You may have heard that Sony Pictures “dropped the ball” or “struck out” (depending on which baseball cliché jumped into a writer’s head) on a film version of Michael Lewis’ best-seller, Moneyball. The film was set to star Brad Pitt with Steven Soderbergh directing. 

The reasons behind Sony’s decision appear to be sound. According to Michael Cieply in The New York Times, Sony has already paid $10 million in script developments and costs like scouting locations. With an estimated $57 million budget, Moneyball, reports Cieply, “was not hugely expensive but not a small indie project, either.  The film was of a sophisticated type that needed the cachet of a Soderbergh, the star power of a Pitt, and perhaps Academy Award potential to overcome its somewhat cerebral quality and the difficult of attracting foreign viewers for a movie about America’s pastime.”

Nonetheless, I’m left with several unanswered questions about this debacle. First, what do they mean “costs like scouting locations”?  The book is the story of how Oakland A’s GM Billy Beane managed to compete in the American League on a small budget through adroit use of baseball statistics when recruiting players rather than just relying on scouting reports. Nothing particularly complex, just more attention to on-base percentage and slugging percentage, indicators like that, which baseball analysts have been emphasizing for about a quarter of a century. The story takes place in Oakland. Why does the location have to be scouted and why would it cost millions?  Can’t they give someone gas money to drive up the Pacific Coast Highway to Oakland to look around? (It isn’t like they’d have to build a new ballpark for the movie.)

And did it cost millions for someone to figure out that there are absolutely no dramatic (or even comedic) events in the book to build a story around? 

Second, what exactly is Steven Soderbergh’s “cachet”?  The man has made three profitable movies this decade—all of them “Ocean’s” flicks with a combined star power of Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Matt Damon. The rest of his films since 2001 have sunk so deep and so fast that most filmgoers never knew they were in the theaters.  Let’s review:  the twin bombs of Che Parts One and Two last year, The Good German in 2006 (which vanished quickly despite a cast that included George Clooney, Cate Blanchett and Tobey Maguire), Bubble (2005), Solaris (2002, also with Clooney), and Full Frontal (2002).  If that list confers cachet, Nia Vardalos is the queen of Greece.

Point three:  As regards the overseas potential for Moneyball, did they really need to spend $10 million and budget another $57 million before a light went on in someone’s head that said, “No one in Belgium or Kenya knows who Eric Chavez is”?  (But people in Japan, Taiwan, the Caribbean and even Australia do—isn’t there a potential box office in those countries if the movie is good?)

Fourth, forget about foreign rights—who in this country is going to shell out 10 bucks to see a movie based on a guy’s study of baseball stats? If that’s what the public wanted, Pitt would have already starred in the life story of Bill James.

According to Cieply, the swift mothballing of Moneyball “may also increase doubts that Hollywood can still deliver tricky but appealing pictures like Michael Clayton, Good Night, and Good Luck and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.”

This is nutty.

Benjamin Button wasn’t a small, tight production like Clayton or Good Night. It was a big-star vehicle of the kind Hollywood specializes in. In any case, what do these three films have to do with the cancellation of Moneyball, since all three were successful? Moneyball wasn’t dumped because it was like those three pictures, but very much unlike them. Everyone in Hollywood knows that producers love to green-light projects that look like previous successes.

Am I the only one who thinks there is something ironic in the flame-out of a film whose budget, including preproduction, could have cost $20-$25 million more than the payroll for the entire Oakland A’s team this year?  Moneyball might not have been regarded as “hugely expensive,” but it’s hard to understand how Pitt and Soderbergh, who are presumably fans of the book, could have missed its central message: Money doesn’t buy quality. 

Let’s give the punch line, though, to script doctor Christopher Wilkinson, who seems to know less about movies than he does about baseball.  “There’s a movie in there,” he said. “But it’s a very unusual movie.” Translated from Hollywoodese to English, this means, “I may get stuck working with some of these people somewhere along the road and I don’t want to offend anyone by saying this was a dumb idea.”

My own guess is that when and if Moneyball makes it to the screen it will be a small one, a cable TV project starring someone like Jeremy Piven in the Billy Beane role. And maybe Robert Wuhl as a colorful and eccentric old-style baseball manager.

For an adaptation of a book on how a successful baseball team can run on the cheap, cable TV is where everyone should have been looking in the first place. A feature film is the kind of idea the Steinbrenner boys might have gone for.

UPDATE: Cieply reports that Sony "has quietly moved to salvage its troubled movie project 'Moneyball' by hiring the high-profile screenwriter Aaron Sorkin for a quick rewrite, while looking to add Scott Rudin, known for his turns on the Oscar circuit, to the film’s roster of producers."

As I write this, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell hasn’t announced his decision on Plaxico Burress’s suspension.  Let’s hope Goodell shows the kind of common sense that most football writers have not and chooses to be lenient. The penalty should be reasonable—does four games sound about right?   It should, considering Burress was already docked the last four games of the 2008 season by the Giants.

It’s time everyone remembered that the only person Plaxico shot was himself and that the results of his stupidity should count as part of his punishment. It’s true that Burress has had a history of scrapes with his coach and sparring sessions with his spouse, but before shooting himself, his behavior was, at least by the standards of professional wideouts, no worse than, say, the average reality TV star.

On the field, his performance has been consistently above that of the average wideout.  In nine NFL seasons he has scored 55 touchdowns, and his 15.5 yards-per-catch is just a fraction below that of Randy Moss. And he has something which Moss does not, a Super Bowl Ring. Burress is only 31—is it possible that no NFL team will give the man who scored the winning touchdown in the 2008 Super Bowl another chance? 

Michael Vick will be released from federal custody on July 20. That is, he’ll be free to leave his home in Virginia and try out for any NFL team that will have him.  A great many people—for instance, Dan Shannon, assistant director for PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals)—think that he hasn’t been punished enough.  Shannon wants Vick put through a rigorous psychological examination to determine whether “This guy really thinks what he did is wrong.”

As much as I dislike Vick, I dislike Dan Shannon even more: It’s not enough when someone pays the prescribed penalty for wrongdoing, they must also be right in their hearts, as defined by people like Dan Shannon, before they are forgiven. Michael Vick, the Dan Shannons of the world feel, should not be allowed to work at his chosen profession until he convinces them that he’s really, really sorry.  I don’t think Vick is really, really sorry for what he did or ever will be, or at least no statement he’s made in public has convinced me that he is.  And ugly as that thought is, I don’t see why he shouldn’t be allowed to go back to work in the NFL. 

