Yankees Suck posts

Yankee broadcast is advertising “50 hours of Derek Jeter-themed material.” There is a 10th circle of hell, after all. . .

— Bill James Online (@billjamesonline) April 30, 2017

The reason for all of those hours? Jeter, who may soon be the co-owner of the Miami Marlins, had his number retired this weekend in a lavish ceremony by the New York Somethingorothers. They now have zero single-digit numbers left. Unless you count zero.

Last week I read a not-very-good book about a very interesting baseball man, “Finley Ball: How Two Baseball Outsiders Turned the Oakland A's into a Dynasty and Changed the Game Forever,” by Nancy Finley.

Yeah, Charlie O's niece, and the daughter of Finley's right-hand man (the other baseball outsider of the title), and not a particularly good writer. Nor journalist.

She's a “homer” in the worst sense, cleaning up after the family image. She spends way too much time, for example, tracking down dirt on poor Mike Andrews, who committed two errors in the 12th inning of Game 2 of the 1973 World Series, leading to an A's loss, and was then forced, by Finley, to sign a legal doc stating that he was injured and ineligible to play for the rest of the Series. Result: furor. A's manager Dick Williams objected, Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn objected (and reinstated Andrews) and the Oakland players particularly objected. Ms. Finley wants to show that Andrews was injured, and knew he was injured, and kept playing anyway, to the detriment of the team. She completely misses the point. An owner doesn't show up a player (nor a manager) the way Finley did. You keep it in the clubhouse. Finley lost his players not because of Andrews but because he didn't back them up. The team didn't like him because he wasn't a team guy. 

That said, she does give us some good dirt on the ways the New York Yankees used the Kansas City Athletics as essentially a major league farm club throughout the 1950s. Most of this isn't news to me, but it's more detailed than reports I‘ve seen in the past:

• In 1954 [Arnold Johnson] bought the Philadelphia Athletics and moved the team to Kansas City. Johnson also had financial interests in Yankee Stadium, and he seemed to pay more attention to the Yankees than to the Athletics. 
• Early on, Charlie had heard rumors that Johnson had been stripping the team of its best players and trading them to the Yankees. He hadn’t completely believed it, but after he acquired the team he discovered that the rumors were true and that [Kansas City Star sports columnist Ernie] Mehl was complicit. ... Charlie immediately announced that there would be no more trades to the Yankees, a decision that could only be seen as a slap at Mehl.
• The cozy relationship between the Athletics and the Yankees became embarrassingly obvious. When the Athletics acquired the young slugging prospect Roger Maris in 1957, the American League president, Will Harridge—who had supported Johnson's efforts to buy the Athletics and approved their move to Kansas City—took the unusual step of publicly warning Johnson not to trade Maris to the Yankees for at least eighteen months. Johnson complied, but barely, trading Maris to New York in December 1959. The Athletics got little in return.
• “Kansas City was not an independent major-league team at all, it was nothing more than a loosely controlled Yankee farm club,” Bill Veeck wrote later. He said that he heard the Athletics general manager, Parke Carroll—a former K. C. sports writer—boast openly in baseball meetings that he had nothing to worry about by trading away so many great players because the Yankees' owner, George Weiss, had “promised to take care of” Carroll in return for his help in making those lopsided trades.

In one game in the early 1960s, Finley, a true showman, actually organized a bizarre pre-game demonstration of how the days of shuttling talent to New York were over:

The fans were chatting, sipping beer, and waiting for the game to start. Suddenly, they grew quiet. They watched as a beat-up old shuttle bus lumbered onto left field. Exchanging perplexed glances, they wondered what was going on. Then Frank Lane walked out to the bus and splashed it with gasoline. An instant later it was engulfed in black and orange flames. Then an unfamiliar voice came over the loudspeaker. It was the team's new owner. Charlie introduced himself and explained that the burning of the bus was his way of announcing that the days of shuttling Kansas City's best talent to the Bronx were over. The Athletics would no longer be the Yankees' farm team. After a pause, a few fans started clapping, and soon the stadium was filled with applause and shouts of approval.

That said, a book like this needs to embrace the beautiful outsized idiocy of Charlie O, and it doesn't quite. I like the below, for example, except she doesn't need to constantly disparage the Other in order to enshrine her uncle. It puts a slight damper on an otherwise amusing anecdote:

By the late 1950s, baseball owners formed an exclusive club of old-money boys and nouveau riche businessmen, and they looked out for each other. Charlie was a self-made millionaire, but he was just an insurance salesman—not part of the club. When it became clear that Charlie might actually acquire the Athletics in 1960, the other owners assigned the Baltimore Orioles' chairman, Joe Iglehart, to investigate him. Iglehart reported back to the owners: “Under no conditions should this person be allowed into our league.”

