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SWEPT BY THE ROCKIES (A COLORADO ROMANCE)
Forgive me if I ramble a bit here. I'm trying to work my way through what I want to say today and I'm not having too much success getting my thoughts to march in straight lines. I've had either too little coffee or too much. Just work with me a bit on this one.

I'm not too exercised by the sweep in Colorado, as the games didn't say much that we didn't know. The consequences of Joe Torre's weird phobia about double-switching out Andy Pettitte in Game 2 aside, these were close games. The Yankees just couldn't get their hits together in any kind of run-creating sequence. In this they were hindered didn't by not walking much and hitting a lot of balls deep but not out.

Yankees pitching has been strong of late - the ERA's right at the league average for the season overall, and is third in the league for June at 3.85 -- only Oakland (3.13) and Boston (3.77) lick 'em this month. The league average for June is 4.57. The offense has been very good as well. It's third in the league in runs scored this month, second in OPS -- but we're still in the backwash of that nine-game winning streak where things were working optimally, and I suspect that the results were deceiving.

The offense is very dependent on a well-timed hit on the days that Alex Rodriguez can't deliver. Rodriguez is averaging a home run once every 9.5 at-bats. All other Yankees are averaging a home run every 44.6 at-bats. The most frequent home run hitter after Rodriguez is Scarlet Letter Giambi, but he's not around anymore, so your runner-up is Jorge Posada at once every 25.7. Overall, the Yankees rank seventh in the American League in at-bats per home run.

When I was on Team 990 last night, Picard asked me if the Yankees had a chemistry problem. After babbling for awhile, I said, "Yes. The chemistry of not hitting." This is not the most scientific argument I've ever given you -- it's more about impressions. It's a stretch to say that the Yankees have a poor offense or weak hitters. They do have some weak hitters -- it seems unlikely that Johnny Damon is going to wake up anytime soon, first base is a disaster, and though Robinson Cano and Melky Cabrera have hit well of late, we're still waiting to see some real consistency and power. It seems as if the whole is less than the sum of the parts.

I know I've gone on and on about the need for a strong first baseman for, oh, more than a year now, and no doubt you're as sick of reading it as I am writing about it. I still feel strongly, though, that as great as some of these hitters have been in the past, the Yankees won't score with any consistency until they add another solid hitter to the lineup. Right now, Rodriguez is the only Yankee who qualifies as a strong home run hitter.

When I've made this argument in the past, I get this knee-jerk response from some readers: "You don't need an all-star at every position." Granted. But if the All-Stars you do have don't produce like All-Stars, if they are All-Stars in name only, then the point no longer applies. If the Yankees can really hit .300, as they have this month, for the rest of the season, with the kind of pitching they've received recently, then they are going to win a ton of games. But .300 isn't exactly likely -- .285 or so is probably a more realistic estimate of the high side. That being the case, it would make a big difference if a greater percentage of those hits went over the wall.

THE FIFTH-MOST (I THINK -- I'VE LOST TRACK) ANNOYING EMAIL EVER

Goldman,
What do you know about the Romines? They ARE ballplayers! Do some research. -Stanton

That's a deep observation you've made there, Stanton. Yes, the Romines play baseball. Therefore, they are baseball players. Alex Rodriguez is a ballplayer too, and Miguel Cairo. Yet, you would no more say that Cairo is the equal of A-Rod than you would that I'm the equal of Shakespeare because we're both writers. Isn't that the essence of the human ability to think critically, that we can tell these things apart, and discern the good players from the bad? If we couldn't, if it wasn't fair to say these things, then we could never say that, say, Albert Pujols was a better baseball player than Coco Crips. It just wouldn't be proper.

I assume this vague email was provoked back on draft day when I wrote that I was relieved that the Yankees drafted catcher Austin Romine with their second-round pick rather than his older brother Andrew, a shortstop. Both are sons of Kevin Romine, a fourth-outfielder type who played 331 games for the Red Sox from 1985 to 1991. He batted .251/.306/.325, which is to say he too was a ballplayer, but not a particularly good one.

I meant no insult to the Romines' empire, and I wish both Austin and Andrew the best of luck and congratulate father Kevin on the success of his sons. That being said, my job here is to give the reader honest reactions to events, and if this brief email is meant to suggest displeasure because I said that Andrew was not a good prospect, and that by "ballplayer" you are arguing that I have undervalued their professionalism, drive, scrappiness, uniform-dirtying, gutty, spikes-high, aggressive, genitals-out, relentless drive to win, all I can say is that I'm sorry, but I have done some research, and what I can tell you is that when a team drafts a player who hasn't hit at a high level in college, then takes away his aluminum bat and makes him face professional pitching, what they inevitably wind up with is exactly what you would expect -- a player who can't hit. Gamer or not, good bloodlines or not, those guys go home without reaching Double-A.