Let me be clear.  I love dogs and I don’t like Michael Vick, but I’m in full agreement with former New York Giant Harry Carson, who told The Sporting News, “Michael Vick was charged, he was tried, he was convicted, he paid the price.  I don’t see any reason why he should not be able to come back and play.” That’s spot-on analysis, and absolutely correct.  Vick has paid his debt, and that should be the only consideration regarding his pursuit of a living.

Whether or not any NFL team should want to hire Vick based on his record as an NFL quarterback is another matter, one that goes curiously undiscussed in the football press. No one has ever argued that Vick isn’t one of the most talented athletes of his time, but he’s never been a very good professional quarterback. College, yes—he could simply  outrun most of the linebackers he played against at Virginia Tech, and his receivers were fast enough to get downfield and make sure that he seldom had to throw into double coverage. In the NFL, you can’t outrun linebackers, not for long anyway, and your receivers can’t consistently outrun defensive backs. If you don’t learn to read defenses, you’re doomed, and Vick has never learned to read defenses. 

Vick has always gotten a free pass when it came to analysis of his effectiveness on a football field.  His won-lost record with the Atlanta Falcons was an uninspiring 38-28-1, and his career NFL passer rating is a less-than-mediocre 75.7, which would put him 27th among active NFL quarterbacks, if he should get hired and become active again.

He was a sloppy, careless quarterback who seldom audibled because he never caught on to adjustments that defenses were making at the line of scrimmage. His ball handling was terrible, and his fakes were so unconvincing they wouldn’t have fooled a New York Times film critic.  He never saw a crowd he didn’t like throwing a football into. 

I’ll bet the Atlanta Falcons, who went 11-5 last year with the undistinguished Matt Ryan at quarterback—but whose QB rating of 85.7 is ten points higher than Vick’s—would be less than thrilled to see Vick’s punch buggy pulling up to their training camp. 

A suggestion, though, for anyone who does decide to give Vick a tryout:  Think about using him as a running back.  For his career he has averaged just 6.7 yards per throw, well below the average for a winning NFL passer, but as a runner he has averaged a whopping 7.3 yards per try, and half of that is acceptable for a pro running back. He’d sure be hell on the run-pass option.

Here’s another suggestion for any NFL team that looks at Vick:  Think about biting the bullet and giving him a dangerous receiver to throw to. Plaxico Burress will be available. 

Memo to Major League Baseball: Next season, if you want to put the Yankees-Mets series center stage, don’t schedule the games immediately after the Yankees play the Red Sox and the Mets play the Phillies. No Yankees-Mets series could ever be meaningless, but the one that starts tonight comes as close to feeling anticlimactic as any series played in mid-June.

The Mets are in worse shape than the Yankees, but ought to feel better about themselves, having won at least one game against their main rivals even with a depleted lineup. At 31-27, they’re four games behind the Phillies, but many of those games have been played without their best (or at least most exciting) player, Jose Reyes, who has appeared in just 36 games, and without Carlos Delgado, who’s played in just 26. (Yesterday’s injury report says he’s “riding an exercise bike but won’t be swinging a bat for at least another three weeks.”)  Without these two in the batting order, the Mets aren’t exactly punchless, but they’re wearing 12-ounce gloves.

A little more than a third of the season may not be adequate for a precise sampling, but Citi Field might have completely done a jiu-jitsu on traditional analysis of the Mets. 

When they played their home games in Shea, they were performing in one of the two best pitchers’ parks in MLB (the other being Dodger Stadium). The Mets sometimes had one of the best hitting teams in the league, but you didn’t know it until you looked at their road numbers. Now, all that has turned around. At Citi Field, where they’re 18-11, they’ve hit .285 with 21 home runs for a slugging average of .428.  In all other National League parks, they’re only 13-16 with 16 home runs. a .272 BA. and a .390 SA. Their power numbers aren’t great at home, but they’re positively anemic on the road, and the road numbers are usually the best gauge of a team’s hitting ability.

The bad news for Mets fans is that the team has just two power sources, though they are outstanding. Carlos Beltran is hitting .341 with eight home runs and a .561 slugging percentage, and David Wright goes into the Yankees series at .362 with four home runs and .528 slugging.  In truth, Wright has been a puzzle: He may wind up with the highest single-season batting average in team history, but his four home runs are about half of what he should have hit at this point.

And here’s the real bad news: All Mets not named Wright or Beltran are batting just .259 with 25 home runs.

The Yankees, too, have a batting order that appears more potent than it is because of their new home park. Though their batting average is actually slightly better on the road (.279 to .270 at the new park), their power is much greater at home (57-38 and a slugging average of .497 at home, to .460 away).  The Yankee hitters are well suited to this ballpark, and it shows:  they’re 18-11 at home, just like the Mets at Citifield, and a mediocre 16-15 in other AL ballparks.

So, designated hitter or not, the Yankees are a much better hitting team than the Mets, even though the Mets are out-hitting them by three points, .278 to .275.  The difference is power. Speed, too:  The Yanks have stolen 42 bases in 51 tries for an excellent success rate of 82.4 percent while the Mets are 60-19—but without Reyes, who has stolen 11 of 13 so far, they are 49-17, for 74.2 precent.

But the real difference between the Mets and the Yankees isn’t power; it’s that the  Mets have aces in both the starting rotation and the bullpen and the Yankees don’t. It would be hard to overestimate Johan Santana’s value to the Mets.  Take away his 8-3 record and the rest of the staff is 23-24.  If you take him out of the rotation and replace him with the average NL starter, the Mets would be out of the pennant race.  Johan’s 79 innings pitched are 15.2 percent of the entire staff’s total, and his 91 strikeouts represent 23 percent.

With J. J. Putz now on the DL, Francisco Rodriguez has all 16 saves chalked up by the bullpen that will be facing the Yankees this weekend.  It’s a sobering thought that both Santana and Rodriguez were free-agent acquisitions. Within their own organization, the Mets have been virtually unable to produce a single first-rate pitcher, either starter or reliever.

How good are Santana and K-Rod?  With them, the Mets go into tonight’s game with the seventh best overall ERA in MLB.  Without them, they’d probably be as bad as the Yankees. 

During the offseason, the Yankees spent the GNP of a Central American nation to improve their pitching staff, and as they go into the first Subway Series, it’s substantially worse than it was last year.

