New York Yankees Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

Current KC Chiefs; 1950s NY Yankees

Go, Buffalo Bills!

Growing up, I was a New York Yankees baseball fan because we had a farm team in Binghamton, NY, a Yankees affiliate, the Triplets. But I knew many people around the country hated the Bronx Bombers because they were too successful. They won the World Series every year from 1936 to 1939, again from 1949 to 1953, and were in the mix most years between 1955 and 1964.

Moreover, they received disproportionate press coverage, even though two other teams, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants, were located within the City limits for most of that period. Mickey Mantle was a bigger star than he would have been in Cleveland. Joe DiMaggio married Marilyn Monroe!

I spent much of last weekend watching four football games. As is usually the case, I did not watch them in real-time but recorded them and watched them later. It’s been clear that I’ve been rooting this season for the Detroit Lions and the Buffalo Bills. The Lions lost, alas, but the Bills won.

I’m pulling for the Bills, the only team that plays its home games in New York State. Moreover, I want them to get the monkey off their back as the only team to lose four consecutive Super Bowls (Jan 1991-Jan 1994).

No threepeat!

But I realized only recently that I’m also actively rooting against the Kansas City Chiefs, and I’m not the only one. They’ve won three Super Bowls in five seasons and are going for a threepeat this year. There are many articles about how they were the worst team in the league this season with a winning record. And some complain that the officiating favors Kansas City.

Maybe I’m tired of all the State Farm ads with quarterback Patrick Mahomes and coach Andy Reid or the ubiquitous presence of tight end Travis Kelce and his recently NFL-retired brother Jason.

I have no strong rooting interests between the Washington Commanders and the Philadelphia Eagles. They’re both in the NFC East, where I root for the Giants when they have a decent team. They aren’t the Dallas Cowboys, who I’ve despised for decades.

If the Bills win tomorrow, I’ll continue to support them in the Super Bowl. If the Bills lose, I’ll be cheering for the NFC team.

Don’t bet on it, at least online

But I won’t be wagering on any of it. Zvi Mowshowitz had previously been heavily [and successfully] involved in sports betting.” As he notes, The Online Sports Gambling Experiment Has Failed.

“When sports gambling was legalized in America, I was hopeful it too could prove a net positive force, far superior to the previous obnoxious wave of daily fantasy sports.

“It brings me no pleasure to conclude that this was not the case. The results are in. Legalized mobile gambling on sports, let alone casino games, has proven to be a huge mistake. The societal impacts are far worse than I expected.”

He links to others who are likewise loathe to tell others what they cannot do but make the same argument.

“You should need to go to a physical location to place fully legal bets of a non-trivial size, or at least interact with a human or bear some other cost or risk.”

Movie review: It Ain’t Over

New York Yankees

I am recommending to you the documentary movie It Ain’t Over. It’s about the baseball catcher Lawrence Peter Berra, commonly known as Yogi Berra (May 12, 1925 – September 22, 2015). Interesting, it was my wife, not really a baseball fan who recommended us seeing it after viewing the trailer.

Early in the film, we see the announcement at the 2015 All-Star Game of the four “greatest living ballplayers”: Hank Aaron, Johnny Bench, Sandy Koufax, and Willie Mays. Watching it, Yogi’s granddaughter Lindsay asked Yogi if he were still alive. Yogi affirmed that he was.

The narrative was about a player who didn’t really “look” like a model athlete. He was short (5’7″) and stocky (185 lbs) and not at all conventionally good-looking. Some said, after he reached the majors, that he didn’t “look like a Yankee,” whatever that meant.

But he could hit. And after some intense tutoring, he became a good catcher. Most of all, he could win, ten World Series rings, more than Aaron, Bench, Koufax, and Mays combined.

As he was treated as a bit of the buffoon, he leaned into the image. It helped that he had those Yogisms. “If you don’t know where you’re going, you might end up some place else.” It was only upon reflection that his sayings contained real truth. Also, he became an endearing pitchman for a variety of products.

Unfair

Still, he took baseball seriously. I remember well that after he managed the Yankees to the 1964 American League pennant before losing to the St. Louis Cardinals in seven games, he was fired, and replaced by the Cards manager, Johnny Keane. I was 11, but I was outraged by this ill treatment. So I was happy when he won the National League pennant as manager of the crosstown Mets in 1973.