So anyone know of a better book on Charlie O?

I'm not exactly spreading the news here—the Yankees finally bought it for the 2016 season more than a week ago. Still, good to kick them to the curb. A shame they didn't have a losing record (they wound up 84-78) but as the man said: There's always next year. 

Take 'em home, Carey:

Still waiting on a losing Yankees season. Maybe this is the year?

From Hardball Times' article, “Damning the Yankees”:

The Yankees are boring, old and slow, and their only exciting pitchers are in the bullpen, waiting for a late-inning lead that seldom comes. They began the season 9-17, and since they won to improve to 4-4 on April 14, the Yanks have spent just one day with a .500 record — May 24, when they won to put their record at 22-22. The Bombers quickly dipped back below .500 and now stand at 27-30. ...

Saddled with oft-injured, over-the-hill former All-Stars on the tail ends of suspect-at-best contracts – Alex Rodriguez ($40 million through 2017), Jacoby Ellsbury ($111 million through 2021), Mark Teixeira ($22.5 million, final year), Carlos Beltran ($15 million, final year) – the Yankees are likely to end this season with the ignominious distinction of the worst win-to-payroll ratio in baseball history.

I also like this dig at New Yankee Stadium, which saw a championship its first year in 2009 (just like old Yankee Stadium in 1923), but not much since (unlike old Yankee Stadium):

Their ballpark is as unappealing as their play. The New Yankee Stadium is a corporatist knock-off of the House That Ruth Built – a sterile, supremely overpriced bandbox where stiffs in suits eat sushi in $1,200 seats. The home field of the most famous team in sports history has gone from hallowed ground to variety show laughingstock.

The House that Ruthlessness Built? 

That said, since the article came out, the Yanks have swept the Angels and are now back at .500. It's an old team but it ain't over 'til the pretty lady sings. 

From Bill Madden's book, “1954: The Year Willie Mays and the First Generation of Black Superstars Changed Major League Baseball Forever”:

On July 27 Arthur “Red” Patterson, the popular Yankees public relations director who the year before had gained nationwide fame by taking a tape measure to determine the distance of Mickey Mantle's tremendous home run hit out of Griffith Stadium in Washington, announced his resignation from the team, citing a clash of personalities with the Yankees general manager [George Weiss]. Patterson had become disgruntled when Weiss passed him over for the assistant general manager's job in April, and the final straw for him was when Weiss castigated him for giving a couple of free passes to a game to the elevator operator at the Yankees' Fifth Avenue offices.

On his “Last Week Tonight” show last night, John Oliver had a bit about the opening of the Major League Baseball season and the wonders that await us. A Cubs championship? Ichiro's 3,000th hit? A not-great Phillies Phanatic joke?

Then it got good:

There is only one thing, however, that we can all be absolutely sure of this season, and that is that the New York Yankees will continue finding ways to look like the biggest elitist assholes in all of sports.

What's fascinating is that it's not the usual elitist assholish behavior from the Yanks. It's not:

• spending more money than any other team by far (they're No. 2 to the Dodgers)
• assuming the best young players on marginal teams will be theirs (although Yank fans already assume Bryce Harper will wind up in pinstripes)
• winning championships (they're in a dry spell for them: one title in 15 years)

It's none of that. This elitist assholish behavior from the Yanks involves dissing their own fans. 

They have a new policy that prevents fans from printing tickets at home. When fans complained that it would be harder to resell tickets online, Lonn Trost, the Yankees COO, whom I've actually spoken with (see: this article from 10 years ago), suggested this wasn't a bad thing, since the rich premium customers wouldn't necessarily want to sit next to, you know, the rabble. He said the following: 

He might not know how to act, Trost intimated. He might not know the proper way to dress. He might disturb the Yanks traditional premium club clientele. 

The true beauty is what Oliver's show decided to do about it: They bought two premium tix for the first three Yankees games, and are selling them for 25 cents apiece to the person who looks least like they've sat in a premium seat before. Brilliant.

You can see the whole thing here. 

Two years ago I posted about the shabby treatment of Vic Power at the hands of the New York Yankees, which appeared to be grooming him to become the team's first black player—roughly seven years after Jackie Robinson broke through with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Then ... not so much. They kept him down in the minors for several seasons, and, in December 1953, traded him in a multiplayer deal with the A's (then in Philly), where he made his major league debut on April 13, 1954. A year later, he had a .319/.354/.505 line while playing Gold-Gloveish D. (He wound up winning seven GGs during his career.) And even though the by-then Kansas City A's were essentially a Yankees farm club between 1955 and 1960—shipping to the perennial champs the likes of Roger Maris, Ralph Terry and Hector Lopez—Power stayed in KC.

