Photo of the Day: Catching the "New" New York Yankees

What could be more beautiful than a blue sky and a green field at the House That Ruth Built (or, to put it more accurately: The New House That the Steinbrenners Built)? This was the scene on Wednesday afternoon, when I snapped this picture as part of my company’s summer outing.

I was thrilled to spend the afternoon in a non-office environment where I could get to know my colleagues/friends a bit better. I just wish my New York Yankees had given me more opportunities to cheer—although I suspect that, for the next couple of years, that will be an off-and-on thing.

It was only my second time visiting Yankee Stadium since the new structure opened in 2009. This game was quite different from my last one nearly two years ago.

At that time, I went to an evening game in September; this time it was an afternoon game in August. Then, temperatures were comfortable, with the worst heat of summer safely past; this time, though not the remorseless, dangerous heat and humidity of this past Saturday, it was warm enough, with temperatures climbing into the high 80s. By the end of the second inning, feeling like a baked Irish potato, I moved closer to the refreshment stand, out of the sun. (Perhaps the most popular at the stand was bottled water, despite the fact that it was selling for a dollar outside the stadium--four dollars less, the outside vendors claimed, than its price inside.) Then, the team was playing the Chicago White Sox, a team on its way to a 73-89 record that the Yankees handled pretty easily; this time it was the Toronto Blue Jays, who,  only the night before, had come from a 6-0 deficit after a 40-minute rain delay to score 12 unanswered runs and win the game.

The biggest difference was on the field. September 2014 marked the last month before Derek Jeter retired, and every at-bat, every jog he made out to shortstop felt like a love feast between the fans and the legend. But, even though the rest of the “Core Four”—Jorge Posada, Andy Pettitte and Mariano Rivera—had already retired, there were plenty of other veterans in the Yankee clubhouse that night, including Mark Teixeira, Ichiro Suzuki, Carlos Beltran, and C.C. Sabathia. 

One veteran not on the field that day—or anywhere near the clubhouse—was Alex Rodriguez, MIA because of his season-long suspension for using performance-enhancing drugs. A-Rod was nowhere on the premises earlier this week, either, as his abysmal batting average and inability to play defense had rendered him a high-priced drag on the club—and, despite his astronomical salary, suddenly expendable.

A-Rod’s long-term decline paralleled the club’s over the last few years. In retrospect, it’s easy to see now that last year’s wild-card appearance was an aberration, with two veterans—A-Rod and Teixeira —enjoying comeback seasons. As their fortunes went south in the second half of the year (Tex’s, following a season-ending injury; A-Rod, through seeming exhaustion as soon as he hit 40), so did the team’s.

Then, this season, came the deluge, a reckoning—and the youth movement. And so, on Wednesday, A-Rod, Beltran, Ivan Nova, Andrew Miller, and Aroldis Chapman had departed; the oft-injured Tex, batting only .196 after Tuesday night’s game, was not at first with his superb glovework; and Brian McCann, with an anemic .231 batting average (more than 30 points below his career average), was not catching. Instead, longtime fans like me saw the likes of Tyler Austin at first, Aaron Judge in right field—and batting in A-Rod’s longtime cleanup spot, McCann’s heir apparent behind the plate, Gary Sanchez.

Right now, the New New York Yankees are in larval form. Sabathia, the principal remaining holdover of the old crew—including the 2009 World Series team—remained the same erratic, aggravating performer he’s been all year, as well as the last few.

He only gave up one walk, and his 12 strikeouts were the most he’s notched this whole season. But he also yielded the most runs he’s given up all year—seven—all that the Blue Jays needed for a 7-4 victory. No longer a power pitcher, he also hasn’t transitioned into quite the finesse pitcher that the Yankees had hoped.

He is also no longer good enough to overcome his defense’s mistakes—including the damage that Chase Headley inflicted at third base, first with an unsuccessful attempt to catch a lead runner at second, then with an errant throw to first base. That paved the way for Melvin Upton’s crushing three-run homer off Sabathia in the fifth.

