Yankees Suck!

by Jim Gerard

  RELIEF PITCHERS:

  RIGHTY: DALE MURRAY (SEE “ALL-TIME WORST YANKEE TRADES”) 1983-1985

  Another former standout (for the Expos), Murray was among the many players—most free agents with decling skills—who treated Yankee Stadium as if it were Leisure Village. He had lost his fastball somewhere between Montreal and Toronto, the latter of whom peddled him to a credulous Steinbrenner in exchange for Fred McGriff.

  LEFTY: FÉLIX HEREDIA 2003-2004

  A lefty specialist who was battered like an equal-opportunity piñata. Heredia’s body—a short torso and outsized legs—looks as if it was hastily assembled by a couple of drunken med students. This could’ve messed up his mechanics and led to his 2004 line: 38.7 innings, 44 hits, 28 runs, 20 walks, 25 strikeouts, 5 home runs, and an ERA of 6.28 (6.39 against lefties!). Heredia’s season was interrupted by a demotion to Class A ball, but this wasn’t good enough for some Yankee fans, who drafted a “Trade Félix Heredia” petition. It read, “By signing this petition you agree that New York Yankee ‘Picher’ [sic] Félix (Ball 4) Heredia needs to be either released or traded to the Red Sox!” It was posted on a website “provided to help concerned citizens rally support for issues they believe in.”

  MANAGER: CARL “STUMP” MERRILL 1990-1991

  One of the many longtime organizational retreads who sacrifice the last vestiges of professional pride to be jacked around by Steinbrenner, Merrill in 1990 presided over only the Yanks’ second last-place finish since the Highlanders era. His two-year record: 120 wins, 155 losses, a .436 winning percentage. Since his firing in 1991, Merrill has traveled the globe as a special consultant and was last seen managing an all-Shiite team in Iraq.

  MANAGER-IN-WAITING: NORMAN ARTHUR “TABASCO KID” ELBERFELD 1908

  A hot-tempered player-manager, The Kid compiled the lowest winning percentage—.276—in Yankees history. He had longevity, though: In 1936, at the age of 61, he pinch-hit for his Fulton Kitty League team and grounded out to third.

  Yanks’ Biggest Bonus Baby Busts

  In the 40 years that the amateur draft has been in existence, the Yanks have produced only five first-round picks who made an impact in the majors, and only two of those—Thurman Munson and Derek Jeter—contributed to New York. They team has a track record of much-ballyhooed prospects who soon fizzle out: Hensley “Bam-Bam” Meulens, Shea Morentz, David Walling. But there are two who flamed out in especially Hindenburglike fashion:

  BUST #1: Brien Taylor

  A fireballing left-hander who could throw in the high 9os, he got a $1 million bonus when he signed as the #1 overall pick in 1991. But in the off-season before his first year in pro ball, Taylor moronically injured his shoulder trying to break up a bar fight involving his brother. (If the Yankees were a Wagnerian opera, the bar fight would be a major leitmotif.) Taylor made innumerable attempts to recover, but the damage to his arm was irreparable.

  BUST #2: Drew Henson

  Biggest bust in Yankee history. The Yanks gave the multitalented Henson a $2 million bonus after selecting him in the third round in 1998. (He had first-round talent, but he dropped because of concerns that he would choose an NFL career.) When Henson wouldn’t commit to baseball full-time, the Yankees traded him to the Reds as part of a package for Denny Neagle in July 2000. Henson then pulled the old “I’ll only play for the Yankees” ploy (previously used by Hideki Irabu), so the Reds dealt him back to New York for outfielder Wily Mo Pena and $1.9 million in 2001. The Yankees gave him a six-year, $17 million contract with the provision that he abandon football. But Steinbrenner prematurely rushed him to the upper levels of the Yankee system. Three years and 358 strikeouts with Columbus later, Henson abandoned baseball to play in the NFL. Meanwhile, Pena tore up the National League in 2004.

  NOTE

  All historical information and statistics were taken from Total Baseball (edited by Pete Palmer and John Thorn, Warner Books, 1989), baseball-reference.com, and baseballlibrary. com.

  Chapter Nine

  THE YANKEE KILLERS1

  Yankee Haters everywhere know that sometimes rooting against the Yankees is more gratifying than cheering for their home team. In this war of emotional antagonism, they often have to rely on proxies, third-party players who punish and dominate the Bombers. Here is an all-star team of players who see red when they see the interlocking NY: The Yankee Killers.