Because? Racism? Well, the Yankees did bring up Elston Howard, and he made his MLB debut on April 14, 1955—eight years minus one day from the day Jackie broke the color barrier—so some might say it wasn't really racism. But it kinda was. 

I'm reading Bill Madden's book, “1954: The Year Willie Mays and the First Generation of Black Superstars Changed Major League Baseball Forever,” and Madden goes into it a bit. Here's Tom Greenwade, the Yankee scout who signed Mickey Mantle, in a 1960 interview with New York Herald-Tribune's Harold Rosenthal on the Yankees' supposed reluctance to break the color barrier:

The Yankees have never discriminated against Negroes. Our policy has always been: “When we find one good enough, we'll take him.” Vic Power and Rubén Gómez were not the right type. You had to know Power's reputation. He's a bad actor. Chases after white women and stirs up trouble. We had trouble with him in Kansas City [the Yankees' Triple A farm team] and we knew he wasn't going to the Yankees, so we got rid of him. Elston Howard, on the other hand, is a high type of Negro. He was the one we wanted. 

Madden's book also details the ways Yankees owner Del Web and GM George Weiss screwed over the supercolorful Bill Veck to keep him from moving the hapless St. Louis Browns to either Milwaukee or Baltimore, or possibly the west coast, opening the door for the Dodgers and Giants to do that. The Browns eventually moved to Baltimore but under different ownership. 

The same day Bryce Harper was the unanamious MVP in the National League for the Washington Nationals, I came across these tweets from Yankee fans:

And this:

Same old same old. See Reason No. 6 here.

Sing it, Carey. And sing it slow and sad. 

Astros 3, Yankees 0. Start spreading the news. 

ERRATA, August 23: Make that 20 numbers, 21 players, with Andy Pettitte's #46 being retired today. Don't know how I missed that. No date set yet for Jeter's #2. 

Here are more numbers to fuel anti-Yankee Nation.

The New York Yankees have won twice as many pennants as the next-best team (40-20, over the Giants), and more than twice as many World Series titles as the next-best team (27-11, over the Cardinals). They spend more money than anyone, most years, and hog the spotlight. They're hogs—the Donald Trumps of Major League Baseball. 

So it's no surprise that they've also retired more numbers than any other team, and today they added to their collection.

Jorge Posada, their regular catcher from 1998 to 2010, and, along with Jeter, Rivera and Pettitte, one of the “Core Four”—the four players that (mostly) stuck with the Yankees during the recent dynasty years, before the crumbling and fan-grumbling began—had his number (20) retired today at Yankee Stadium. It's the 19th number the Yankees have retired. And that doesn't include Derek Jeter's No. 2, which will soon go. And it's only counting the No. 8 once, when, for New York, it was so nice they retired it twice: for both Bill Dickey and Yogi Berra. 

Here's the list, team by team (and updated, per above), and not including all the 42s for Jackie Robinson retired throughout MLB (except, of course, for the Dodgers):

A few teams, instead of going overboard, have actually gone underboard when retiring numbers. The worst culprit is my Seattle Mariners, who, despite such talent as Ken Griffey Jr. and Edgar Martinez on the team, have yet to retire anything. I figure they'll get this ball rolling after Junior goes into the Hall of Fame next year. It'll probably go Junior, Edgar, Ichiro, eventually Felix. Maybe Buhner. Maybe Alvin Davis, maybe Jamie Moyer. Maybe. 

The Mets also seem to under-retire: Just Tom Seaver and two managers: Stengel and Hodges. Shouldn't someone else be in the mix? Ed Kranepool? Tommy Agee? Dwight Gooden? Daryl Strawberry? Maybe not. But David Wright down the line. 

Most teams, though, go overboard in this realm. Start with the Yanks' so-so picks. Billy? One title in '77. Maris? An apology for all the boos. Munson? Sorrow for dying young. Elston Howard? Oops, it sure took us a long time to integrate, didn't it. Reggie? Based on three homers.  

The White Sox have retired some pretty medicore numbers, too, while the Indians retired “455” for the fans (a stupid gesture) and the Cards 12 retirees are a mixed bag. (August Busch? Plus three managers?) 