Veterans such as Sabathia and Headley are no longer at a point when they can exceed or even meet already meager expectations. So now fans get to watch Enter the Youth Brigade. There’s a lot of upside to this latter game: young bodies less prone to injury, hungry spirits less liable to jadedness, more payroll flexibility due to low-cost contracts, the satisfaction that comes with not having to hear so much about buying a pennant.

But a world of uncertainty is involved in these youth movements, too. Bronx Bomber fans only have to look out to Queens, where the Mets—preseason division favorites because of the Young Guns on their pitching staff—have suffered from devastating injuries that have left them in a dogfight just for the second wild card spot.

Yankee fans with even average memories can recall their 2009 versions of today’s Mets: Phil Hughes, who was going to become the next Roger Clemens; Ian Kennedy, who would assume the mantle of Mike Mussina; and Joba Chamberlain, who, if he didn’t enter the starting rotation, would take over seamlessly from Mariano Rivera as the team’s closer. Subsequently, all three had their moments, but—now in their early 30s—they are journeymen rather than Bronx mainstays.

But hope is always born again, even in the middle of a season seemingly going nowhere, and rookies Judge and Sanchez provided it with two hits apiece. In particular, the torrid pace of Sanchez—five homers in 15 games—got sportswriters looking through archives to find another young Yankee who’d made a similar impact. The answer: Shelley Duncan in 2007 and Steve Whitaker in 1966. Neither went on to make a lasting imprint in pinstripes (or, for that matter, much elsewhere).

In other words: Stay hopeful, but just remember--sometimes, can’t-miss prospects really do miss.

The A-Rod-Yanks Summit: Translating the Communique

Did you catch that statement from the New York Yankees the other day about their sit-down with Alex Rodriguez? It sounded to me less like a PR statement and more like a State Department communique about a summit between, say, Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu—guys supposedly on the same side whose relationship has become visibly, seriously strained. A phrase in the paragraph from the Bombers even echoed diplomatic parlance for “we had an argument.”

Here’s the Yankees’ official description of what transpired: “Today we held a meeting at Yankee Stadium between Hal Steinbrenner, Randy Levine, Brian Cashman, Jean Afterman, Alex Rodriguez and Jim Sharp. Alex initiated the meeting and apologized to the organization for his actions over the past several years. There was an honest and frank discussion on all of the issues. As far as the Yankees are concerned, the next step is to play baseball in spring training."

Whew! More people than you can imagine find it harder to figure this out than, say, T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.”

In their accounts of issues that don’t really get settled, such statements often require translation—heck, full-scale unpacking—for the uninitiated. Think of the following, then, as a form of public service on my part. (Phrases and sentences in italics come from the Yankee statement reproduced in Andrew Marchand’s report of the meeting on ESPN.com. Everything else is my translation, free of charge.)

“Today we held a meeting at Yankee Stadium…” Translation: Notice that this was our time, our place. Not at some neutral site down in Florida between our spring-training camp in Tampa and Alex’s home in Miami. We wanted him to feel the chill in the air even before he stepped into our offices. No attempt to make him comfortable here.

“…between Hal Steinbrenner, Randy Levine, Brian Cashman, Jean Afterman, Alex Rodriguez and Jim Sharp.” Translation: Hank Steinbrenner wanted to sit in. All of us who saw The Godfather didn’t think this was a good idea. You see, he’s got this Sonny Corleone thing going—all impulsive and stuff. He still feels rooked that, when A-Rod was ready to leave the team after the 2007 season, Hank practically threw money at him—that contract with all the incentives for breaking the all-time home run records—without knowing that the guy was taking steroids. So now, Hank thought it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to leave a dead horse in the vacant chair where A-Rod’s supposed to sit! Lucky that Hal is more the Michael Corleone type, saying far more can be accomplished with long silences and cold stares.

Another person who wasn’t there was Joe Girardi. You know the ol’ good-cop, bad-cop routine? Well, Joe’s the good cop in all of this. 