For the Yankees to have drafted a gloveman with their second-round pick, when they need to stock up on young position players in the worst way, would have been unconscionable. The good news is, they didn't -- the report was in error. They still took a Romine, and the pick has been rated a good one, so I'm not sure what you're complaining about. One out of two ain't bad.

I figure that you're a relative, boyfriend, girlfriend, etc of the players in question? I've gotten those emails before, but usually the writer identifies him/herself as such. That's got to be the case, because it's hard to imagine that there are too many general fans who are counting the days until the Romine family gets its second generation of Major Leaguers.

Your questions, comments, suggestions welcomed at oldprofessor@wholesomereading.com.

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THURSDAY, June 21: Posted at 3:45 p.m. ET

HERE, THERE, AND EVERYWHERE
Your host appears in the New York Sun, writing about the Michael Barrett trade and the catching situation of the Yankees and Mets.

I get streamed live with host Picard (it's not as painful as it sounds) tonight at 8:25 on Team 990.

TODAY'S LINEUP
Andy Phillips watches from the bench. Cairo is back. Who cares what his career average against Rodrigo Lopez is? You're not going to get any consistency from any first baseman, be it Josh Phelps, Andy Phillips, Lou Gehrig, Tom Cruise, Chewbacca, Batman, if they're on the bench every other day.

Hideki Matsui's home run today broke a tie with the Braves for 12th place in team home runs. Miguel Cairo is at first. The Yankees aren't scoring. Just sayin'.

JOE GIRARDI SAYS, "NYET"
Smart man. There is no fixing that ballclub under present ownership. Andy MacPhail may have gotten a grant of autonomy, but those kinds of promises are easily broken. Even if MacPhail does succeed, and there are no guarantees, it's likely that the next manager won't be the guy in the big chair by the time the team gets good.

The odor of bad teams rubs off on good managers, tainting them forever. Very few get third chances-baseball doesn't have too many Jimmy Dykes-style caretakers these days. Baseball still thinks well of Girardi. He should hoard that goodwill. Other, more favorable jobs will open up soon.

SOSAPATHY
Perhaps it's because his name is so tied up with Mark McGwire's and the retroactively sullied Summer of '98 that I find it impossible to muster much excitement about Sammy Sosa's 600th home run. This has little to do with Sosa personally-while I am a wholehearted subscriber to that quaint old concept of American justice, innocent until proven guilty, and in addition am a skeptic about the efficacy of performance enhancing drugs in many respects (their utility is unproven, and will remain unproven), it's tough to escape the feeling that the home run records have been debased in some way. To further remove Sosa from even implied culpability in that, whatever happened to cause that, it wasn't just the chemicals-it was the ball, the shrinking strike zone, the denial to pitchers of the right to pitch inside, and every other change, obvious and not, that cumulatively changed the offensive environment after the labor mess of 1994-1995.

Runs are down a bit this season, as is the home run rate, and I'm finding the games a lot more enjoyable. Pitchers have half a chance. Shutouts (team, rather than individual-complete games are still dead) are up. It's a better, more compelling brand of baseball.

Sosa and his home runs are just a reminder of a less than ideal version of the game, one that led to nothing but trouble due to its misplaced emphasis on power. The only thing Wade Boggs was on was poultry.

The only thing to be said about Sosa himself is that he's not any good anymore. As with Craig Biggio, there's little joy in watching a player chase a career goal at half his old strength and dragging his team backwards at the same time.

BAD SHOW, MR. TORRE
The Yankees scored one run last night, so to some degree everything that happened with the pitching after the Matt Holliday home run is irrelevant, but Joe Torre did a miserable job of handling Andy Pettitte in the seventh inning. In the bottom of the seventh, the Yankees were trailing 2-1. Pettitte retired Brad Hawpe for the first out. Troy Tulotwitzki and Yorvit Torrealba hit back to back singles. With runners on first and second, Clint Hurdle pinch-hit Ryan "The Assimilator" Spilborghs. Pettitte gets the grounder he needs, but it's not hit hard enough to turn two. Runners on first and third, two outs, Willy Taveras up.

Though he hasn't thrown a lot of pitches, Pettitte hasn't exactly looked sharp through any of this. In most other games, Torre probably would have pulled him. It seems as if he was mesmerized by the fact that the pitcher's spot was leading off the next inning. If he replaced Pettitte with Luis Vizcaino, the man he had ready in the pen, his options were:

(1) Double-switch, which would mean replacing Andy Phillips with Miguel Cairo or Johnny Damon. The latter might have had a problem playing defense due to his abdominal strain, so let's assume it would have had to be Miguel Cairo leading off the eighth.