The Yanks are 27th in the major leagues in ERA at 4.85 (they finished 2008 at 4.28). Much has been made of a couple of disastrous relief efforts from Mariano Rivera. What’s been overlooked is that even if Mo had been at the top of his form, the Yanks would have a lousy bullpen. After 58 games, the relievers have an ERA of 4.69, 25th overall and well behind the Red Sox (first at 2.88), the Mets (second at 2.98), the Tampa Bay Bucs (10th, 3.84), the Kansas City Royals (21st at 4.44) and even the Baltimore Orioles (24th, 4.67).  The bullpen has been the plague of the Yankees in this decade; the inability of the Steinbrenners’ farm system  to produce even a couple of competent relievers is essentially what cost Joe Torre his job, and it will probably be what costs Joe Girardi his.

As for the starters, no matter how you look at it, C. C. Sabathia has been a disappointment, just 5-4 so far with an ERA of 3.68 and only 67 strikeouts in 93 innings. You assume he’ll do better as the season goes on, but A. J. Burnett (4-3 with an ERA of 4.89) probably will not. If he pitches well tonight, Joba Chamberlain (3-1 with 55 strikeouts in 59.1 innings) could emerge as the ace of the staff.  With Chien-Ming Wang bafflingly ineffective, Andy Pettitte just a shade below mediocre (despite his 6-2 W-L record, he’s given up 82 hits in 74.2 innings), and Phil Hughes erratic despite flashes of brilliance, there doesn’t seem to be any other potential big-gamers on the roster.  

Essentially the Yankees’ season should come down to this: Either Wang will recover or Hughes will become the star the Yankees thought he would be three years ago. If neither happens, the Yanks have no chance to overtake the Red Sox.

No one playing ball in New York wants to lose a Yankee-Mets series, but this weekend, all the players with NY on their caps may be a little distracted.  Some of their attention may be directed to the scoreboard and the games at Citizens Bank Park, where the Red Sox are playing the Phillies. 

In terms of how it affects the Lakers dynasty, though, it matters little whether they win this year, just as it mattered little last season.  The Lakers, like Hemingway’s definition of a great novelist, compete only with the dead.  They aren’t merely the most successful team in NBA history, they’re the most successful team in American professional sports history, and when they play for the NBA championship it just somehow seems natural.

Laker dissers, like Yankee haters, are quick to write off the success of the team to the wealth of their hometowns. The anti-Laker argument goes something like this:  they have no professional sports competition.

The Lakers have the town to themselves, some argue. There’s no professional sports competition—the Dodgers, despite their excellent start this season, haven’t won a World Series in two decades and Los Angeles doesn’t even have an NFL franchise. How could a team with all that glamour and money, they ask rhetorically, not be a winner?

The argument presupposes that having movie stars sitting courtside guarantees a playoff spot, and that a huge revenue base guarantees a winner. Why then, can’t the LA Clippers cash in on this potential bonanza?  The Clippers, who have been battling the Lakers for home-crowd support since their first season in Los Angeles (1984-85), make a fascinating contrast with the Lakers: the Clippers have been the worst in the NBA, and maybe in all of professional sports, over the time span the Lakers have been the best.  In their 25 seasons in the City of Angels, the Clippers, with the same resources as the Lakers, have a winning percentage of just .347 and have made the NBA playoffs only four times. The Lakers over that period have had the highest won-lost percentage in the league, over .650, and have been in the playoffs 23 times.

In truth, the Lakers could claim to be a great deal more than just the NBAs best franchise over the last quarter century: they’ve been the NBA’s flagship franchise during the league’s boom years. The NBA’s fortunes began to skyrocket when Magic Johnson came to Los Angeles from Michigan State in 1979—or, as some historians think, when Kareem Abdul-Jabbar came to the Lakers from the Milwaukee Bucks in 1975.

In any event, the Lakers, paced by those two future Hall of Famers, redefined sports glamour in the television age with a celebrity fan list that includes Jack Nicholson, Denzel Washington and Leonardo DiCaprio; and a knockout cheerleading squad -- the only one in basketball whose name anyone knows. They also produced the only play-by-play announcer to have had an impact on the English language, the late Chick Hearn, who broadcast 3,338 consecutive Lakers games from 1965 through December 2001 and in the process contributed such phrases to the American lexicon as “Putting up a brick” (for a bad shot) and “Slam dunk!” (no definition needed).

Of course, the Lakers did not win because Jack and Leo rooted them on: The celebs came because they won. Since their first NBA championship in 1950, when they were the Minneapolis Lakers—in case you were wondering where the team’s name came from—they’ve been the winningest team in American professional sports by at least one measure, the New York Yankees and the Boston Celtics not excepted.

Over the last 49 seasons since their move to LA, the Lakers have finished under .500 only seven times. Just to compare, the Yankees, the most famous winner in American sports, have gone under .500 10 times since 1961 and the Boston Celtics, though they won an amazing 11 championships in the 13 seasons from 1956-1969, have dipped below the mediocrity line 14 times since 1970.

Perhaps half of the professional basketball players best known to the American public over the past five decades have been Lakers. To skim just the cream from the top: Elgin Baylor, Jerry West, Wilt Chamberlain, Gail Goodrich, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson, Shaquille O’Neal, and last year’s MVP, Kobe Bryant (and the man who should have been MVP this year if the voters had bothered to look at the opposition he played against compared to that of Lebron James).  The kinetic Pat Riley and Zen-like Phil Jackson, winners of a combined six titles with the Lakers, exemplify the two polar opposites of basketball coaching.

It’s no secret that ABC executives as well as NBA Commissioner Daniel stern would have much rather had a Kobe Bryant-Lakers vs. Lebron James-Cavaliers final. The Orlando Magic bring neither heat nor ratings to the party.  There’s no storied rivalry as there was last year with the Lakers and Celtics. Lakers-Cavs would have been the jackpot, but ABC and the NBA will have to settle for half a jackpot and consider themselves lucky to have the only team playing who casual sports fans all over the country can easily identify. Except for the glorious aberration of the Michael Jordan years in Chicago, no NBA team has even approached the Lakers’ appeal.

The simple truth is that regardless of the outcome of the series, as the Lakers go, so goes the NBA.

It’s a truism in professional sports that a good player in New York is an automatic celebrity. Not only is he guaranteed more high-priced endorsement deals, but he has a big edge over players in the suburbs when it comes to All-Star and MVP support. It comes as something of a surprise, then, to realize that the best all-around player in New York baseball is also its most underappreciated.  If you think that both of those labels don’t fit Carlos Beltran, consider the following:

-- In his 11 previous major league seasons (including 6 ½ seasons with the Kansas City Royals and a half season for the Houston Astros), he has hit more than 20 home runs eight times, more than 30 home runs in 3 seasons, and 38 or more twice, including 41 in 2006 with the Mets.