The worst, though, has got to be the Houston Astros, which came into existence in 1962, has one pennant, and yet has somehow retired nine numbers. I'll give you Biggio and Bagwell, and maybe Mike Scott, particularly for '86. But I think that's about it. Nolan Ryan's best years were elsewhere, Jimmy Wynn was only a three-time All-Star, Jose Cruz and Larry Dierker were only two-time All-Stars, and the remaining two are guys who died young: Jim Umbricht and Don Wilson. That's sad but I don't know if it deserves being up on the wall. 

So does Posada deserve having his number retired? I could make arguments for and against. He was a five-time All-Star with a higher lifetime OPS than Jeter (.848 to .817). But in the World Series, where it counts to Yankees fans, he hit only .219 in 29 games. The only thing he ever led the league in was grounded into double plays. Twice. I think he's mostly honored because of the Core Four thing. 

From Charles Leerhsen's biography “Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty”:  

Clark Griffith of New York had hinted that [Tigers new manager Hughie Jennings] might want to make a swap. When Hughie heard back from the Highlanders the next day, however, they were offering only Frank Delahanty, a .238 hitter, a proposal that was either, as Hughie said, “a humorous effort,” or an indication of just how wary some people were of young Tyrus.

This was before the start of the 1907 season. Cobb, who at this point was 20 years old and had played 139 games over the two previous seasons (batting .293), would go untraded. There'd been strife on the team, according to Leerhsen, because some of the other players, northerners mostly, disliked Cobb, who kept to himself, had airs, read books, and was, you know, good. They hazed him for the better part of a season. To some, Jennings mostly, it would just be easier to get rid of the kid, but Tigers' business manager (and eventual owner) Frank Navin liked Cobb and squelched any deal.

Over the next 13 seasons, Cobb would win 12 batting titles, lead the league in OPS nine times, hits eight times, runs five times, RBIs four times, and stolen bases six times. The Tigers would also win three straight pennants (but no championships).

The Highlanders, soon to be the Yankees, would have to wait out those 13 seasons before they began their turnaround. 

I just finished Bill Pennington's excellent bio, “Billy Martin: Baseball's Flawed Genius,” and, as often happens when I read about Yankees history, particularly mid-century Yankees dominance, I wonder about the teams that finished second in the A.L. all those years. Who stayed home as the Yankees went to another effin' World Series?

Here's who. These are the second-place finishers in the American League the years the Yankees won the pennant. I've limited the scope to the years before divisions were created (1969), when the team with the best record in either league immediately went to the World Series:

It's a mixed bag. Different teams threaten the Yankees at different times. The Philadelphia A's got the scroogie in the late '20s, but then gave back good in '29, '30 and '31. The Tigers won the pennant in '34 and '35 but then sat home because of the DiMaggio-resurgent Yankees of the late '30s. The Red Sox, sadly, never gave as good as they got. That '30s/'40s team hadn't won a pennant since 1918, and spent four out of five years finishing second to the team whose league dominance they (or Harry Frazee) started with the Babe Ruth, et al., trades. Ouch. 

But it's Indians fans who have real reason to hate the Yanks. They finished second in '51, '52, '53, '55 and '56, and only threw off the Yankee yoke in '54 by winning 111 games. (The Yankees won 103.) During this run—this is awful—the Indians won 93, 93, 92, 111, 93 and 88 games, and all they have to show for it in historical terms is Willie Mays' catch against them in the '54 Series. Ouch again.  

Anyway, that's the answer. If the New York Yankees had been the New York Suckees and everything else stayed more or less the same, the Cleveland Indians would've benefitted the most with seven additional pennants. Tigers would've had six, Red Sox five:

Overall, the greatest A.L. team in terms of pennants wouldn't be the Yankees with 40 but the Red Sox and the A's tied with 18. The Tigers would be right behind them with 17. The National League leader is the St. Louis Cardinals with 19. 

The saddest bit of data? If you do this, if you take away all of the Yankees pennants from 1921 to 1964, all 29 of them, and assume that 1976 was the first year the Yankees won the pennant, they still would have more pennants than the White Sox, Browns/O's and Senators/Twins. Ouch for a third time, and out. 

Indians' fans would've seen more buttons like this in the '50s if not for the Bronx Bombers.

When I was reading Marty Appel's history of the New York Yankees, “Pinstripe Empire: From the Babe to the Boss,” I was really looking forward to 1965. You know why. 

From 1921 to 1964, a span of 43 years, the Yankees won 29 pennants and 20 world championships. Essentially they were in two out of every three World Series (67% of them), while winning nearly half of all Series titles in those years (46% of them). No wonder author Douglass Wallop had to enlist Satan to stop them. (And of course, Satan is really a Yankees fan, so he wasn't much help.)