(2) Hope that Vizcaino retired his man and then pinch-hit for him, wasting a pitcher on one batter-something managers do all the time with the Mike Myers types of the world. Keep in mind that if you didn't have Mike Myers types you would have a lot more flexibility to do this kind of thing, but never you mind.

(3) Stick with a clearly fading Pettitte, then pinch-hit.

This third option made the least sense in terms of risk and reward-if Pettitte couldn't get out of the inning, Torre's hand would be forced anyway. He'd have to make a pitching change, triggering options one or two. The only difference is that the state of the game would be that much more desperate.

Pettitte stayed. He allowed an RBI single to Taveras. Torre checked his lineup card. Pettitte was still due to lead off the next inning. It hadn't changed. He couldn't pull Pettitte. Kaz Matsui came to the plate. The first of Pettitte's last two pitches was in the dirt. The next was high by a yard. No move-he was due to lead off, you see. The count was 3-2, and it wasn't hard that with one pitch too high and the other too low, the next would be just right. Matsui ripped it down the left field line for a two-run triple.

Torre went for Vizcaino, so the whole exercise was pointless. Vizcaino allowed an RBI single to Matt Holliday, because Holliday is good and Vizcaino isn't. The headline for this game at MLB.com is "Pettitte Unravels Late." That's not quite accurate. It should be, "Torre fails to rescue Pettitte."

Your questions, comments, suggestions welcomed at oldprofessor@wholesomereading.com.

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WEDNESDAY, June 20: Posted at 9:33 a.m. ET

WHAT CAN YOU SAY...
...About Tuesday's game, except that the Yankees were out-pitched by a fairly mediocre pitcher? The not particularly velveteen Josh Fogg (pardon your host a strained Mel Torme reference) is an average pitcher at best, but he has above-average control and the Yankees weren't in a mood to work the count.

It was a tough night to lose, because both the Red Sox and Tigers won, putting the Yankees another game back in both of their races. They also missed an opportunity to gain ground on the A's and Mariners teams, which also lost...

The Tigers are going to be a tough team to beat. With 431 runs through 70 games, they're on a pace for just under 1000 runs. Magglio Orgonez is batting .377 and is on a pace to erase the single-season record for doubles -- it's 67, still held by the titanic team of Earl Webb and Fenway Park after 75 years. Mags seems likely to be, at the very least, the unofficial first-half MVP.

Right now the Tigers have some real problems in the bullpen, but be it a Bagwell-for-Andersen deal ("Cameron Maybin for Eric Gagne?" he joked) or something more equitable, this is the kind of problem that can be addressed by the trading deadline. With Nate Robertson coming off of the disabled list soon and Andrew Miller settling in as a starter, they still have more than their share of strong starting pitching. Barring injuries, they're not going anywhere.

That's for the future. In the short term, there's still the Rockies to beat, and the Giants, and then the Orioles, the last of which may be run by Joe Girardi by the time the Yankees show up. The Giants have lost six straight games, the Orioles nine straight. No doubt by the time the Yankees get to them the law of averages will be ready to take a hand and supply them with some Ws.

Or maybe they'll just go on losing. It could be 1988 all over again for Baltimore. That's unlikely, but as a baseball fan (as distinct from a partisan fan of any one team, Yankees or other), you'd like to see it happen on the off chance that it might galvanize the Angelos family into selling or changing their ways. It's a better league when there's a good team to go with that beautiful ballpark.

No one would have predicted that the Nationals would have a better record than the Orioles at this point in the season. If Joe Girardi is smart, he'll stay away.

ARMAGEDDON REDUX
I've been reading Max Hasting's excellent Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-1945. It's a dour, serious book, and a welcome corrective to the Stephen Ambrose-style rah-rah histories of the period. I recently came across this passage (page 187 of the paperback, if anyone wants to check it out):

Yet the root cause of Eisenhower's chronic manpower difficulties was an earlier Washington policy decision. The U.S. had created a ground army far smaller than its population would have allowed because the War Department woefully underestimated the size of the force that would be needed to defeat Hitler... It remains astonishing that only eighty-nine U.S. Army divisions were deployed for active service... Yet, even among the five million men drafted to the U.S. Army, only two million served in combat roles, in the loosest interpretation of the phrase. Barely 300,000 men were available in north-west Europe even in 1945 to confront German fire, as members of rifle companies or armoured units... The campaign could have been won more quickly, and Allied forces might have advanced much further east, if Eisenhower had been given more soldiers, especially more infantrymen.

Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Sometimes I think the true lesson of human history is that no one ever learns anything, and we just act out the same stupid play over and over again, except with different sets and costumes.

CAN'T SLEEP LATELY, EXCEPT AT THE WRONG TIMES, BUT I'M STILL GOING PLACES
This weekend, I'm heading down to Washington DC for a special event at RFK on Saturday. Baseball Prospectus stars Will Carroll, Christina Kahrl, and I will be talking baseball with Nationals President Stan Kasten. After, the Nats have been kind enough to throw a ballgame for us to watch, and the Indians are going to show up to play against them. I understand tickets have been flying, but if you're in the area and have a hankering to talk baseball, please come on by. This here page has the necessary information. Information is always necessary.

Your questions, comments, suggestions welcomed at oldprofessor@wholesomereading.com.

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MONDAY, June 18: Posted at 8:45 p.m. ET

THE ONE BEFORE "MEAN MR. MUSTARD"
I write on Derek Jeter in the NY Sun. I say he's pretty good. Shocking, I know.

"HILLENBRANDED," STARRING CHUCK CONNORS
In Sunday's New York Post, George King and Mark Hale reported that the Yankees have talked to the Angels about Shea Hillenbrand, who may soon be traded or released. Hillenbrand is a miserable player having a miserable year, but the Yankees are playing Miguel Cairo at first base, so even a player as bad as Hillenbrand might qualify as an upgrade. Let's run through a few questions on the Hillenbrand matter:

Q: Miguel Cairo is hitting .250/.303/.300 overall, but .295/.319/.364 this month. Would Hillenbrand be more productive?
A: Coming into this season, Hillenbrand was a .287/.325/.449 hitter, so you would think so. That's still not great production for a first baseman/designated hitter, but it's better than what the Yankees are getting now.

Q: Yeah, but Hillenbrand hasn't hit like that lately, right?
A: Not for almost a year, no. He hit .248/.275/.415 for the Giants, which is nightmarishly bad, and he's hitting .246/.269/.324 this year, which explains why he's about to get dropped.

Q: But if he found himself, he'd be a better hitter than Cairo, right?
A:Probably, because Cairo is almost certain to slack off. Still, it is in the realm of possibility that Hillenbrand stays where he is and is actually comparable or worse than Cairo.

Q: What about defense?
A: Well, he wouldn't be better. He could be worse.

Q: So is this worth trying?
A: Sure, if it doesn't cost you anything. There's a good chance the Angels are going to dump Hillenbrand anyway. You wouldn't want to trade anything of value for him.

Q: Let me ask that again. Is this worth trying?
A: Let me ask a question back: If Hillenbrand starts his Yankees tenure by going 3-for-25, will Joe Torre keep waiting on him or pull the plug?

Q: Well, how quickly will Torre see Hillenbrand as a veteran worthy of his eternal protection?
A: More so than Cairo? Probably never.

Q: So if Hillenbrand is acquired and doesn't grab the job, the Yankees could bounce between him and Cairo and whoever for the rest of the year?
A: Yeah, and getting .250/.280/.350 production.

Q: How will that work?
A: Not great, but they've survived that kind of thing so far.

Q: How is Hillenbrand's clubhouse rep?
A: Let's not go there.

PERLOZZO-BE-GONE
I haven't much to say except that it was clear from the beginning that Sam Perlozzo was a poor choice for the Orioles. He had no strategic vision and no insight into commanding the respect and attention of the players. The Orioles are so badly mismanaged from the top that any manager they hire is going to have two very simple jobs: (1) Baby-sit. (2) Not throw away any of the few wins they were likely to get. It's clear that Perlozzo didn't do either one very well. His biggest contribution to the franchise was bringing in Leo Mazzone, and it's not clear that Mazzone will be keen on staying now that his best pal has been canned (or, more accurately, reassigned).

The Orioles are rumored to have interest in Joe Girardi. Major league managing jobs are hard to come by, and it's difficult to turn down an offer-maybe you'll get lucky and turn the situation around in spite of the lack of organizational support. Girardi almost did that in Florida, or at least seemed to get the ball rolling, but it's unlikely he could achieve the same thing in Baltimore. This is a team where the ownership lacks the insight or interest in making the hard decisions necessary to rebuild the team. It would rather just patch indefinitely, despite declining attendance and growing fan hostility.

Managing teams like the Orioles destroy managerial reputations; it's tough for a skipper not to become associated with the franchise's malaise. Right now, Girardi still has a successful glow about him from his year with the Marlins. He came into a difficult situation and handled things reasonably well. After a year or two with the Orioles, he'll be just another failure. John McGraw couldn't make this team a contender.

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