-- Beltran has driven in more than 100 runs in 8 seasons and scored more than 100 in 7. That’s as many as Albert Pujols, generally regarded as the best hitter in the game today. 

Not to confuse the issue:  Beltran isn’t a better hitter than Pujols, who’s three years younger and has played three fewer seasons, but Carlos surpasses him in other areas of the game.

-- Beltran is a terrific base runner and base stealer, arguably the best in the game today. Through May 14, he has 279 stolen bases and been thrown out only 38 times, having stolen more than 20 bases in 7 seasons and 30 or more 4 times, and more than 40 twice, including two amazing seasons, 2003-04, in which he stole 83 bases in 90 attempts.  Baseball analysts tell us that a player must be successful around 75% of the time to really make a contribution; Beltran’s career success rate is a staggering 88%. 

Let’s put that in perspective. Rickey Henderson’s, baseball’s all-time stolen base champ, had an 80.1% success rate over 25 seasons. Sharp-eyed readers will say “Yes, but that includes Henderson’s down seasons when his stolen base percentage was likely to be lower.” True, but after his first 12 seasons, Rickey’s was successful in 81.6% of his attempts, or 6.4% lower than Beltran’s right now.

-- Defensively, Beltran may have no equal.  He was a Gold Glove winner in centerfield from 2006-08; the think tank at Baseball Prospectus called him “The best centerfielder in baseball for the second time in the last three years.”  Fielding statistics in baseball are never conclusive, but Beltran’s are pretty impressive no matter how you look at them.  His career fielding percentage is .985, 12 points better than his peers in centerfield in the American and National Leagues in the same period, and he has gotten to an average of 2.80 balls over nine innings compared to 2.67 for everyone else.

His bosses know how good he is. At $18,622,809, he was the highest paid player in the National League last year when he hit .284 with 27 home runs and  112 RBIs, scored 116 runs scored, and stole 25 bases (in 28 attempts).  That plus a Gold Glove.

Many sportswriters, surprisingly, do not know. There is no way a player can put up such amazing numbers in so many different facets of the game as Beltran has without being on a fast track to the Hall of Fame. But when was the last time you heard anyone speak of him that way?  In fact, where was his support last year when it came to vote for baseball’s MVP? 

As researcher Dave Fleming pointed out on Bill James Online, “Last year, Beltran had a remarkable season ... He hit .333/.390/.528 in clutch situations and .344/.440/.645 during the September stretch ...”  And yet, “Thirty-two writers voted for the NL MVP.  None of them thought Beltran was the best player in the National Leager. Only three [emphasis Fleming’s] of the writers thought Beltran was one of the top ten players in the league. By the writers’ consensus, he was the 21^st best player in the NL last year.”

“Ryan Howard came in second in the MVP vote. Beltran beat him in every single statistical category except home runs.”

In fact, Beltran’s teammate, first baseman Carlos Delgado, got more MVP votes than Beltran.  Delgado did hit 11 more home runs, but Beltran had more hits, walks, doubles, triples, and stolen bases, played a more important defensive position, and hit better in so-called clutch situations.

So why doesn’t the City’s press recognize this guy as one of the best in the game today?  Why haven’t Mets fans embraced him the way they have Jose Reyes, David Wright, and, for that matter, Carlos Delgado?  “Pick your reason,” says Prospectus’s Steven Goldman. “They were offended by the size of his contract, he doesn’t give much of himself away in interviews, he had a lousy first season with the Mets in 2005.  In fact, it was his only bad season in the major leagues.”  (He hit just .266 with 16 home runs and 17 stolen bases.)  

Goldman concludes, “If none of those explains his lack of appreciation, maybe it’s some combination of them.”  

I’d like to add one more: the memory of Beltran taking a called third strike to end the seventh and final game of the 2006 National League Championship Series – which quickly erased the memory of the three home runs and eight runs scored he had in that series. (The headline of  MSNBC’s story: “With season on line, Beltran doesn’t lift bat.”)  For the record, he’s a lifetime .366 hitter in 22 postseason games with 11 home runs and 8 stolen bases in 8 attempts.

What does someone have to do to win over the fans in this town?  Well, hitting .370, as Beltran has so far this season, and pulling the Mets out of a tailspin and into first place in the NL East could be a start.

“The best pitcher in baseball,” according to Sports Illustrated’s May 4 cover story, is Kansas City’s Zack Greinke, who is 6-0 and leading the major leagues with a 0.40 ERA. 

SI is wrong.  They might have changed their minds had they been at the game last night, where Johan Santana threw seven shutout innings, allowed two hits and struck out 10 against the world champion Phillies to extend his record to 4-1 and a National League-leading ERA of 0.91.

Greinke is a fine pitcher, who is currently performing way over his head. With luck, he will be touted at the end of the season as a candidate for the American League’s Cy Young Award.  Santana is on the verge of nailing down a plaque at the Hall of Fame.

If Johan had been luckier last season, everyone would already understand that he’s headed for Cooperstown, or at least if he’d been lucky enough to have J. J. Putz as his set-up man and Francisco Rodriguez as his closer. Thanks to those two, the Mets are currently leading the National League in bullpen ERA at 2.94; K-Rod, as we go to press, has an ERA of 1.42 with eight saves.

Santana has already led his league in earned run average three times in nine previous seasons (2004 and 2006 with Minnesota and 2008 with the Mets) and won two Cy Young awards. Last season the Mets’ bullpen cost Santana a third Cy Young Award—that’s my opinion, anyway. Seven times he left the mound with a lead only to have the relievers blow it. He wound up third in the Cy Young voting behind San Francisco’s Tim Lincecum and Arizona’s Brandon Webb.  How much did those blown saves hurt Johan?  Let’s compare the NL’s three best pitchers last season:

                        W-L     ERA     Starts   IP         Hits      SO-BB

Lincecum          18-5     2.62     33        227      182      265-84

Webb               22-7     3.30     34        226.2   206      183-65

Santana            16-7     2.53     34        234.1   206      206-63

Santana and Lincecum were neck-and-neck in just about every statistic; Lincecum gets the edge in win-loss percentage and gave up 24 fewer hits, while Santana had a slightly lower ERA, pitched a few more innings, and had a lower strikeouts-to-walks ratio.  You can make a good argument for either man’s credentials. But note that Webb, who did not have a better season than Santana, finished second in the voting to Johan’s third.  That’s because he was 22-7 to Santana’s 16-7, which is, unfortunately, the first thing that Cy Young voters look at. 

