deja-phooey all over again

Well yankee fans, did the game last night remind you of anything? Like all of last year! The Yankees get a few runs, sit on the lead while the opposition pecks away at the starter in the middle innings and then blows the bullpen to kingdom come before the Sandman gets a chance to put them to sleep. Why do the yankees lose so many games like these? The obvious answer is that their bullpen still stinks, even after all the huff and puffing during the hot stove league. But I would proffer another explanation, at least as relevant as their bull pen woes. They play lousy fundamental baseball, and for that, blame accrues to the manager.

First of all, the Yankees need to win a lot of come from behind games because they are the world's worst frontrunners. If they build an early lead they typically go into a shell and try to hang on, a strategy which only magnifies the weakness of their relievers. They don't get runners over and so they don't scratch out additional runs in the middle innings to take pressure off the pitching. Most of them either will not or cannot bunt, and since most of them are older power hitters this inevitably means a lot of rally killing double plays. Exactly what is Torre doing in Florida each February and March? He should have all of these guys training to bunt for at least one full day and then an hour every day after that. John Kruk says major leaguge ballplayers don't really need spring training and so spend most of their time partying. But if the expectation was that they had to know how to make every skill play, respond defensively to every situation etc., they would find that they needed the work every day out there. Hit and run is something else the Yankees don't try very often or do very well. Nor do they move runners often enough by giving themselves up. They'd rather wait for the three run homer. But that is just lazy man's baseball, which serves you much better against weaker teams whose pitching is prone to give up the bomb than stronger ones. The Yankees are a terrible situational hitting team in part because Torre doesn't require them to do the little and relatively easy things (like bunting) that increase the odds of success. He hasn't created a culture of urgency around getting each man in scoring position home and so when the playoffs roll around, they don't, and they lose.

The other side of fundamental baseball of course is defense, and the Yankees really should be much better defensively than they are. Hitting is an art; defense is a science. By sheer repetition in practice, a major league ballplayer will come to make all the routine plays. And if the Yankees did no more than that, improved in just the measure that daily workouts would ennable, they could win 5 more games a season. They're is no point in riding a slumping artist; but Torre should be yanking people off the field, mid-inning, for botched plays, and he should be instituting strenous, mandatory practice regimes to make sure the routine plays are made, the right base is thrown to, the cut-off man is in place. He cannot leave Robinson Cano, who had yet another bad error last night, to be the second coming of Alphonso Soriano. When it comes to defense, Torre needs to use the considerable moral capital he has accrued from being the most overrated manger in the game and kick some ass. He might want to start by telling Posada you either block the plate in the Bronx or you're going to be doing it in Columbus.

Torre is the one that always claims it's pitching that counts; we win with our pitching, he says. On that philosophy, you are necessarily envisioning a lot of low run games. If you're scoring at will, after all, it's not really about your pitching. But it is precisely in the low run game that manufacturing opportunies, pushing across the odd run, matters most. The Yankees draw a lot of walks. That too is central to their philosophy. But if you're going to take walks in low run games, it really would realy help to learn how to score without getting hits. It is also in low run games that you cannot afford to give runs away, as Torre blithely watched Bernie Williams do all last season. You cannot have a pitching first philosophy and tolerate the woeful defense the Yankees play as an obstacle to be overcome. To do so is to become a hitting first team, like the Yankees of the 1980's, and we all know how many world championships they won. But without admitting it, without acting on it, just by being the unimaginative, push button manager he is, Torre has de facto adopted a hitting first philosophy, and Cashman has built him just the team to ennact it--right up to the first round of the playoffs.

The Yankees haven't won a world championship since gradually losing the sound fundamental heart of the team--Girardi to trade, Knoblach to insanity, O'Neill and Broscius to retirement, Bernie and Tino to age and decrepitude. Those guys, those teams, have come to be mytholigized by Yankee fans, surrounded by a dewy aura of magic, moralized as men of nerve, mettle, intestinal fortitude, clutchness--warriors to use George's favorite overheated term. But the truth is they just played the game right, by Spalding guide standards. If they had magic and mettle, it was the magic and mettle of sound fundamentals.

And the Yankess would stillhave won it all in 2002 if only, with the bases loaded in the top of the ninth up 2-1 in games on the Marlins, and the score tied, Torre had told Aaron Boone to squeeze bunt. Mariano would have closed it and we wouldn't have looked back.