Just about all of us are praying that A-Rod gets injured and retires in spring training, harder than some little kids at Christmas pray for their very own pony. But the chances in both cases are not great. If that’s the case, we need somebody who knows how to motivate, use and get everything out of A-Rod in a season when so many of our veterans are trying to come back from injuries. Despite the make-nice vibe the other day, the only one left in the organization that A-Rod might trust is Joe. As far as A-Rod is concerned, Joe is the only one around here in his corner. Let him go on dreaming.

As for Jim Sharp—well, that’s a great last name for a legal eagle, huh? A damn sight better than that ambulance chaser Joe Tacopina! Matt Lauer really got him good reading that letter on the Today Show from Major League Baseball waiving the confidentiality clause in the joint drug agreement, didn’t he?

"Alex initiated the meeting…” Translation: You think we called this pow-wow? We’re lucky we can stay in the same room with him without throwing up! No, A-Rod’s camp approached us last month about this. Nothing doing, we said then. Why hurry? He was ready to sue everyone here at the drop of a hat a year and a half ago. Now, he can sweat coming back. The list of those who hate his guts is a mile long.

“…and apologized to the organization for his actions over the past several years.” Translation: You should have seen the bum, biting his lips and getting all misty-eyed. Maybe he didn’t see all the eye-rolling going around the room.

We’d heard it all before in 2009, when he promised up and down that he was done with steroids. But as soon as we heard he was palling around again with “Cousin Yuri,” we knew he wasn’t around for the companionship.

Then he had the nerve to sue everyone and his brother when he got caught out with the ‘roids. The papers say all those futile lawsuits were the bad advice he got from Jay Z and his crew. Me, I think it was the influence of his girlfriend these last few years, Torrie Wilson.

I’ve never understood what women at a certain level see in him. His ex, Cynthia? Lovely lady. Psych major. He had already seen at least three therapists for his issues, but maybe he collects them for security, the way he collects lawyers, publicists and financial guys. Oh, and women—which is why his marriage broke up. (Madonna. You know, the Mayor of Cougartown, USA.)

Kate Hudson? I can’t remember him smiling so much as the year he dated her, after the collapse of his marriage. I’m convinced she helped him survive that first steroid scandal until he was able to have that monster postseason. But the season he got his World Series ring—the reason he came to the Yankees in the first place? After that, it was finis for her. If you want to know the truth, I think he was really cursed from then on.

Cameron Diaz? You can do a LOT worse than rebounding with a girlfriend like that. You hear a lot of stories on people in this business, but everyone who ever met her going to see A-Rod at his building always said you couldn’t find a sweeter person. (They didn’t mind looking at her either.) Of course she didn’t last.

You wanna know what I think of Torrie Wilson? I’m not even going to mention the fact that any woman who would date A-Rod for more than a few years, as she did before their breakup, needs to have her head examined.

No, what got me about her WWE “career” was the type of stuff she did to opponents: kneeing, eye-gouging, struttin’ around. Nothing is beneath you in professional wrestling. I think some of that attitude rubbed off on A-Rod when he decided to sue everyone around here.

Oh, and how could I forget about the acting they do in those matches? Or should I say, bad acting? Like the time he staged that walkout from his hearing with the arbitrator about the suspension because Bud Selig refused to testify, even though he and Tacopina knew all along it wasn’t going to happen? Maybe A-Rod thought this was his chance to transition into a new career: acting. But it wouldn’t be an Oscar he’d get for this, but a Razzie. You know, the award for horrible acting that Sylvester Stallone’s won, like, 10 times.

If he’s going to apologize to anyone, I think his teammates would be the best place to start. They stood behind him back in ’09. So what did he do to say thanks? He and his lawyers threw one of them, Francisco Cervelli, under the bus, by leaking his name in connection with the Biogenesis scandal in an attempt to throw the scent off himself.

Even in the best of times, it’s been one distraction after another, and we’re talking not just “over the last several years,” but since he came here in ’04. A damn good thing his suspension took place during the Derek Jeter goodbye tour; the story would not have been about the guy who played the game right, but the one who, we’re more and more sure of it, always played it wrong. (By the way, The Captain always had only one objective: Win. That’s why, even when he fell out with A-Rod, he never said a nasty thing to the press about him, publicly or privately.)

