Good morning Fackers. Hopefully everyone had an excellent weekend of food, family, tradition, presents and of course drinking (and if not, Chinese food and movies). It was a busy one for me, starting with a friends party on Wednesday night, then a Christmas Eve Wigilia at my aunt's house, Christmas Day at my Mom's and a huge annual gathering with my father's side of the family yesterday, scheduled squarely over the Giants' game miserable and embarrassing failure. Luckily there was no TV so I was spared the agony.
Amidst all the festivities last year, including a trip up from New York, I managed to find some time to write the first post for this blog (well, technically the second). Fast forward exactly one thousand five hundred posts and you'd arrive at this one.
I didn't have a specific goal in mind when I started Fack Youk other than to write about the Yankees and when we started off, it was much less Bronx-centric than it is now. We didn't have the Casey Stengel banner picture, the knockoff Red Sox font, the motto that turned away countless advertisers, the black and white photo policy and aside from me, the cast of characters here was totally different.
There was a lot I didn't realize about writing back then. I didn't understand that it wasn't as much about what you say but how you say it. And that who is saying it matters even more. The most important thing about maintaining a blog is establishing a voice and not coincidentally, it's the hardest thing to do. A lot harder than I expected.
The humble thing to do would be to say that we've come further than I could have imagined over the past year, but that's not really true. Success is easy to imagine. You write a couple of posts, people like them, you get a few links and it's easy to imagine that in no time you'll be rolling in pageviews and ad revenue. In reality, what look like ramps to untold amounts of traffic are really just spikes that return a certain baseline in a few days (at most). What makes a blog successful is the day to day grind.
As our pal Craig (then only of Shysterball) told me when I reached out to him for advice shortly after this whole thing began:
Work on pacing yourself and putting out regular, predictable content that people can come back to on a regular basis, and soon they'll bookmark you or put you in their reader, and from there things grow steadily.
The thing that I truly could not have imagined is how much content we produced over the past year - over four posts a day, including weekends. Those are the kind of details that you usually gloss over when you set out to accomplish something (even if you don't know what that something is). There was no way I could have possibly fathomed the amount of hours that I'd spend playing the role of Sisyphus in an attempt to put something new and interesting on the top of a web page. It's somewhat ironic that in a medium so instantaneous, true success and progress takes a long time.
Thankfully, the Yankees had about as good of a year as could be expected and have continued with a great offseason thus far, which has made all of the effort put into this blog seem more worthwhile. We all got awfully lucky in that respect.
Last but certainly not least, thanks to everyone for stopping by. There are a ridiculous amount of Yankee blogs out there and the fact that you choose to come here is what makes it worth putting in all the effort. Hopefully this time next year we'll have more to celebrate and be thankful for. In the meantime, we'll continue with the vulgarity and analysis.
Just a heads up, Ken Burns' Baseball is on the MLB Network today. It started at 6:00 this morning and runs until tomorrow at 5:30AM.
It was our intention to pursue the game — and its memories and myths — across the expanse of American history. We quickly developed an abiding conviction that the game of baseball offered a unique prism through which one could see refracted much more than the history of games won and lost, teams rising and falling, rookies arriving and veterans saying farewell. The story of baseball is also the story of race in America, of immigration and assimilation; of the struggle between labor and management, of popular culture and advertising, of myth and the nature of heroes, villains, and buffoons; of the role of women and class and wealth in our society. The game is a repository of age-old American verities, of standards against which we continually measure ourselves, and yet at the same time a mirror of the present moment in our modern culture — including all of our most contemporary failings.
But we were hardly prepared for the complex emotions the game summoned up. The accumulated stories and biographies, life-lessons and tragedies, dramatic moments and classic confrontations that we encountered daily began to suggest even more compelling themes. As Jacques Barzun has written, "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball."
My plan: turn it on and hide the remote. Sure beats watching A Christmas Story over and over again.
Christmas is a time to be with family, so as we take it slow here at Fack Youk over the next couple days here are two family related baseball notes:
Mark Feinsand reports that former Yankee third base coach Larry Bowa played in role in steering his nephew, Nick Johnson, back to the Bronx. Bowa encouraged Johnson to return, citing the uniqueness of the Yankee experience and the opportunity to win. Perhaps most noteworthy about this is that Bowa seemingly hasn't completely soured on the organization. He left for LA with Joe Torre two years ago and was clearly on Torre's side in the aftermath of that messy breakup.
Earlier this year we poked a little fun at Gregg Zaun and his website. Zaun's uncle is one time Yankee and longtime Oriole Rick Dempsey. Dempsey apparently is trying to one-up his nephew on the embarassment scale and has released his own Christmas album. Dempsey's got a long way to go to replace my favorite Christmas song though:
Well, Black Friday has come and almost gone. Get your shopping done yet? I haven't. Why start today when there are still twenty eight shopping days until Christmas? And how about the irony in the biggest retail bonanza day of the year having appropriated the name originally given to the day in 1929 that the stock market crashed, ushering in the Great Depression?