If Mets relievers had held on to the lead those seven times Santana presented them with it—or, let’s say it a different way: If the Mets had had K-Rod as a closer last year and he held on to all seven leads (he’s 8 out of 8 this year)—then Santana would have been 23-7 and finished ahead of Lincecum in the voting just as Webb finished ahead of Santana.

And if that had happened, Johan Santana would currently be regarded, correctly, as someone who is on the fast track for the HOF, as nobody with three Cy Youngs has ever been left out of Cooperstown. Blown saves or no in 2008, Santana won’t be left out, either. Look for him to nail it down once and for all down this year’s pennant stretch. 

That’s if the Mets have a pennant stretch.  As of Wednesday morning, the Mets were 13-13; Santana had won three of four decisions while the rest of the Mets staff was a combined 9-12. Unlike last year, when the bullpen collapsed, the team’s problem this year is that the starters behind Santana can’t hold the lead long enough to hand it to the relievers.  Right now, the Mets are looking like a ship that plugs a leak only to see a bigger one spring open somewhere else. 

When the Mets made Santana the richest pitcher in baseball with a $137.5 million, six-year contract—the Yankees, of course, topped that with C.C. Sabathia’s seven-year, $161 million deal—it was to “Erase the disgrace,” as one homemade sign seen at Shea last year implored.  That it didn’t work out that way was hardly Santana’s fault. Now, after the 2008 ending, he’s got two disgraces to help erase. 

At a press conference shortly after he arrived in Port St. Lucie in the spring of 2008, he told reporters, “I’m not going to go out there and try to be a hero. I’m just going to be myself, and, hopefully, with my help we can make everyone forget what happened last year.” But that “with my help” stuff isn’t enough, and no one knows it better than Santana. If the Mets win the pennant, he—not David Wright or Jose Reyes or Carlos Beltran—will have been the biggest reason.

Two years ago Jeff Souhan of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune told me, “Johan didn’t just go to New York for the money. At this point in his career, he’d have chosen New York over Minnesota even if the Twins had found a way to match the money.”  What did he want? “He wants more run support,” said Souhan. “He wants to build his credentials for the Hall of Fame, and he wants to perform in front of a large Latin community. He wants the national spotlight.”

He’s entitled, of course, to all those things. And if the rest of the Mets rotation can pull itself together, he’ll get them. And in return, Santana will give the Mets a very good shot at erasing those disgraces.

Jacoby Ellsbury’s steal of home in Sunday night’s game – with New York third baseman Cody Ransom standing so far away from Ellsbury that he couldn’t have identified him in a police lineup -- didn’t end the season for the New York Yankees, but if things continue like this for much longer, Yankee fans will look back on it as if it had.

This team is a $200 million mess with several semi-pro players on the roster and an aging superstructure on the verge of collapse. Alex Rodriguez is due back soon, but the Yankees’ season may well be over by then. Meanwhile, there’s one possible shot in the arm that could start a reversal in their fortunes. As we go to press, it looks as if Phil Hughes will be starting Tuesday night against the Tigers at Detroit. It’s about time.

If American sports’ most valuable franchise ($1.5 billion according to a recent Forbes assessment) had a modicum of wit to match its wealth, Hughes would have started the season on the Yankees roster.

Two years ago, when he was the second-youngest player in the American League, Hughes was looked on as the hottest pitching prospect in the Bronx since ... well, probably ever.  He was built like a younger, slightly taller Roger Clemens, with virtually the same mechanics – the same repertoire and velocity. “The Pocket Rocket,” they were calling him. There seemed no limit to what Hughes could do.  The excitement that surrounded him was much like the hype that greeted Joba Chamberlain a few months later.  They were, potentially, the two greatest young pitchers to come along at the same time ever in Yankee history.

The radar gun on Hughes’s early appearances put him at just under 97 mph on a four-seam fastball, and the slow ball he threw off that pitch was referred to by then-Yankees pitching coach Ron Guidry as “a knee buckler” – batters would bend at the knee trying to follow the ball as it broke down and then, as if frozen in place, watch it drop over the plate for an embarrassing strike. 

Hughes’s promise seemed on the verge of deliverance on May 1 of 2007 when he threw a no-hitter for 6 1/3 innings before sustaining what the injury report called a “Grade 1 hamstring strain.”  Hughes didn’t think it required rehab, but 24 days later he sprained an ankle during a conditioning exercise. The docs slapped a Grade 3 on that one and Hughes was out of the lineup for 3 ½ months.

He’s never quite been able to put it back together, though he finished the 2007 season with a 5-3 record, striking out 58 and walking just 29 in 72.2 innings. He finished the season with a fine bit of relief in the ALDS against Cleveland, giving up three hits and striking out six in 5 2/3 innings. But he had a miserable 2008 in every sense, losing all four of his decisions with a 6.62 ERA.  The cheering postseason news was that it may not have been his fault:  tests later revealed that he had pitched with a stress fracture in a rib, which caused him to work in pain. After rehab and the addition of a smart cut-fastball to his armament, his strikeout ratio shot back up – 38 Ks in 30 innings in the Arizona fall league. Hopes resumed for the season.

And what did the Yankees do?  They signed 37-year-old Andy Pettitte to fill out the starting rotation. Pettitte has gone 43-36 over the past three seasons and was 14-14 last year, and you know he’s not going to pitch much better than that this year.  If the Yankees had guts and imagination, Phil Hughes would be in the starting rotation now instead of waiting to see if Chien-Ming Wang’s April swoon is permanent or temporary.

If the Yankees organization had just a single person with vision, it would be understood that Hughes is worth taking a chance on, that he has the potential to be the Yankees’ future and that he is giving the Yankees absolutely no return for the enormous investment they’ve put into him simply by filling few extra seats for his starts in Trenton.

What you can’t help wondering is why, up to now, it wouldn’t have been possible to prepare him for a slot in the starting five with some on-the-job training in the bullpen?  Why, exactly, did we have to wait to see if Wang’s arm fell off before Hughes was given a chance to pitch?

