The Morning Offering - May 2, 2005

Written by Worm on May 02, 2005

April is over, and it’s time to face baseball reality. Every team comes into the season with high hopes, and justly so. Nobody knows who’s going to win at the end of the year, and even the typical losers can hope to surprise. Well, it looks like the Royals are worse than ever so far this year, but baseball has still had its share of surprises so far.

Before the season began, I made some predictions for the end-of-season outcomes. Well, it’s nowhere near the end of the season, but for the most part my estimates aren’t too far off, yet. Looking at the standings, though, the big surprises so far are the Orioles, the Phillies, and the Yankees. Well, perhaps the Phillies shouldn’t be such a big surprise. After all, it seems that their production hasn’t matched their talent level for several years now, so, if they’re at it again, is it really all that surprising?

The Orioles are a nice story, though. Once a powerhouse in the AL East, they have been out of the picture during the escalation of the Cold War between the Yankees and Red Sox since 1998. But, for now, they hold first place, and have been playing sharp and dominant baseball. Their once anemic offense made huge strides last year, and, so far this season, their pitching has been good enough to put them on top of what would seem to be the toughest division in baseball. The question is, can their young pitching staff continue to perform at this high level for a full season?

Which brings me to what’s really on my mind, the Yankees. The Yankees suffered through a mediocre April last year, before getting things on track to post their third straight 100-win season. So, is this year any different? Well, I can’t predict the future, but this year something feels different.

Maybe it’s the way that they’re losing games. They never seem to have enough guts and desire to muster a rally when the game is on the line, even a losing rally. When they’ve won, they’ve pummeled their opponents into the ground, but in the games they’ve lost, it hardly seemed like they posed a challenge to the other team. The Yankees have looked eminently beatable so far this year.

And, for some reason, I’m not too surprised. More so than in any other recent year, the way this team has been cobbled together seems ill-conceived and doomed to failure. The Yankee management finally seemed this off-season to abandon all pretense of constructing a team built for success, and instead devoted itself wholly to filling every open roster spot with whoever had the best numbers last year. And, since they haven’t been winning World Series for a few years, they seemed to hope reacquiring Tino Martinez and Mike Stanton would be their good luck charm to get them over the top. To me, it looks like the Yankees don’t know what they’re doing.

And so it looks like the Yankees this year may be far less than the sum of their parts. They’d be following in the footsteps of some recent famously overpaid teams such as the Mets, Dodgers and Orioles. The latter two have had the distinction within the past ten years of having a shitty ballteam with the highest payroll in baseball.

In my year-end predictions, I picked the Yankees to finish first based on their overall talent level, which is tremendous. Well, the Yankees may have finally become such a hodgepodge of players, like a subway car full of superstars, that even Joe Torre can’t bring them together as a team and play to win. It’s early yet, and things may change, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see this team underachieve beyond all expectations. They simply aren’t built to win.

And that’s my offering to the Rotogods. I know there’s no Yankee love lost here, but I had to get that off my chest. Oh, and your Scrabble word of the day is SUQS.

-- Written by Worm on May 02, 2005