“There was an honest and frank discussion on all of the issues.” Translation:  We told him to keep dreaming about becoming the starting third-baseman again, barring an injury to Chase Headley (which would be a disaster all around). With all that rust from a full year away from the game, not to mention hip surgery, he'll be lucky to get his bat on the ball, never mind fielding "the hot corner."

We also let him have it with both barrels about his incentives contract. No way, we told him and Sharp, that we would pay another $6 million each time his career home run total passed Mays, Ruth, Aaron and Bonds. Another $30 million that we’d be on the hook for? Not going to happen!

A-Rod and Sharp just sat there and didn’t say anything. We’re under no illusions that they’re going to take this lying down. Maybe we will lose if they take us to court, but we figure we have at least an even chance. And before the case is decided, we’ll have a lot more opportunities to show what an out-and-out liar the guy is. So even if he wins, he loses.

“As far as the Yankees are concerned, the next step is to play baseball in spring training." Translation: They asked us for advice about how to deal with the media on this. Our first reaction was, hey, what are all your crisis managers there for? But as we thought about it a bit more, it occurred to us that we needed to get it over with ASAP. So now we want him to take care of it before the pitchers and catchers report to spring training. Yankee Stadium will do. Again, we'll be thrilled to have him come over on a cold day.

This is like a bad, bad marriage where the couple is only sticking together for the children, only in this case it’s worse: three years and $60 million. We can’t unload a 39-year-old guy with severe injuries, an extensive steroid history and a whole season of not having played.  We’d have to pay someone to take him off our hands. 

The only consolation in this whole thing is that other teams continue to make the same type of mistake we did with his contract in ’07. I’m not even thinking of Albert Pujols, though you can be sure that he’ll never again have with the Angels the kind of monster years he did with the Cardinals. No, look at Ryan Howard—just like A-Rod, three years and $60 million left to go along with a body that’s breaking down—or Giancarlo Stanton signing that 13-year, $325 million contract with the Marlins.

Nobody can convince me that stupidity isn’t contagious. Too bad you can't get rid of it with an antibiotic. That's why I think A-Rod comes down with it all the time!

Lucky for A-Rod that Hal and Hank's dad wasn't in charge anymore when he started pulling all these shenanigans. Ol' George called Dave Winfield "Mr. May" just for one really bad World Series, then sicced that lowlife Howie Spira on him when they got into a dispute over a foundation. Even with Jeter, for God's sake, The Boss wondered if he was spending too much time partying! What do you think he'd make of A-Rod? The Old Man would have thought that even "Mr. Spring Training" would have been too good to call him. "A-Fraud" or "Shame of the Yankees" might have been more appropriate, he'd say. And for once, nobody here would have had the slightest reason to disagree with him!

(The photo shows Alex Rodriguez at Ameriquest Field on May 22, 2004, toward the start of his usually tortured tenure with the Yankees.)

‘Bad Business’: A-Rod, Stranger to Truth

“As you can imagine, I’m feeling left out, I can’t be with the team at spring training and this leaves an empty hole in my life. And on top of that I’m dealing with the backlash of all these ugly rumors and false stories. […] Of course I am very concerned about these rumors and about what the team is doing and saying about me. … People have been telling me that you have an 8% bounty on my contract.[…] Maybe all of this is coming from my cousin […], who knows. He claims he met with the Yankees and that you are after me and it has me concerned. I hope this [e-mail] is the start of us clearing the air between us. I don’t want us to be enemies. I am loyal to the team. I only want the best for the Yankees organization. But I do need reassurance from you and I need to know what is going on. It is bad business for everyone.”—New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez, e-mail message of February 28, 2013 to team president Randy Levine, quoted in Steve Fishman, “The A-Rod E-Mails—The Slugger and the Suit: A Baseball BromanticTragedy,” New York Magazine, January 6-13, 2014

Ten years ago this winter, the New York Yankees, faced with a major decision about one of their heroes, reacted the way they usually do: unsentimentally, some would say even heartlessly. Aaron Boone—already known to hundreds of thousands of bitterly disappointed Red Sox fans as “F-----g  Boone” for his walkoff homer beating their team in the American league championship series—had phoned the Bronx Bomber brass with the news that he had wrecked his knee in a pickup basketball game.