When I popped this question to pitching coach Dave Eiland – who does not set but merely reflects the Yankees’ strategy -- his response was, “We want him to be a starter, and the best way to do that is to find him starts, not use him out of the bullpen.” O.K., fine, but how do you “find” starts for a pitcher?  The only way Hughes would have gotten chances is if Wang or someone else failed, and then what?  In other words, the Yankees have been operating in their usual crisis-management mode, and after the weekend’s Red Sox disaster, it’s crisis time.

Before the Boston Red Sox series, the Yankees, particularly Brian Cashman, had become pretty arrogant about their long-time sore spot, pitching. “I think we’ve got the best starting rotation in the league,” Cashman was heard to say just a week ago. They do if C.C. Sabathia settles down, if A.J. Burnett doesn’t get injured, if Joba Chamberlain lives up to his great potential, if Andy Pettitte pitches a little better at 37 than he did at 36, and – biggest if of all – if Chien-Ming Wang rediscovers how to make his sinker sink.

That’s a lot of ifs, and Phil Hughes is a big if, too.  But he’s a gamble that can pay off in a major way, one that could turn an entire season around.  Hughes could be that good; just two short years ago everyone in the Yankees organization thought that was the case.   They could have made him part of a package deal for Johan Santana, and they chose not to.

Now’s the time to start justifying that decision by handing him the ball. 

Jose Reyes, running off the field after a great play with a grin on his face that makes Tom Sawyer look like Mickey Rourke, seems to have no idea of the burden he carries around.

Major League Baseball has become, largely, a Latin game. Other great Latin players came here after All-Star careers on other teams, but we’ve had Jose since age 20. Dominican-born Reyes is the first great Latin superstar to begin his career with the Mets. He’s ours, and with any luck he will never wear anything but orange and blue.

That is if Jose Reyes is a superstar.  A great many baseball analysts say he is.  For instance, in Baseball Prospectus 2009 he is called, simply, “The Most Exciting Player in Baseball.”  Now you can’t really be that and not be a superstar – can you?

Though his career so far is running neck-and-neck with Derek Jeter’s at the same age, a lot of Mets fans still aren’t sure. One wonders what their hesitation is.  Last year he hit .297 with 16 home runs, stole 56 bases in 71 attempts, led the National league in hits, and had 19 triples. That’s a pretty good season.  Reyes hits with consistency, knows how to get on base when he doesn’t hit (career on base percentage of .336), is a dazzling fielder at shortstop, and is flat-out the best base stealer in baseball (258 steals in his last four seasons).

So what are Mets fans waiting for?  Well, for one thing, that superstar breakout season that all great players are supposed to have. A World Series ring wouldn’t hurt either; getting to the World Series might do for starters.  

“He’s our igniter,” said Mets third baseman David Wright two years ago.  “As he goes, we go.”  Well, for the last two years, Reyes has gone with the Mets down to the wire, only to fade at the end.  His BA for the last two seasons from September on has been a hugely disappointing .223 over 52 games.

It would be ridiculous to blame the team’s collapses at the end of the 2007 and 2008 seasons on Reyes – but a super star is supposed to be able to prevent something like that from happening, isn’t he?  At least that’s the way the Mets’ following looks at it, and they’re not likely to see it any way different until their team wins the World Series. In New York that’s what a superstar is supposed to – ignite the team in important games.

It would be wrong to say that Jose Reyes isn’t a fan favorite; he’s one of the two or three most popular regulars in New York baseball right now. But in a very real sense, New York fans are still waiting for him to arrive.  Reyes isn’t so much competing with great players of the past as with himself – the Jose Reyes of his potential. In 2007 Mets announcer Gary Cohen called him “the most fabulously gifted player in the game, and the most exciting player baseball has had so far in this century.”  I don’t care what century you’re talking about, that’s a lot of potential to live up to.

Willie Randolph, a few months before his departure from the Mets, told me, “I can’t remember the last time I saw such a combination of power, speed and enthusiasm. He might have more sheer talent than any player I’ve ever seen.”  Constantino Viloria of El Dairio thinks that Reyes “has a great chance of bringing people together in this town as no Latino player ever had.” Meaning if the Mets win. 

No one put anything like that on Derek Jeter’s shoulders. But by the time Jeter turned 26, he already had three rings.   Or, stated another way, by the time Jeter was 26, no one was talking about his potential, they were talking about what he had already done.

Over the winter, Mets manager Jerry Manuel stirred things up by hinting that during the season, Luis Castillo might lead off instead of Reyes.  As is usual with Manuel, there was no really coherent reason offered for the possible switch – a few vague statements about needing to “rein Jose in” and make him “a more viable team player.” Exactly how batting later in the order, which would result in fewer runs for the team, would make Reyes a better team player was not explained. To the relief of Mets fans, Manuel seems to have abandoned the idea, and Jose can, happily, continue his progression towards future comparisons with the greatest leadoff man in baseball history, Rickey Henderson.

Meanwhile, the window of opportunity to win that World Series may be closing. Johan Santana is probably the best pitcher in the league. But he’s 30, and who knows how much longer he can continue to carry an increased workload (his 234 innings pitched last season were a career high). David Wright, like Reyes, is 26 and may be just hitting his peak.  But Carlos Delgado is 37 and Carlos Beltran turns 32 in a couple of weeks, and it can’t be assumed that they will continue to perform at superstar level.

Perhaps Jose Reyes smiles so easily now because he does not understand the burden on him. But it looks like this is the season for Reyes to be the player he can be and to erase the humiliations of the last two years.  The chance may never come again. 

If Cannon were around today, he’d have a good subject in Derek Jeter.  Though the New York press and Yankee fandom don’t seem to realize it, Jeter has been on a sharp decline over the last couple of seasons, and 2009 is going to determine a lot about how the next generations of fans remember him.  Thirty-four—he’ll be 35 in June—isn’t old for a bottle of wine or even a first baseman, but it’s like dog years for a shortstop, and right now Jeter is acting like an old dog refusing to learn new tricks.

He just finished the World Baseball Classic hitting .276 and without an RBI or stolen base. If the starting assignment has been based on merit, Jeter would have sat out every game and watched Jimmy Rollins play. Jeter’s devotion to the WBC is admirable, but the truth is if he weren’t one of the most popular players in the history of the Yankees—and I don’t take that lightly since he’s been my daughter’s and my favorite player for the last 13 seasons—he wouldn’t be shortstop right now. I don’t know who would be, but Derek Jeter would be playing another position.

Let’s go ahead and say it: No major league team has ever won a pennant with a 35-year-old shortstop.