His firing by George Steinbrenner, only 16 games into his second of a two-year contract with the Yankees in 1985, and the fact that George sent an underling to do it kept Yogi out of his beloved Yankee Stadium for 14 years. When he came back, even though I KNEW what happened, it left tears in my eyes and my wife’s as well.

There were many great quotes by Yankee players from Al Downing to Mariano Rivera, big Yankee fan and friend Billy Crystal, sportswriter Roger Angell, broadcaster Bob Costas, the late baseball announcer Vin Scully, and Yogi’s neighbor growing up in the Italian section of St. Louis, the late Joe Garagiola.

But Yogi was much more than a beloved ballplayer. He was an unrecognized war hero. His loving marriage to Carmen Short lasted from 1949 until her death in 2014. They had three sons, including Dale, a Major Leaguer himself, and 11 grandchildren.

He became the inspiration for the Hanna-Barbera cartoon Yogi Bear. Indeed, when Berra died, the AP accidentally reported the death of the animated ursine.

We saw the very positively reviewed It Ain’t Over at the Spectrum Theatre, on a Wednesday night in mid-June.

Buying the next World Series?

Bad for baseball?

Another question from Kelly:

As I write this, the owner of the New York Mets has spent WILDLY in an attempt to pretty much buy [the] next World Series. Just ONE contract he handed out this year is larger than the entire payroll of the Pittsburgh Pirates–cumulatively, since 2010. Is this bad for baseball? How does baseball fix this, if it even wants to?

First, I know that you know you can’t guarantee a World Series. You can secure the best players based on previous performance, but the players could get injured. Indeed, the Mets were getting balky about Carlos Correa’s ankle, the same issue that kept the San Francisco Giants from signing him, and as you know, he ended up back in Minnesota.

Players also have off-years. Rookies on other teams in their division could be outstanding.

Still, your broader point is well-taken. The Pirates, since 2010, had a few decent years (2013-2015) but lost 101 and 100 games the past two seasons. This is a terrible outcome for a team who played in the first World Series in 1903 and existed for two decades before that.

Is this bad for baseball? I think so. No matter how much Major League Baseball rejiggers (dilutes) the playoffs, those teams with nothing to play for by Labor Day depress the whole MLB product.

One fix would be shared revenue of television revenues. This won’t happen because those large-market teams, such as the Mets, are advantaged by the imbalance.

An easier fix, at least logistically, would be a hard salary cap. That means a team can’t just pay a “luxury tax” and spend to their heart’s content. In the NFL, the salary cap is tied to league revenues; if the league does well, everyone benefits.

Minor leagues

MLB had ticked me off recently when they gutted their minor league affiliations. This Mother Jones article at the end of 2020 describes it well. The minor leagues are inefficient. “There were more effective ways to, say, add velocity to a teenager’s fastball or improve a hitter’s launch angle than playing games—this kind of work could be done at closed-door facilities and any time of year.”

But I’d argue it’s the thing that makes people develop an affinity for the major league team that farm system teams develop. I grew up watching the Triplets in the Triple Cities of upstate New York in the 1960s. Later, Al Downing played for the New York Yankees.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Albany-Colonie Yankees had players such as Andy Pettite, Jorge Posada, and future Hall of Famers Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera.

From MJ:

“It should go without saying that one of the teams driving this movement—though by no means the only one—was the Houston Astros:

[T]he Houston Astros, a model of modern player development, bucked that trend a few years ago. After the 2017 season, they reduced their affiliate count from nine to seven clubs. The Astros believed they could become a more efficient producer of talent with fewer farm clubs.

One of those teams that lost its affiliation with the Astros was the Tri-City Valley Cats, who play in the Albany-Schenectady-Troy metro. The Astros won the 2017 World Series with five former Valley Cats, which I wrote about here; we won’t get into the subsequent signal-stealing scandal.

Compare and contrast

It occurred to me that the drafts of college football players to the NFL and college basketball players to the NBA can create players with instant impact on a team at the pro level. College baseball, not really.

That player coming up from the minors to play in The Show is exciting for fans who saw them when. I think MLB should spend MORE money on Minor League Baseball, not less. But I don’t see MLB going in this direction.

One last question from Kelly:

And finally, something mundane: Do you have bird feeders? If so, how many and what kinds?

Sort of. My daughter made one from a plastic, half-gallon milk carton. She made the openings and painted the rest. It was hanging in a tree for a time, but it came down. We need to reconnect it and put the feed in again.

Baseball player Dave Winfield is 70

dead bird

I always liked the outfielder Dave Winfield. He played for the San Diego Padres as the right fielder from 1973 to 1980, becoming an All-Star in the middle years there.

