A-Rod, Yanks Deserve Better

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Perception is a tricky thing in baseball, especially when it comes to the Yankees. Just ask Alex Rodriguez. On Wednesday, just a day after he hit the decisive home run in a 7-5 win over the Boston Red Sox, he was taking abuse around the city for bad form (the home run was a fluke shot off a Tim Wakefield knuckleball, rather than a solid line drive) and bad timing (he hit it with the Yankees already up by three). It just doesn’t matter what the man does. He can’t win.

There are a few reasons Rodriguez gets so much guff. One is that he hasn’t been a clutch hitter on the order of Boston’s David Ortiz since coming to New York prior to the 2004 season. It’s an absurd standard to hold a player to, but that doesn’t stop anyone. There’s also the matter of his fat contract, his historic talent, and his tangible insecurity. No one gets on scrubs who make the league minimum and strut about with self-confidence for their failures; the criticism Rodriguez gets is caused by the enormous respect fans have for him, and the terrible expectations that accompany it.

Rodriguez also serves as a useful proxy for the failure of the Yankees to play aesthetically pleasing baseball over the last few years, something that counts for a lot in New York.This is why Derek Jeter is so loved and respected; I could mathematically prove that Jeter is something like the seventh- or eighth-best player on the Yankees right now, and no one would care. I wouldn’t really care, for that matter. He plays subtle, stylish baseball and is a pleasure to watch, more so than maybe any player in the game.That’s why he’s the man, while more effective but more stolid players, like Rodriguez and Jason Giambi, aren’t, and why the dynastic Yankees he symbolizes are respected and loved by all, while the more recent editions, which have been successful but won no titles and earned no style points, aren’t.

What should be clear, though, is that optical illusions don’t just fool us as regards individual players; they affect the way we look at whole teams. For example, any longtime Yankee fan would, if asked, agree that Billy Martin’s clubs were more efficient offensively. Joe Torre’s Yankees constantly leave huge quantities of runners on base, as when they stranded an incredible 31 in losing two of three to the Mets last weekend. Generally, rather than the refined National League style of ball for which the Yankees (oddly) were known under Martin and during the mid-’90s, more recent models have been known as graceless bludgeoning machines, incapable of playing the inside game and exceptionally reliant on the longball.

As often happens, when you run the numbers it seems this perception isn’t valid.Just as a lark – a systematic study adjusting for league-wide offensive levels, situational approaches and so forth would be beyond the scope of this column – I compared the efficiency of three Yankees teams Billy Martin managed for an entire season (1976-77 and 1983) to that of the 2003-05 Yankees. As a measure, I settled on the ratio of their hits minus home runs, walks, and hit batsmen to their runs minus home runs – basically the percentage of men who reached base and didn’t score, whether because they ran themselves off the bases or weren’t driven in.

It’s astonishing just what a home run era we live in. Today’s Yanks routinely hit twice as many home runs per season as did the 1976 Yankees, who hit 120, and rap many fewer singles, doubles, and triples than the older teams did. In addition to hitting more home runs, today’s Yankees also draw a third again as many walks, and are plunked twice as often.If you think,as I do,that watching guys hit home runs and draw walks is somewhat boring, you’d be right in recalling the Martin-era Yankees are more exciting.

Not, though, as notably more efficient. In 1976, 65.7% of Yanks baserunners didn’t score; in 1977, it was 69.9%; in 1983, 68.4%. The 2003 Yankees, by contrast, failed to plate 68.5% of their runners; the next year, it was 67.1%, and last year, 67.7%.These are not huge differences. Martin’s fondness for the hit-and-run and other such strategies for getting runners over and getting them in is nearly cancelled out, in this comparison, by the fact that his teams routinely got caught stealing twice as often as Torre’s. Our present-day Yankees certainly seem, with regular viewing, as if they lack urgency and are content to play softball rather than baseball. But next to a legendarily aggressive team, that style doesn’t seem to result in them leaving a greater proportion of ducks on the pond.

If there’s any insight to be had here, it’s probably just that Joe Torre, for all the legitimate criticisms that can be leveled at him, isn’t doing much wrong when he manages games push-button style, just as Alex Rodriguez isn’t doing much wrong when he draws his walks and hits his home runs rather than bunting for base hits or dropping balls over the second baseman’s head. Managers and players alike have to work with the talents they have, and do the best with them they can. If that means softball offense or Billyball, so be it. Wins are what matter, and that little matter of October aside, the Yankees are doing fine on that score.


The New York Sun

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