  C: CARLTON FISK

  In his 22-year Hall of Fame career, Fisk hit well against the entire American League, but against the Yankees he added his fists and a pugnacious attitude. In August 1973, in a game tied 2-2 in the top of the ninth, he brawled with Yankee counterpart Thurman Munson after the New York backstop tried to run him over during a missed squeeze bunt by Gene Michael. Boston won the game, 3-2, in the bottom of the inning. Seventeen years later, while with the White Sox, Fisk berated the Yankees’ Deion Sanders for not running out a pop-up. While Sanders was too stunned to respond, Pudge’s tirade nearly instigated a fracas between the two teams. “Yankee pinstripes, Yankee pride,” Fisk scoffed. “I’m playing for the other team, and it offended me.” Sanders apologized the next day.

  DH: EDGAR MARTINEZ

  The 41-year-old Martinez was a designated hit man for Yankee pitching throughout his just-completed 18-year career, batting .323 with 22 homers and 100 RBI in 130 games. Hell, his double in the bottom of the ninth in Game 5 of the 1995 Divisional Series delayed the Dynasty for a full year. But the Yanks shouldn’t be embarrassed—Edgar the Great was an equal-opportunity basher, with 309 lifetime home runs, 1,261 RBI, and a .933 OPS average, stats he would’ve padded if Seattle hadn’t buried him in their minor-league system early in his career. Clearly the best DH ever.

  1B: DAVID ORTIZ

  “Papi” cemented his plaque in the anti-Yankee Hall of Fame by almost single-handedly un-hexing the Red Sox in last year’s ALCS. The numbers—OBP: .533 (with 12 walks), SLG: .813—don’t even tell the whole story, as he had two game-winning hits, and his five homers all came at crucial times. His home run ended the Yankees’ sweep dream in Game 4 of the ALCS, and his blast off Tom Gordon signaled a comeback in Game 5, which Ortiz also ended, with a 14thinning single. In Game 7, seconds after Johnny Damon was cut down at the plate in the first inning, Ortiz dispatched Mystique and Aura to the Retired Strippers Home with his two-run blast off Kevin Brown. The rout was on.

  2B: DICK McAULIFFE

  The guy with perhaps the most awkward batting stance in major-league history—leaning back toward the catcher, bat held high over his head, facing almost square to the pitcher, then raising his front leg high—was also a forerunner of today’s slugging middle infielders, one of the few such creatures in 1960s baseball. And boy, did he feast on Yankee blood. In his 15-year career, he had 24 HRs and 67 RBI versus New York, personal bests against any one team.

  SS: SCOTT FLETCHER

  During a 15-year career as an infielder and DH with the Rangers, White Sox, and other clubs, Fletcher played for six teams and hit .262. But against the Yankees, journeyman Fletcher turned into Honus Wagner: He hit .335 against New York before retiring in 1995.

  3B: GEORGE BRETT

  Hall-of-Famer Brett hit .358 in four postseason series against the Yanks, three of which—the 1976,1977, and 1978 ALCS—they won, despite Brett’s heroics. In the third game of the 1978 ALCS, he hit three home runs against Catfish Hunter only to watch Doug Bird give up a game-winning home run to Thurman Munson. Brett finally gave the Yanks their comeuppance in 1980, when his three-run homer off Goose Gossage in Game 3 put the Royals in the World Series for the first time.

  OF: KEN GRIFFEY, JR.

  Griffey always explained his career performance against the Yankees-.312 average, 33 home runs, and 92 RBI in 447 at-bats—as a kind of revenge killing. It seems that when Griffey’s dad, Ken Griffey, Sr., played for the Yanks in the early 1980s, Billy Martin kicked Junior out of the clubhouse because the child was too boisterous.

  OF: CARL YASTRZEMSKI

  In his Hall of Fame career, the great
Yaz compiled 45 home runs and 145 RBI—an MVP-caliber season—against the Yankees alone. Most Sox fans remember with painful clarity his game-ending pop-up against Goose Gossage in the 1978 one-game playoff, while forgetting that he tagged Cy Young winner Ron Guidry for a home run earlier in that contest.

