee -- laid bare.

The rest is history. Johnson pitched admirably out of the bullpen, holding the Angels scoreless until Tom Gordon took over in the eighth, but the Yanks could do no more damage. Robinson Cano, the rookie who had seemed to wind up in the center of every big play in the series, and not always on the right side, was the victim of Bernie's missed hit-and-run in the second inning, and then wound up being called out running outside the basepaths as he sped to first on a dropped third strike to end the fourth; had he run where he was supposed to have -- essentially through Erstad, who didn't have the ball (just because he was a punter doesn't mean he's tough) -- the Yanks would have loaded the bases for Williams. Instead, they let Angels rookie Ervin Santana, who came out of the bullpen in relief of the injured Bartolo Colon, off the hook at critical times.

In the end, the $203 million kludgemobile failed, a victim of both bad design and bad performance. Just how many of the parts will be stripped of this ill-suited machine remain to be seen. Williams is likely done as a Yankee, and after his critical lapse in Game Five, it's not a moment too soon, despite all of the warm sentiments his passing from pinstripes should evoke (that's what those Game Four ovations were for). Kevin Brown, injured for more than half the season, is finally done in this town as well. Between those two, that's $23.5 million off the books once Bernie's buyout is counted. Hideki Matsui, Tom Gordon, Martinez, Sierra, John Flaherty, and all of the bullpen dross are free agents, with only Matsui likely to return. But the core of the team will remain in place, one year older and no necessarily the wiser, and damned expensive. Here are the major 2006 salary commitments for some of the incumbent Yankees, not including prorated bonuses or pending options:

Alex Rodriguez  $25*
Derek Jeter      18
Jason Giambi     18
Mike Mussina     17
Randy Johnson    16
Gary Sheffield   13
Mariano Rivera   10.5
Jorge Posada      9
Carl Pavano       8
Jaret Wright      7
Tony Womack       2

That's $143.5 million dollars committed to just 11 players, not even half of the roster. Not even half an outfield, for that matter. But the biggest question coming from the Bronx is who will be around to fill out that roster. GM Brian Cashman's contract expires at the end of October, and he may well decide he's got better things to do than endure another season of marginalization in an increasingly dysfunctional front office. At this point, two scenarios appear to be possible:

1) Cashman stays because George Steinbrenner (who wants him to stay, to the extent of not granting him permission to discuss other openings before his contract expires) not only meets his price but significantly eases him from the yoke of the goons-without-portfolio who comprise the Yanks' Tampa office and Steinbrenner's inner circle, often undermining the team's day-to-day operations.

2) Cashman leaves, finally free to seek a more sane employer, and the Yanks promote VP of Scouting Damon Oppenheimer, whose moon is quite apparently in the House of Steinbrenner these days. The 43-year-old Oppenheimer took over the team's postseason scouting duties from Gene Michael (who's been thoroughly marginalized himself since re-upping in June 2003) this year. His promotion might do something to unify the team's dual decision-making nodes, at least until someone else emerges to second-guess him to Steinbrenner. The Boss does like his scapegoats, after all.

It's much less likely the Yanks would go outside of the organization to hire a GM in the event of Cashman's departure, and anyway, that's a topic for another day. Beyond that and despite all speculation about the linking of his fate to Cashman's, Torre is a virtual lock to stay, with $13 million still on his contract. He'll need a new set of consiglieres, however. Bench coach Joe Girardi appears fated to wind up the manager of one of the two Florida teams, while pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre has resigned, setting fire to the bridge behind him on the way out of town as he highlighted a perceived slight from Steinbrenner.

The time for change is upon the Yankees, a change that may go all the way to the top and one certain to have some impact on the roster despite a lean free-agent class. Let's hope the Yanks do a better job of managing change during this early-arriving winter of discontent than they did last year.

Update based on Comment #1 (" It isn't that bad since 8 mil of A-Rod's deal is from Texas"): Actually, it's a little more complicated than that. Rodriguez agreed to defer $4 million of his 2006 salary as part of a $45 million deferment arranged in 2001. The breakdown of the remaining $21 million is 15 NY/6 Tex according to what I published back in February 2004:

       TX   NY
2001   21
2002   21
2003   21
2004    3   15
2005    6   15
2006    6   15
2007    7   16
2008    8   16
2009    7   17
2010    6   18
bonus  10
defer  24
-------------------
      140  112

So that may shave as much as $10 million off of the $143.5. It's still a ton of money that by itself is already more than any other team payroll in 2005, including the Boston Red Sox ($126.8 million according to a recent AP report).

And that doesn't even take into account the luxury tax hit. As three-time offenders, the Yanks 2005 payroll is taxed at 40 percent for the amount above $128 million; that's $30 million right there. The 2006 hit will be 40 percent above $136.5 million, so assuming that the Yanks more or less match this year's $203 mil, their portion might actually decrease all the way down to $27 million or something like that. In other words, every single player they add beyond the eleven they're already committed to will cost them a 40 percent premium. As it was last winter, even the richest team will feel that bite.