This will be Jeter’s 14^th season (not counting 1995, when he only played 15 games), and judging from the blogs and radio call-in shows, Yankee fans are assuming that he is a walking Hall of Famer, but I don’t necessarily think that’s true.  If he pulled a Thurmon Munson, I think he’d get in.  His credentials are pretty good.   In 1,985 games, he has a batting average of .316, and that’s always the first thing they look at. He has 206 home runs, a very good total for a middle infielder, and has been in double figures every season since 1996, when he got the starting job. He’s driven in more than 100 runs only once (1999 with 102), but batters who hit first or second in the order aren’t expected to have 100 RBI seasons: they’re expected to score runs, and Jeter has had more than 100 runs scored in 11 of 12 seasons, from 1996 through 2007, missing the mark just once, in 2003 when he played only 119 games (a full season would have projected him to at least 110).

Last year there was an ominous note—he scored just 88 runs, the first time in his career when he played as many as 150 games and didn’t score 100. 

Jeter has been one of the best base runners of his era—some would say the best.  Mets fans are quick to point out that Jose Reyes has more stolen bases in six seasons, 290, than Jeter, 275, for his entire career.  But the comparison isn’t meaningful. Reyes steals on impulse, whereas Jeter runs almost exclusively in situations where a stolen base is meaningful. Reyes’s success rate has been 80 percent in 755 games. Through 2006, by which time he had played 1679 games, Jeter’s success rate was also 80 percent; it’s over the last two years, when injuries and age have taken their toll, that Derek’s been easier to throw out (a combined 26 steals to 13 caught). By the time Reyes has reached his 30s, his career stolen base percentage will likely dip below 80 percent.

Then there’s fielding.  Despite the sensational jump-and-throws that make the postgame highlights and winning three Gold Gloves from 2004-2006, Jeter has never been an especially good fielder.  Up to the last two seasons, this hasn’t made that much difference—the point is that he has always been able to hit and run well enough to play shortstop, even when his fielding has been mediocre.   But now, after two seasons in which his range factor—total chances per nine innings—vs. the league’s average has been bad, his fielding has become very important. 

If Jeter can no longer field well enough to play shortstop, where exactly can he play? There’s been talk of moving him into left field if only because it’s the easiest defensive position of the eight. But left fielders are expected to hit. If you can’t produce say, 25 home runs and drive in 90-100 runs, you probably shouldn’t be in left field. Is there anyone out there who seriously thinks that Derek Jeter can still produce those kinds of numbers?

Others have suggested that the Yankees try him in center field, but if his 35-year-old legs aren’t good enough to cover the ground at shortstop, how are they going to carry him in center field?

There apparently aren’t many out there with me on this, but I’m all for dumping Robinson Cano, who had a considerably lower on-base average than Jeter last year (.305-.363) and who, though he’s just 25, hits with no more power.  A move to second base would hide the decline of Jeter’s range in the field if only because new first baseman Mark Teixeira and whoever replaces Jeter at shortstop will cover more of what he can’t. (And anyone the Yankees play at shortstop is likely to have more range than Jeter does now.)

I know, there are all kinds of objections to this, starting with Robbie Cano’s “potential.” But in three full seasons starting with the Yankees, Cano has an OBA of just .323, and I don’t see any an indication that he’s ever going to get any better. Right now the Yankees could get something for him. If they wait till summer and he’s still hitting around .200, like he was last year, they’re stuck with a lousy player who has no trade value.

The other major objection to moving Jeter to second—namely, who will play shortstop—is beside the point.  In another season the Yankees are going to have to make a change anyway.

I think, in defiance of most Yankee fans, a good 2009 season is critical to Derek’s Hall of Fame chances. His batting average and stolen base percentage and power numbers (for a shortstop) are impressive, and the 2,535 career hits look great for a guy who has only batted a little more than 8,000 times.  And, of course, he has four World Series rings. That’s the argument for.

Unfortunately, for sportswriters outside New York, Jeter may need a bit more. Most baseball analysts I know agree that Jeter should or could have won MVP awards in 1998, 1999 and 2006.  That he didn’t probably reflects the rest of the country’s resentment that New York players receive so much national attention (or at any rate, are said to). But he didn’t win, and that may ultimately be used as an argument against him when it comes time for the HOF vote. In fact, though he’s placed high in several important categories, the only eye-opening statistics he’s ever led the league in are runs scored (1998) and hits (1999).  Given the swiftness with which he seems to be slipping—he hit .343 in 2006, .322 in 2007, and .300 last year—it’s not likely he’s going to be leading the league in anything important from here on in.

Derek Jeter has always been the epitome of a gamer, the Yankees’ symbol of a guy who comes through with the game on the line—in short, not Alex Rodriguez. But since 2000, including the last five years when he played alongside of A-Rod, Jeter hasn’t propelled his team to any titles. Yankee fans owe him a lot, but it’s doubtful they owe him a free pass for his refusal to sit while recovering from injuries and for refusing to voluntarily give up his position, which he is no longer capable of playing at an All-Star caliber.

The unpleasant fact that everyone is going to have to start facing up to very soon is that it is Derek Jeter, and not Alex Rodriguez, who could be the albatross hanging around the Yankees’ neck.

Though it’s still selling like beer in the bottom of the sixth, The Yankee Years by Joe Torre and Tom Verducci has just about vanished in the mainstream sports press. For all intents and purposes, analysis of the book ended with the revelation that Alex Rodriguez was on steroids when he was with the Texas Rangers. No one seems to have interest in what Torre and Verducci have to say about the last several Yankee seasons except for the ammunition it gives local sportswriters to fire at A-Rod.

This is too bad, because it means that the time is practically past for anyone to figure out exactly what went wrong with the Yankees in those years—or in fact if anything really did go wrong.

For a tell-all book, The Yankee Years is mild stuff, no matter what you’ve heard or read—mostly a few digs at some of the New York stars such as hefty former Yankee lefthander David “Boomer” Wells (who seems to need more attention than most ballplayers).  Fans who want more specifics can Google “Joe Torre The Yankee Years” and sift through the 1.3 million— and counting—results. Serious Yankee fans, though, may skip those passages and go straight to what amounts to Torre’s and Verducci’s revisionist history.

Verducci—and we have to give him responsibility for this, since he’s the one who actually wrote The Yankee Years—seems to have a very limited view as to those responsible for the Yankees’ failure to win a World Series since 2000 despite having the biggest payroll in baseball. 