Boone could have done what hundreds of pro athletes would have done in the age of the lucrative contract and lie. Instead, he admitted to doing something forbidden by his contract.

For their part, the Bronx Bombers could have waited a year for their recent hero to rehab the knee while they filled his hole in the lineup with temporary and/or low-priced talent. Nothing doing. The team reacted to the disclosure by their third baseman—already, in less than half a season, hugely liked by teammates—by voiding his contract, releasing him, and trading for the man many regarded as the best player in the game: Alex Rodriguez.

After all this time, can we really be sure that the Yankees aren’t sorry that they pulled the trigger on one of the true blockbuster trades in their history?  True, Boone was never again the player he was before his injury, and he was forced to retire five years ago following open heart surgery. But nobody could deny his heart on the diamond, nor his clubhouse chemistry.

The latter was precisely what was missing once A-Rod came aboard. For all his gaudy stats, he lifted the Bombers to only two pennants and one World Series win during his 10 years with the team. It hardly justifies his mammoth contracts. Worse, he became a flashpoint and symbol of futility in the Yankees' pennant races with the Boston Red Sox--contests that the Bombers increasingly came to lose (three World Series championships for the Bosox during that time, one for the Yankees).

Seattle Times columnist Les Carpenter displayed more foresight than he ever could have realized 10 years ago when, summing up Boone's departure and A-Rod's arrival at the Yankees, he wrote: "In this spring of Yankees chaos, Alex Rodriguez and steroid suspicion, the best story has been lost. Aaron Boone told the truth when it really would have paid to lie."

As it did for A-Rod--till now, when only his legal team is profiting.

As we witness the start of A-Rod’s season-long suspension from baseball—and, very likely, the end of his career—the e-mails between him and Randy Levine take on particular interest as points in the road in the estrangement between player and team. To be sure, Levine hardly comes off as a saint with his odd attempts at what he must have conceived as jock humor (e.g., wondering when Robinson Cano’s “steroids” would kick in), stroking the ego of his insecure slugger, and final descent into PR lingo, as relations between player and team grew tense. But he certainly appears in a better light than the Yankees’ decade-long albatross.

The above quote from A-Rod continues the same tone of wounded disbelief as his most recent statements to the press involving Bud Selig, the Yankees, arbitrator Fredric Horowitz, the players’ union—everyone but Barack Obama. He remains supremely oblivious to the thin legal ledge on which he finds himself—and, more important, to the realization that his own choices in life placed him there.

“Steinbrenner would roll in his grave if he knew what was happening!” A-Rod was complaining to Levine by last summer. Not so. If history is any guide, the late principal Yankee owner would have been at least engaging in a public spitting match with his cleanup hitter, and very likely doing everything up to (and, likely, beyond) the legal limit to abrogate their contract. (After all, The Boss paid lowlife Howie Spira $40,000 for any dirt he could dig up on Dave Winfield—whose only offense was not helping the Yanks win the World Series.)

About that “bad business” A-Rod bemoaned:  He is solely responsible for his troubles stemming from Biogenesis founder Anthony Bosch. If Rodriguez felt an “empty hole” in his life over not being able to attend spring training a year ago, imagine how he must feel now. A team trying to turn over a new leaf from a disastrous season would make him feel about as welcome as a skunk in a perfume factory.

The Yankees want the story of their spring training to be Jacoby Ellsbury and Brian McCann joining the team, and Derek Jeter coming back from his injury. They do not want it to be about the man who, according to Anti-Doping commission Doping Agency CEO Travis Tygart, had taken “the most potent and sophisticated drug program developed for an athlete that we've ever seen”—even exceeding that of Lance Armstrong.

A-Rod’s legal team is correct: ‘Roid-runner Bosch is hardly a model citizen. All the more reason, then, to wonder why Rodriguez, already outed as a juicer in 2009, would pursue a business relationship with a man who could only remind people of A-Rod’s greatest disgrace.