Their run ended in '64, the year after I was born. For 10 years, they sucked. Then Steinbrenner instigated their rise (late '70s), fall (the '80s), rise again ('96-'03) and fall again (post-'09). Since '64, the Yankees have won 11 pennants (22%) and seven titles (14%)—paltry numbers compared to what they did before.

That's why I was so looking forward to 1965.

But I wondered: Sure, the Yankees in my lifetime have paled compared to the dynasty years. But how do their numbers stack up again the rest of Major League Baseball?

Yeah. Still on top. And in terms of World Series titles, it's not even close: 

MLB Pennants and Titles Since 1964

This is why I root against them. Even after their fall, they're still the most successful team in baseball. 

This 1966 Topps card displays the previous year's sixth-place finish of the former World Champions. The '66 team would do it better, finishing in last place in the A.L. for the first time since 1908. Can you name the only other year the Yankees finished in last place?

Tomorrow is Opening Day (or Night), so everyone's talkin' baseball while their team is in first place. I've seen the map below several times today. It's Facebook's map of baseball fandom: “Each county is color-coded based on which Facebook team pages has the most likes from people who live in that county”:

You can see a bigger version here, courtesy of The Atlantic.

A couple of things about the map:

• That little notation in the lower left? It says: “There are no U.S. counties where a plurality of fans like the New York Mets, Toronto Blue Jays, or Oakland Athletics.” Almost makes you want to root for those teams. 
• I get that the Yankees have fans in places other than New York. “Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser.” Gen. George S. Patton. But ... in the South?

So which Southern states root for the Yankees? Most of Virginia, West Virginia, and Louisiana. Half of Florida. And parts of North Carolina, South Carolina, Arkansas and Mississippi.

I get Florida (spring training, Steinbrenner home), and my friend Mr. B lets me know the Yankees had a farm team in Greensboro, NC from 1990 to 2002. But c'mon, Southern states. Yankees? Really? 

I just got back from a quick trip to Atlanta, where I stayed in midtown and during a free moment walked over to the Margaret Mitchell house, where I participated in a tour, etc., and watched a film on the making of “Gone with the Wind.” I came in on the film when all of those actresses were trying out for the character originally known as Pansy O'Hara before she got an 11th-hour name change to “Scarlett.” When the film role finally went to Vivien Leigh, the reaction among the Southern was disappointment tempered by worst case scenarios: sad, yes, that an English girl got the part, but at least it was better than a Yankee.

Now look at you. That old attitude is gone with the wind.

First, a few tears for victims of high expectations: the early 1950s New York Yankees:

“You would think we would have had one of those ticker-tape parades after all those years,” said Whitey Ford. “But we never had a single one. People just expected us to win, and we did, and then it was on to next year. We had our victory celebrations, we got our rings, but there was never a parade. It would have been fun! I would have liked to have been in at least one!”

That's from Marty Appel's book, “Pinstripe Empire: The New York Yankees from Before the Babe to After the Boss.” Appel was PR for the Yanks, but there's still good stuff here. Ammunition, you might say.

So from 1949 to 1953, the Yankees won five World Series in a row, and only one time ('52, against Brooklyn) did it even go seven games. Otherwise: five and out, four and out, six and out and six and out. 

That Yankees team was the only team to ever win five World Series in a row. But another team won four in a row. Can you name them?

Right, it's still the Yankees: the 1936-39 version. When DiMaggio was starting and Gehrig was finishing. 

As for three in a row? Only two teams have ever done that:

• 1972-74 Oakland Athletics
• 1998-2000 New York Yankees

Even two in a row is rare:

• 1907-08 Chicago Cubs (dry patch since)
• 1910-11 Philadephlia Athletics
• 1915-16 Boston Red Sox
• 1921-22 New York Giants
• 1927-28 New York Yankees
• 1929-30 Philadephia Athletics
• 1961-62 New York Yankees
• 1975-76 Cincinnati Reds
• 1977-78 New York Yankees
• 1992-93 Toronto Blue Jays

That's it: only seven of the 30 franchises. And no team has gone back-to-back this century. The Giants have won three of five, but they keep spacing them out.  

Interesting footnote: for all of their postseason triumphs (11 titles, most in the NL, and second-most in the Majors), the Cardinals have never gone back-to-back. My Cardinals friends blame Mickey Lolich. 

The 1949-53 Yankees inspired Douglas Wallop's novel, which became the Broadway/movie musical “Damn Yankees”; the 1972-74 Oakland A's inspired the DC Comics story “The Kid Who Beat the Oakland A's,” which kind of inspired the Thomas Ian Nicholas movie “Rookie of the Year.” So far, the 1998-2000 Yankees have inspired nothing.