From 1996, Torre’s first year as Yankees manager, through 2000, the team won 487 games and lost 322, for a percentage of  .602.  From 2001, through Torre’s last season, 2007—the span over which Torre and Verducci feel the Yankees were in decline—the Yankees were actually a little better, 686-445, for .607.

This hardly passes for the sense of failure that the book seems to be pushing us toward.

The difference between the first five years of Torre’s tenure and the last seven was the Yankees postseason performance. From 1996 to 2000, New York was 46-15 (.754) in the playoffs with four World Series rings.  From 2001 to 2007, they were 31-32 in the postseason (.492) and lost in their only two World Series appearances (2001 and 2003). 

Their failure to win the championship is the real reason that Torre is no longer with the Yankees. Torre and Verducci place the blame for that failure squarely on the Steinbrenner family and general manager Brian Cashman, and given the lack of attention paid in recent years to the Yankee farm system—the minor league affiliates haven’t produced a real first-rate position player since, who … Derek Jeter?—there’s plenty of blame to go around.  The problem is, it never quite comes around to the man who made the game decisions, Torre.

The authors seem to agree that the signing of Alex Rodriguez “made for a whole different dynamic in the Yankees clubhouse.”  But they fail to tell us why a proper dynamic is essential to a winning team in the first place.  Colorful rebels like Babe Ruth, Billy Martin and Reggie Jackson have always been as much a part of the Yankees dynamic as solid company men like Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Berra and Derek Jeter.

In the March 9 New Yorker, Roger Angell wrote that “A-Rod’s consuming self consciousness and preoccupation with image and his own statistics alienated his teammates and damaged his performance in clutch situations.”

Angell is an astute student of baseball as we’ve seen over the last 25 years, but this seems like a fuzzy statement. If A-Rod is obsessed with his stats—and I’d honesty like to know which major league players aren’t—how would that “damage” his ability to hit in the clutch? In fact, what exactly is the evidence that A-Rod hasn’t hit in the clutch?  (And I won’t even go into the definition of what clutch means.)  Angell did, however, make at least one very important point, namely that the “A-Fraud” line, which was taken out of context by the New York press, “appears to have been a clubhouse joke, part of the open baiting that Rodriguez routinely endured.”

The larger question, though, seems to have gone undiscussed anywhere: Why is so-called team chemistry so important?  A Yankees fan old enough to remember the names Reggie Jackson and Billy Martin might ask why a proper “dynamic” matters at all. If high-priced loose-cannon sluggers are so disruptive to a team’s morale, one wonders why the Boston Red Sox won World Series in 2004 and 2007 despite the bizarre behavior of slugging outfielder Manny Ramirez.   Ramirez quarreled continuously with the Boston front office and finally forced a trade after the 2007 season—interestingly enough, to the Los Angeles Dodgers, where he seemed to get along quite well with his manager, Joe Torre. 

Torre and Verducci would have us believe that the Yankees’ failure to win a World Series in the past decade was due to the front office’s pursuit of high-priced superstars while the more fiscal-minded Red Sox cultivated their farm system. This is a popular theory in the New York press, where writers are always looking for reasons to bash the Steinbrenners, but the truth is that while the Yankees did neglect their minor leagues, the Red Sox also overtook them because of shrewder free agent acquisitions, including sluggers Ramirez in 2001 and David Ortiz (who the Yankees passed on signing) in 2003.

In the critical area of pitching, the Red Sox left the Yankees in the dust, signing Curt Schilling (in 2004) and Josh Beckett (2006)—two hard-throwing right-handers who raised their profile considerably by beating the Yankees in the World Series.  The biggest shocker came when the Red Sox outbid the Yankees for Japanese ace Daisuke Matsuzaka, who cost Boston $51.1 million for negotiation rights and $52 million for a six-year contract. In the opinion of Red Sox fans “Dice-K,” 18-3 with a 2.90 ERA last year, was cheap at the price.

Certainly, there has been a big difference between the Yankees and the Red Sox in how each of them spent their money. When the Red Sox hired writer and analyst Bill James in 2003, they made one of the smartest free agent signings in baseball history. Most veteran baseball executives had dismissed James’s work as abstract and impractical, but the Red Sox’s progressive brain trust embraced his views on significance of such statistics as on-base percentage and strikeouts–to–innings pitched and the importance of building a roster around players in their peak rather than in their declining years. 

While the Red Sox were spending millions wisely, the Yankees were wasting resources on players past their prime, such as first baseman Jason Giambi, who was already 31 when the Yankees got him, and soft-tossing Japanese lefthander Kei Igawa, who has been paid $8 million for, so far, winning three games. So locked were the Yankees into crisis-management mode that in 2007, desperate for pitching, they re-signed 44-year-old Roger Clemens for $28 million; Clemens won six games.

So the Yankees’ bad decisions during Torre’s last seven seasons can’t be entirely blamed on their manager. But in his book, Torre sees himself as a victim of impersonal forces rather than as someone who might have influenced their outcome.  Like the executives he criticizes, Joe Torre, in The Yankee Years, seems blissfully unaware of baseball’s new math.

The book is called “The Yankee Years” because, let’s face it, no one is really interested in Torre’s Mets, Braves and Cardinals years (and it remains to be seen whether there will be any lasting interest in the Dodgers years).  For all of Verducci’s fine reporting—and there is plenty—The Yankee Years is pulled down by Torre’s unceasingly self-serving recollections. O.K., he’s a nice guy and the Steinbrenners aren’t nice people—we get it. 

The failure to even address these questions is also the major failure of the book. Tom Verducci knows all about the revolution in sabermetrics that Bill James begat; there are numerous references in the book to Red Sox GM Theo Epstein and manager Terry Francone and their enlightened approach when it comes to new acquisitions. But Torre is strangely silent on these issues. Didn’t Verducci even sound him out about whether he understood the importance of a stat like on base plus slugging?

For that matter, did Verducci ask Torre if he knew anything about Yankee history before he became manager?  Long before the Steinbrenners, Casey Stengel, the most successful manager in baseball history, won 10 pennants and seven World Series and was fired for not winning the seventh game in his final championship run.  Yogi Berra was also fired by the pre-Steinbrenner owners for winning a pennant but failing to win the seventh game of the World Series. In his second incarnation as Yankee Manager, Yogi was fired after just 16 games.

Though the Yankees wanted him to take a pay cut, Joe Torre was still offered $5 million plus nearly $3 million in incentives if he did what he did not do for the previous seven seasons—win a World Series. There are a lot of former Yankee managers who would have seen that as a sweetheart deal.