Anyway, I hope no senior citizen greeters were trampled to death by charging, angry mobs this morning, rushing to get their shopping done before the sun rose. It would be an improvement from last year. It's bad enough to have be in a work at four in the morning the day after a holiday, it's quite another to have to fear for one's life in doing so.
A couple tidbits of Yankee news that you've doubt heard already. Shelley Duncan, outrighted last week, has elected free agency. And Bob Sheppard, absent from the Yankee public address job for the past two plus years, has officially announced his retirement. I knew it was a long shot for Mr. Sheppard to make it back, but it certainly is sad to know that "The Voice of God" will never be heard live in the new Stadium. We wish them both the best in the future endeavors.
That's it for today Fackers. We'll probably ease our way back into the swing of things after the long holiday weekend.
Shortly before Christmas last year - on December 23rd to be exact - I was sitting down for lunch/dinner at my company's holiday party at the 21 Club, cutting into a piece of prime rib when I felt my phone vibrate. I didn't want to be rude but I fished my phone out of my pocket with my non-fork hand and stole a glance at the incoming text message. It was from my friend Joe: "Yankees close to signing Teixeira".
My face must have betrayed something when I read the message because my co-worker Greg nodded his head towards me and went, "What's up?".
I replied, "Holy shit, I think the Yankees are going to sign Mark Teixeira".
I put down my knife and fork and stared at the middle of the table shaking my head. I honestly couldn't believe it. Maybe it was just a rumor. They had already locked up CC Sabathia and A.J. Burnett. Did Brian Cashman and the Yanks really have the balls to orchestrate an eleventh hour coup for the most coveted position player on the market? Over the next hour or so, the texts kept flowing in from friends and cousins and college roommates, each one more certain than the last.
After the party, the other big Yankees fans from my office and I huddled up at the bar downstairs, having drinks on the company tab as groups of people would stand up and take turns belting out Christmas carols printed on a Salvation Army pamphlet they must have been handing out in exchange for donations outside. Between the renditions of Frosty the Snowman and sips of Macallan 18, we tried to get our heads around the fact that, amidst the faltering economy, the Yankees had just sent a message to their fans and to the rest of baseball: "We want to win a World Series that badly"
I got up early the next morning to head back upstate for Christmas with the family. I loaded up my car in the near-freezing rain, drove up the Westside Highway and crossed the George Washington Bridge, thinking I was going to beat the traffic upstate. I turned onto the Palisades Parkway and was met with a sea of taillights which bluntly informed me that this wasn't going to be a smooth getaway I had envisioned. The highway was a sheet of ice.
After 15 minutes of not moving one inch, I put the car in park, unbuckled my seatbelt and took out my iPhone to thumb through my Google Reader. At that point I needed something - anything - to keep my mind off the fact that I was hungover and stuck in standstill traffic in New Jersey to which there was no end in sight.
One of the first posts I came across this one from Shysterball and suffice it to say, it sort of blew my mind. An incredibly poignant blockquote from Will Leitch about Dock Ellis' no-hitter on acid and two beautifully dovetailed paragraphs from Craig summing up what writing about sports should really be about. It couldn't have been more up my alley.
And that's when I decided that I was going to start a blog. Well, I had technically already started one. I reserved a domain name wrote one post about trying to decide who to root for when the Red Sox played the Rays in the ALCS a little while back but that was the only thing on there.
Then on Christmas Day, after our visiting relatives had departed, I sat down and pounded out 1000 words on the Yankees most recent acquisition on my laptop. I drafted an email entitled "The Fack Youk Manifesto" to five or six of my friends informing them of my intentions, and said:
I realize that there is like an 85% chance that this never really goes anywhere, then dies a slow death from neglect, but there's that 15% that we can carve out this little space for our thoughts, all contribute and make it interesting/entertaining enough for some other people to check it out. I talk enough sports with you guys and hear interesting stuff worthy of a blog post and it makes me think that we could put that stuff to use and concentrate it here.
A lot has changed since then. Joe and Will don't really contribute much anymore because of the demands of studying for the bar exam and fascist corporate internet policies. I got unimaginably lucky to find Matt in the comments section, who, is not only a talented writer with a great sense of the history of the Yankees, but a great dude with similar musical tastes.
On the shortest of notice, I handed him the reigns to the blog for almost a full week back in May when I left for a road trip, which coincided nicely with a 9 game winning steak by the Yanks. He didn't miss a beat - which was far more than I had any right to expect - and the site has been markedly better ever since.
In the months since then, we've previewed and recapped every game (except for the three against the Blue Jays 4th of July weekend) and churned out almost 800 posts between us, which is very nearly 5 per day, including weekends.
