felix culpas

Gary Sheffield's fall, like Matsui's before him, has apparently cost him the season. If this is devastating at one level, I would like to suggest that at another it is liberating.

After the Yankees expressed more relief than ecstasy after Boone's epic shot to beat the Bosox (again) in 2003, one sportswriter, an unusually acute member of his degraded species, wrote of their "joyless pursuit of perfection." And while the committment to excellence, continuing excellence, is never to be deprecated, it is the case that perfection can be the enemy of excellence much as the best can be the enemy of the good. And the way that hostility is to be measured is precisely in the loss of joie de endeavour. The Yankees and their fans, myself included, have always carried an obsession with winning it all right now, every year. It has on the whole served them well, making them at once the most en-titled and the most deserving sports collectivity in history. But it has also caused them to field consistently veteran, not to say elderly teams, teams built for immediate success, and in so doing it has robbed all of us of one of the more joyful baseball experiences, the sense of futurity and the savoring of a somewhat uncertain expectation, combined with an assured understanding that the present is for competitiveness, not ultimate victory.

Without Sheffield and Matsui, make no mistake, the Yankees will not be winning any world championships this year, not unless they ruin the future by picking up aging ballplayers looking for one last run. Exactly what they shouldn't do, both for the sake of the team and for the sake of their fans. The fast and furious run of injuries (which include Damon, Posada and now Rivera) are an opportunity not just to reinvent the team-- prioritizing youth, speed, glovework and situational hitting--but the fans as well, allowing us to let go of our presentist/triumphalist obsession and enjoy the younger players being competitive, doing well, even if that does not mean finally winning it all. Of course we will need some help from Torre on this one, but who knows maybe he'll do the right thing for once. Surround your veteran core, those you should be playing even if they're nicked--Damon, Jeter, Giambi, Posada--with the Canos, the Phillips, the Cabreras and for god sakes, not the Longs or Williams but the Crosbys, as soon as Bubba is ready. And by all means pitch Resner. Let's get the kids ready for the future and get all of us oriented to a horizon longer than the next game. We should learn to enjoy--if only every once in awhile, and even then out of necessity--the pleasures of player development. Two-thirds of the outfield, one half of the infield will finally be under thirty, and all of them, except maybe Cabrera is a better than average fielder. Something new, in more than one sense. This team is good enough in my view to hang around in the race without really having a serious chance of going to the series, or maybe even the playoffs. Like Cleveland last year. They were exciting, and the Yanks can be too, maybe for the first time since 1998. But they will only be exciting if we are baseball fans enough to be excited at the prospect, at the condition, that is, of prospectiveness.

When Adam and Eve leave Eden at the end of Paradise Lost, they paradoxically had a much larger world for wandering than they had before the fall. I want to suggest that we might have larger horizons as Yankees fans than we did before the respective falls of our outfield superstars.