  OF: TONY OLIVA

  Oliva was one of the most graceful yet punishing hitters of the mid-1960s and would certainly have reached the baseball pantheon if he hadn’t suffered a debilitating knee injury. Still, he was a three-time batting champion and a lifetime .304 hitter (over 14 seasons). Against the Yankees, though, he took his game into the stratosphere, slugging .527 (very high for his pitching-dominant era) with 28 homers, more than he hit against any other club.

  LHP: BILL LEE

  Although the Spaceman went 12-5 against the Yankees while with the Red Sox, the always-candid Lee has admitted that his record was built mostly against substandard Yankee clubs of the early 1970s and that he benefited from the old Yankee Stadium’s yawning left field. But mostly, he says, it’s because pitchers are smarter than hitters. “Hitters are Neanderthals,” Lee says. “Pitchers are smarter than hitters-except for Roger Clemens.”

  RHP: FRANK LARY

  The original “Yankee Killer” (as he was dubbed by the press), Frank Lary was an average pitcher on a mediocre Detroit team in the 1950s, but he somehow morphed into a Power Ranger whenever facing the Yankees. How else to explain his anomalous 12-year career? Lifetime overall record: 128-116; record against the Yanks: 28-13, including 7-1 in 1958, when the Tigers were 77-77 and finished 15 games behind the first-place Bombers. (He went 9-14 against the rest of the AL that year.)

  RHP: WALTER JOHNSON

  The Big Train had the Yanks tied to his tracks: He notched 60 of his 417 wins against the Yankees—the most by any opposing pitcher. What makes Johnson’s record remarkable is that he won all those games while playing for the Washington Senators, a perennial AL bottom-dweller. In 1908, Johnson pitched three shutouts in four days against the Yankees, then known as the Highlanders. In 1923, he gave New York its first defeat at their new park, Yankee Stadium, before 70,000 fans. In 1924, with his career winding down, Johnson led the Senators, picked to finish seventh, to the pennant, just ahead of New York.

  RHP: CURT SCHILLING

  It could be said that he’s the undoer of curses, the antidote to Yankee mojo. First he stopped the Dynasty in its tracks in Game 1 of the 2001 Series, allowing only one run and three hits, striking out eight and walking one. His Series totals were 21.3 innings, 12 hits, four earned runs, 26 strikeouts, and two walks.

  In Game 6 of the 2004 ALCS, on a torn tendon in his ankle that led to the bleeding socks—the stigmata to Red Sox fans—Schill shut the Yanks down on one run and four hits, and drove a stake into their black hearts.

  MANAGER: AL LOPEZ

  “El Señor,” as he was known, managed the only two non-Yankee American League teams to win pennants during New York’s 1949-1964 mega-dynasty. In 1954, his Cleveland Indians won a league-record 111 games, finishing eight games ahead of the Yanks (who, ironically, compiled their highest single-season win total during that 15-year run). And five years later, Lopez did it again, with his “Go-Go” Chicago White Sox.

  COACH: FRAN PIROZZOLO

  Even minor coaches—ones so low on the totem pole they don’t even wear uniforms—can kill Yankees. Take Fran Pirozzolo,2 a “mental skills coach” who worked for the Yankees from 1996 to 2002, then turned Benedict Arnold and helped the Marlins’ Josh Beckett and Pudge Rodriguez prepare for the 2003 World Series. As George King wrote in the New York Post, “Pirozzolo continued to hurt the Yankees this past October when he worked closely with Red Sox ace Curt Schilling, communicating with the self-centered Schilling on a daily basis” through the postseason. Pirozzolo propounds a program called “guided visual imagery,” which is something Schilling heavily endorses. Kings wrote that Pirozzolo helped Schilling handle the trade to Boston and persuaded him to log on to the Sons of Sam Horn Red Sox site and tell their fans that he was there to break The Curse. Now if he can only get Schilling to visualize keeping his mouth shut.

  NOTES

  1 Material from this chapter is taken from a story by Bill O’Keefe in the New York Daily News, July 2003, Retrosheet.org, baseballlibrary.com, and Richard Lally (in an e-mail interview with the author, September 2004).