In 1981, he became a free agent. The sometimes volatile owner of the New York Yankees, George Steinbrenner signed Winfield to the most lucrative baseball contract at the time. But The Boss didn’t understand a cost-of-living provision and ended up agreeing to a ten-year, $23 million deal, rather than ONLY $16 million. This led to Steinbrenner’s feuding.

In 1985, Steinbrenner, in criticizing Winfield, said to The New York Times writer Murray Chass, “Where is Reggie Jackson? We need a Mr. October or a Mr. September. Winfield is Mr. May.” A few years later, the owner was banned from baseball for two years, in part for hiring a guy with Mafia ties to dig up dirt on Winfield.

This was weird: “On August 4, 1983, Winfield killed a seagull by throwing a ball while warming up before the fifth inning of a game at Toronto’s Exhibition Stadium. Fans responded by hurling obscenities and improvised missiles. After the game, he was brought to a nearby Toronto Police Service station and charged with cruelty to animals. He was released after posting a $500 bond… Charges were dropped the following day.”

Away from the Bronx Zoo

Dave Winfield was traded in 1990, and he was wearing a California Angels uniform the one time I saw him play in person, June 14, 1991. He went 3 for 4. Ten days later, he became the oldest player to hit for the cycle (single, double, triple, home run).

Finally, in 1992, with the Toronto Blue Jays, he got his first World Series ring. He retired in 1995, having accumulated 3110 hits, including 465 home runs, in his 22-year career. He was selected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2001, his first year of eligibility. Here’s his induction speech.

He could do it all. Here’s why he wants kids to play multiple sports, as he did growing up. Dave Winfield – Field dedication ceremony, 2021.

Book review: Steinbrenner – The Last Lion of Baseball

In 1990, baseball commissioner Fay Vincent booted Steinbrenner out of baseball for two years.

There was a recent Daily Double on the game show JEOPARDY, in the category PARDONER: Ronald Reagan pardoned this owner for illegal campaign contributions in 1989–the Gipper a Yankees fan?

The contestant guessed George Steinbrenner and was, of course, correct. What other owner of that American League franchise could many people name? And which other owner would be in need of Presidential absolution?

Steinbrenner – The Last Lion of Baseball was written by Bill Madden, a well-regarded writer who had a “mostly pleasant working relationship with George in his “capacity as a baseball writer” for UPI and then the New York Daily News. But Madden was furious when he had been fed some bogus story by Steinbrenner about how Lou Pinella, a manager George fired, was trying to steal the furniture.

Steinbrenner was always firing managers, publicity directors, and general managers, who presumably run the day-to-day operations of a team. But it was difficult for all of them because he was a hands-on owner, luring or aggravating the players.

George grew up in Ohio and made his wealth first by reviving the family-owned Kinsman Marine Transit Company, then purchasing it from his family. He later was a co-owner of the American Shipbuilding Company, and, in 1967, he became its chairman and chief executive officer. By 1972, the company’s gross sales were more than $100 million annually.

CBS bought the New York Yankees in 1965, but it was not a good fit. Early in 1973, Steinbrenner, who had tried and failed to buy the Cleveland Indians in 1971, led a group of investors in purchasing the Yankees for $10 million. However, part of the price was two parking garages that CBS bought back the garages for $1.2 million, so the net cost was $8.8 million.

One of my friends recently told me that, though he grew up as a Yankees fan, he changed allegiances, and it was entirely because of the massive amounts Steinbrenner spent in trying to buy championships. I get that. During his 37-year ownership from 1973 to his death in July 2010, the Yankees did earn seven World Series titles and 11 American League pennants.

Madden’s book was exceedingly thorough and obviously well researched. I was feeling a bit exhausted, though, about three-quarters of the way through the 430-page book. Oh, yeah, ANOTHER manager fired – he hired and fired former Yankee infielder Billy Martin FIVE times as manager!

Or dissing one of his players; in 1990, baseball commissioner Fay Vincent booted Steinbrenner out of baseball “for having paid a two-bit gambler to dig up dirt on the Dave Winfield Foundation.” George once dubbed Winfield Mr. May for a poor post-season.

In many ways, George Steinbrenner was a loud, pompous, opinionated, stubborn rich fellow who reminded me of a current part-time DC resident. At least George could play the stadium organ. Oh, yeah, Reagan pardoned Steinbrenner for his really minor financial role in the Watergate scandal.