I'd be lying if I said there wasn't a huge sense of personal validation involved in the Yankees winning the World Series for me. Since the playoffs began, our work has been recognized by a lot of people and we've more than doubled our average daily traffic. We've received even more kind emails and insightful comments from you guys than usual, which makes this all seem worthwhile. We've got some other recognition from well-respected baseball writers that I really couldn't have imagined when I wrote that first post on the signing of Mark Teixeira.
I've devoted what can only be described as an unhealthy and perhaps inadvisable amount of time reading about baseball in order to make my writing for this site as good as possible.
Unfortunately, that not-so-indirectly led to me getting laid off from my last job - the one that brought me to that company party in the beginning of this post. I wasn't going to regret the decision either way because I've spent the last six months doing something that makes me want to get out of bed in the morning as opposed to smothering myself to death with my pillow like my last job.
I highly doubt I have a career ahead of me as a writer, but seeing someone like Craig, whose work I have a lot of respect for, make that jump just two days ago is quite inspiring. Regardless of where it goes from here, I'm incredibly proud of what we've managed to do with this site in terms of traffic and recognition but mostly in terms of content. 105,000+ unique visitors and 270,000+ pageviews later (and counting), here we are.
Now I'm back in Albany, not far from where I grew up, living with two of my good friends from high school, doing something that's barely profitable at all which in no way shape or form is a real job, despite the fact that I treat it like one. In some ways, it has come full circle.
Tomorrow, Matt, a few of my buddies and I are going down to the parade, so if you are going to be there and want to meet up, use my email address on the left side of the site.
After that, I don't know. This blog isn't going to disappear regardless of what happens, but we're going to have to scale back the content here if I ever want to get my shit together. There will be still be posts - probably much more off-topic material - but they won't be going up at 9:00, 11:00, 1:00, 3:00 & 5:00 all offseason, obviously.
If you've made it this far, I'd suggest you subscribe to our RSS Feed via Google Reader (164 people can't be wrong!). It will tell you when there is a new post so you don't have to come to the site to check. It will hurt our pageviews but help your sanity.
So thanks for reading this year. Thanks for your great comments and signed baseballs and for filling in the gaps where our knowledge is lacking. Thanks to those other bloggers who were kind enough to link, especially Joe from River Ave. Blues, Craig, Jason from IIATMS, Kevin Kaduk from Big League Stew, Ross from New Stadium Insider, Pete Abe, Rob Neyer (once), and even A.J. Daulerio, you know, back when Deadspin used to link to other blogs. A big thanks to Cliff who helped me a lot behind the scenes and Boston Bren who is mostly responsible for the site layout. There are others I'm forgetting, so I apologize for the omissions.
So, before we all disperse, there of course has to be a song. And it's only fitting that what is probably the de facto band of Fack Youk provides the soundtrack to this post.
See you around.
Jay
Say you want to be a rolling stone, Get your sail out in the wind, Get out on the highway and let 'er roll on, Roll on back to someplace you ain't never been.
When I was younger I was hard to hold, Seem like I was always goin', Whichever way the wind would blow, Now that travelin' spirit calls me again.
It has literally been a long offseason; at least a week longer than the thirteen previous ones. It wasn't just that the Yankees didn't make the postseason, they were pretty much dead to rights when they fell 12.5 games back of the Rays and 7 games back of the Red Sox on August 31st. They hadn't even been within 5 games of the division lead since July 31st. The didn't lead the division at any point during the year.
I was lucky enough to attend each of the last three games at the Old Stadium, but by then it was completely apparent that the Yanks weren't going to the playoffs although they hadn't been mathematically eliminated quite yet. It was a great spectacale to behold, but on the field, they were dead men walking.
Despite the fact that missing the playoffs represented a monstrous failure to the organization, the outlook on September 29th was pretty rosy. Dropping Giambi, Mussina, Pavano and Abreu represented a huge amount of payroll relief and the New Stadium was set to bring in a massive influx of new revenue. Sure enough, the Yanks reeled in the top three free agents on the market and significantly upgraded their roster by Christmas.
All this drama has made the chasm between meaningful baseball games pretty excruciating for us Fackers. We don't want to be reduced to talking about bullshit gossipy topics like Jeter's house or A-Rod's revolting taste in women, but unfortunatley those were the most compelling things at the time. I don't think it's a whole lot better to get wrapped up in the ups and downs of Spring Training.
Is anyone else just ready for some baseball that actually matters?
Good morning Fackers. Hopefully everyone had an excellent weekend of food, family, tradition, presents and of course drinking (and if not, Chinese food and movies). It was a busy one for me, starting with a friends party on Wednesday night, then a Christmas Eve Wigilia at my aunt's house, Christmas Day at my Mom's and a huge annual gathering with my father's side of the family yesterday, scheduled squarely over the Giants' 
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