  2 George King, New York Post, November 3, 2004.

  Chapter Ten

  THE DYNASTY

  Sure, they were the “consummate pros” who pulled more October Surprises than the Bush family. But who among us wants to relive the Yankee Dynasty? (For self-flagellation, we always have the YES Network.) No, it already haunts our dreams, waking and sleeping—and besides, it didn’t have to happen. Consider:◆ What if George Steinbrenner wasn’t suspended by Fay Vincent for his involvement with Howard Spira? Then maybe Gene Michael wouldn’t have gotten a free hand to draft the Yankee nucleus, hire Buck Showalter, and rebuild the team.AND:

  ◆ What if Michael failed to dissuade Steinbrenner from trading the young, struggling Bernie Williams and Mariano Rivera (which the owner came very close to doing)?AND:

  ◆ What if Jeffrey Maier’s dad restrained him from putting his glove over the right-field fence in the eighth inning of Game 1 of the 1996 ALCS and Tony Tarasco caught Jeter’s game-tying homer?AND:

  ◆ What if umpire Carlos Hernandez correctly called Mark Langston’s 2-2 right-down-the-middle pitch to Tino Martinez a strike in the seventh inning of Game 1 of the 1998 World Series, with the score tied 5-5? Maybe the Pods take the game and—who knows?—the title.

  You get the picture. All that followed—the pennants, parades, new mutant species of front-running Yankee fans that haunt our dreams, awake and asleep—might never have happened if not for the worm of fate.

  But it all did happen. And we’ll face it with dignity, like men, by taking potshots at some of the Dynasty’s most iconic members:

  SIX REASONS WHY DEREK JETER SUCKS

  1. He’s totally overrated. In the “Holy Trinity” of AL shortstops, he’s Curly. Except for 1999, he’s been completely trounced offensively by Nomah and A-Rod, with far less power than either. In almost the exact same number of at-bats, A-Rod has 381 home runs and 1,095 RBI, to Jeter’s 150 homers and 593 RBI. Nomar has 182 homers and 710 RBI in almost a thousand fewer at-bats than Jeter. A-Rod regularly has posted OPS averages 100 to 150 points higher than Jeter’s. Lifetime, A-Rod has a .955 OPS and Nomar a .919, to Jeter’s .848. Jeter’s defense had become so putrid that even his hitherto-unquestioning supporters in the New York media were urging him to switch places with A-Rod or take a hike to the outfield. (To be fair, his defensive stats, such as range factor, improved to slightly above average in 2004—and he won a disputed Gold Glove award—but most likely that was due to A-Rod’s exceptional range at third, which allowed Jeter to shade to his left, or weaker, side.)

  2. Celebrity nooky. Mariah Carey, Vanessa Minnillo, Jessica Alba, Anna Kournikova. The life cycle of the teen female heartthrob is instant stardom, mass adulation, screwing Derek Jeter, and doing infomercials by age 25.

  3. PR face for sweatshop-labor-exploiting multinational. Among Jeter’s endorsement deals is one with Nike’s Team Jordan, the division that carries His Unfairness’s name and logo. Jetes even has a signature training shoe, the Nike Jumpman Jet, that ghetto youth are most assuredly shooting each other over.

  4. Hypocrite. Affects a bland, above-the-fray persona mistaken for “class,” while (according to intimates quoted in “Jeter-A-Rod feud” stories) privately bearing grudges more unforgivingly than a Sicilian don.

  5. Boring. Like most athletes, says almost nothing that even hints at personality.

  6. Scapegoats teammates for his poor performance. After last year’s ALCS, he blurted to reporters that “This isn’t the same team” as the Dynasty club. Jeter hit .200 and made two errors.

  WHY CHUCKIE CAN’T THROW

  Someday, psychiatrists consulting the DSM-IV will
find in its pages, along with generalized anxiety disorder and schizophrenia, something called Knoblauch’s Syndrome. Its primary symptom is the sudden inability to accurately throw a baseball from second base to first, and it was named after the Yankee second baseman, who went from adidas All-Star to Rawlings basket case within a year after the Yanks acquired him from Minnesota.

  Midway through the 1998 season, the former Gold Glover suddenly developed a mental tic—Joe Torre gave it the scientific term “the yips”—that caused him to hesitate after fielding the ball, then make throws that landed in the first-base boxes. It was like a remake of Pride of the Yankees written by the staff of The Simpsons.

  Unlike Steve Sax, who, 15 years earlier, suffered a similar problem but who conquered it within one season, Knobby never did. He had a league-leading 26 errors in 1999-14 of them on souvenir tosses. By June 28 of 2000, he had made 15 more, most on throws. Finally Torre moved him to left field during spring training of 2001, where he both fielded badly and lost his hitting ability as well. After the Yanks let him go, he played left field for Kansas City for a year, then retired.