In addition to Bosch, there was A-Rod’s “cousin” Yuri Sucart, who, he admitted upon being exposed as a juicer five years ago, had procured PEDs for him; Canadian HGH advocate Anthony Galea, about whom A-Rod testified to a grand jury a year or two ago; Angel Presinal, a banned baseball trainer; and, perhaps most sinister, Jorge “Oggi” Velazquez, a former liquor store owner and  proprietor of a now-defunct anti-aging clinic, a guy with a 20-year rap sheet for grand theft, drug offenses,  burglary, and, most recently, domestic violence. “Oggi” is the kind of character that major-league baseball has feared since the “Black Sox” scandal of 1919, a criminal with the potential to affect the outcome of games—and, investigators believe in this instance, the transmitter of threats to Bosch if he didn’t help cover up A-Rod’s use of PEDs.

Say goodbye, then, to “A-fraud”—the teammate the Yankees strongly (and probably correctly) suspected of using performance-enhancing drugs as far back as 2005…the teammate they still turned out to support at a 2009 press conference where he owned up to steroid use with the Texas Rangers...a teammate who spoke so often of his "band of brothers" in the locker room, yet so anxious to avoid detection again last year that he threw fellow Yankee Francisco Cervelli under the bus to investigators, in a desperate attempt to deflect attention from himself.

Say goodbye to pointless friction with the clubhouse and front office—with managers Joe Torre and Joe Girardi walking on eggshells about dropping him in the batting order in the playoffs, despite unbelievable futility at the plate; with Levine telling him he needed to “put up or shut up”; with general manager Brian Cashman, in the only instance of this that I can recall in his years with the team, calling a player (A-Rod) a liar.

Say goodbye to a man addicted to the spotlight and its perks (enumerated by then-agent Scott Boras in A-Rod's first go at free agency, in 2000)-- a private office at Shea Stadium, his own marketing staff, his own merchandise tent at spring training, a luxury box, the use of a private jet, and billboards galore—amenities that former Mets GM Steve Phillips rightly said would lead to a roster of “24-plus-1.”

Say goodbye to a world-class narcissist: a guy stupid enough to have a list made about his “13 Most Hilariously Embarrassing Moments” on the blog Total Pro Sports that many will find woefully incomplete; a guy photographed kissing himself in the mirror for a Details Magazine photoshoot, having agent Scott Boras announce that he was opting out of his first Yankee contract in the middle of the Red Sox' clinching game in the 2007 World Series, and flirting with swimsuit models during a Yankee playoff loss.

Say goodbye to someone who, by all accounts, was hopelessly messed up by his father’s abandonment of his family, yet managed to do the same thing when his wife divorced him because of one extramarital affair after another (including with that long-in-the-tooth cougar, Madonna).

Say goodbye to an entire lingo associated with A-Rod and PEDs: testosterone creams and lozenges, pregnenolone, clomiphene, “gummies,” "boli," “cohete” (Spanish for “rocket”), HGH, IGF DHEA, and GHRP 2/6.

Say goodbye to pitiful postseason performances (really, only two series over 10 years when he made a difference—both against the Minnesota Twins), despite the sophisticated PED regimen discussed above.

Say goodbye to warnings and sitdowns in Bud Selig’s office with the slugger—about his penchant for high-stakes gambling, about trips to Canada to visit Galea, about his involvement with Bosch.

Say goodbye to a player who, after admitting to using PEDs while with the Texas Rangers and banned because of overwhelming evidence of having done so from 2010 through 2012, can no longer credibly argue against the rumor reported by Selena Roberts that he has been using PEDs since high school.

Say goodbye, then, to the man who succeeded the honorable Aaron Boone at third base for the Yankees: someone who’ll never fulfill his ambition to hit 800 career home runs, but who runs a fair chance of being baseball’s all-time liar and cheat.

(The photo shows Alex Rodriguez on at Ameriquest Field on May 22, 2004, toward the start of his usually tortured tenure with the Yankees.)