ESPN.com – MLB – Epilogue: ‘The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty’
About four hours after Wilson’s gaffe, Toronto general manager J. P. Ricciardi was driving on the Massachusetts Turnpike when his cell phone rang; it was Paul Godfrey, the president of the Blue Jays. “Are you sitting down?” Godfrey asked Ricciardi. “Guess who the Yankees want.” Mondesi. Ricciardi almost veered off the road.
Great reading, but he seems to be hitting the theme of “these guys just don’t have the chemistry the old guys had” a bit too hard. The basis of the claim: signing guys like Sheffield, Brown, and A-Rod to big contracts, trying to paste together a championship team rather than build one, a task he implies is impossible
Weren’t two of those three guys integral parts of the 1997 Mercenary Marlins? Yeah, they’re older now, but the fact is you can buy a championship if you buy the right players. Rather than blame the fall of the Yankees on some bad luck and some bad personnel decisions, he stretches to hard to blame it on esprit de corps. I think that’s part of it, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.
And really, the 2001, 2003, and 2004 Yankees were, what, a total of six or seven pitches away from having three more championships (I assume they’d go on to beat hte Cardinals last year)? As Braves fans, we can’t (as I usually do) take our playoff woes in stride as a function of small sample size, bad luck, and the unpredictability of the post season and simultaneously excoriate the Yankees for choking, not having good chemistry, etc.
I hate the Yankees and think they’ve made way too many mistakes over the past few years, but let’s not turn this into a morality play.
Craig
Wow, I hope the public library gets that book. I don’t want to buy it, but as a staunch Yankee hater I sure would like to read it. The excerpt was great, thanks for the link.
I don’t really buy the chemistry thing myself. What I’ll say is that there probably is a correlation between “nice guys” and guys who play good defense, as Bill James has speculated. A good defensive team will usually have good chemistry unless they can’t hit at all.
I agree with you there Mac. I suspect a lot of the bad blood on teams with “bad chemistry” begins with mental errors in the field, which inevitably leads people to not trust their teammates. Contrast this with a team that just isn’t hitting well. For that team, the cards simply aren’t falling right. Bad defense is frequently attributable to mental errors and lollygagging. You can’t be as mad at a guy in a slump as you can be at a guy who doesn’t hustle.
“Catch the ball!” – Mariano Rivera to Kenny Lofton
Anybody see the picture of Rocker on the ESPN.com MLB frontpage? It’s meant to be a nice article but he looks downright crazy in that photograph…
Chemistry is a lot of psychobabble. In “Ball Four” Jim Bouton talked about how the old Yankess hated each other but still kicked everyone’s ass. Chemistry is nice, but overrated. And unless you have actually played or been in a clubhouse, I don’t think someone is really qualified to to talk about the internal dynamics of a major league team.