Game 94: Flashing Lights

In the three years my two friends and I had our Yankees Saturday package, we were only in our seats one time when the first pitch was thrown. The trek typically began from my apartment on the Upper West Side and it's tough to get three hungover dudes up, showered, out the door, on the subway, through the turnstiles, up into the upper deck in time for a 1:00pm start. We never left before the game ended, we just had real issues with getting there on time.

But August 4th, 2007, we decided we absolutely had be seated in Section 7, Row M, seats 15-17 before Phil Hughes through his first pitch. We took it somewhat easy the night before, got up early, ate breakfast and hopped on the train by noon. We were milling around outside the stadium at 12:45 and were in line to get beers when the National Anthem came on. It was a balmy summer day, probably near 90, and I remember removing my hat and listening to the recording play as the line momentarily stood still.

Phil Hughes worked a 1-2-3 first inning and after Derek Jeter singled and Bobby Abreu drew a walk, Alex Rodriguez came to the plate looking for his 500th career home run. This was the one and only reason we had been anxious to get there early - the chance that he came to the plate in the first inning.

He had gone eight games since his last homer and each night, what stood out - as it did during Jeter's pursuit of Gehrig - were the countless camera flashes that would go off when he was at the plate. Although the electricity surrounding each at bat - both literally and figuratively - had diminished by that Saturday afternoon, there was still a palpable sense of anticipation in the stands.

It wasn't there for long, because on the first pitch off of Kyle Davies, he launched a high, hooking drive right down the left field line. A-Rod was leaning on his right side, staring at the ball through his sunglasses to see if it would stay fair, but from our perfectly positioned seats, it was already obvious that it was gone.

As Joe Posnanski beautifully detailed earlier today, the milestone home run numbers have lost much of their luster over the past 20 or so years, but it didn't feel like it to us at that point. Just by shear luck, that homer came on a Saturday home game and we had the chance to witness something that, even though it's less rare than it used to be, still doesn't happen very often.

Just under two years, ninety-nine homers and some image-shattering PED revelations later, A-Rod is on the cusp of another big, round number. He hit his first Major League homer against the Royals and his 499th, 500th and 599th against them too. He has three homers in 10 plate appearances (seven ABs) against tonight's starter, Brian Bannister. He will be facing Davies - the man who served up #500 - tomorrow and Anthony "career 2.6HR/9IP" Lerew on Sunday. Perhaps his search for 600 will drag on like the quest for 500 did, but it seems likely that he'll pull it off sometime this weekend. If he does it tonight, you can be sure it will happen under plenty of flashing lights.

As you recall, you know I love to show off,
But you never thought that I would take it this far,
What do you know? Flashing lights, lights,
What do you know? Flashing lights, lights.

Yankee Lineup:

Brett Gardner LF
Derek Jeter SS
Mark Teixeira 1B
Alex Rodriguez 3B
Robinson Cano 2B
Jorge Posada DH
Curtis Granderson CF
Francisco Cervelli C
Colin Curtis RF

RHP A.J. Burnett

A.J. Burnett RHP

9 Days Until Spring Training: Roger Maris

In a perfect world, Mantle would have been the one to break Babe Ruth's single season home run record. Instead it was an aloof North Dakota native named Roger Maris who didn't come up with the Yankees, wasn't comfortable in New York, didn't get along with the media, and was never fully embraced by the fans.

Maris was signed by the Indians in 1953 for $5,000 and chose the path of professional baseball over a standing offer for a scholarship to Oklahoma State. In his first full season as a minor leaguer, Maris was assigned to the B-level Keokuk Kernels of the Illinois-Indiana-Iowa league. It was there that manager Jo Jo White taught him how to pull the ball and transformed from a solid hitter for average to a bona fide home run threat. That year, Maris hit 32 round trippers in 134 games and made his first significant strides towards becoming a Big Leaguer.

He made his debut on Opening Day 1957 for the Indians and hit the ground running with a 3 for 5 effort against the White Sox. The following day, he hit his first Major League home run, a go-ahead grand slam in the top of the 11th inning.

Maris was the starting center fielder for Indians in '57 but played all three OF positions, appearing in 116 games in total. He left his high batting averages in the minor leagues, hitting only .235 but his 14 home runs helped him to be a better than league average hitter (105 OPS+).

During the 1958 season, Maris was dealt to the A's for, among others, the immortal Woodie Held. Maris doubled his home run output from the previous year to 28 but hit only 19 doubles, saw his on base percentage dip below .300 and his OPS+ drop to 97. In 1959 he was transitioned to right field and began to put it all together at the plate, hitting .273/.359/.464 (123 OPS+) and was rewarded with a selection to the All-Star team.

The Yankees were tantalized by Maris' left handed power and were looking to give their team a boost after a third place finish in '59. They sent World Series hero Don Larsen, their two starting corner outfielders from the previous season, Hank Bauer and Norm Siebern along with 25 year old first baseman Marv Thornberry to Kansas City in exchange for Maris, Joe DeMaestri and Ken Hadley.

As he did in his first game in Cleveland, Maris made a great first impression as a Yankee, smacking two homers and a double in his debut against the Red Sox. He went on to win the AL MVP that season, nudging out Mickey Mantle by a scant 3 points in the voting. They had similar years at the plate but Maris, batting behind Mantle, drove in 18 more runs in 66 fewer plate appearances.

While the writers were willing to recognize Maris' accomplishments, many fans refused to embrace him as a True Yankee®. The Bombers were still very much Mickey Mantle's team and Maris' icy relationship with the New York media only served to further extend that perception.

While some still hold Maris' single season record up as the all-time mark, 1961 was far from a normal year in baseball and comes with it's own share of caveats.

Before 'the 61 season began, the AL expanded from eight to ten teams, adding the Los Angeles Angels and the Washington Senators by way of an expansion draft. Both teams selected Yankees with their first picks; the Angels took Eli Grba and the Senators claimed Bobby Shantz. The Yanks also lost Duke Maas, Dale Long, Bob Cerv, Ken Hunt, Bud Zipfel. The expansion draft weakened the overall talent pool in the league fairly significantly, but despite the pillaging, the Yankees were among the teams least affected.

That same season, the schedule was lengthened from 154 to 162 games. Commissioner Ford C. Frick, initially announced that in order to break Babe Ruth's record, it would have to be done in 154 games. He said:

Any player who hit more than sixty home runs during his club’s first 154 games would be recognized as having established a new record. However, if the player does not hit more than sixty until after his club has played 154 games, there would have to be some distinctive mark in the record books to show that Babe Ruth’s record was set under a 154 game schedule and the total of more than sixty was compiled while a 162 game schedule was in effect.

This was met with strong media backlash. The Sporting News placed it at #15 of the "most shameful acts in baseball history" and columnist Leonard Koppett called the decision "a remarkably foolish thing".

The prevailing wisdom at the time said the decision was prompted by Frick's loyalty to Ruth which could be traced back to Frick's days as a newspaper man. Frick had ghostwritten for Ruth in the past, allowing Ruth to "cover" every world series from 1921-1936 and wrote glowing columns about Ruth during his time with the New York Evening Journal.

Regardless of his perceived bias, Frick was making a logical choice. The tag of single season is rather arbitrary and it was clearly easier to reach 60 home runs given 8 extra games to say nothing of the substantially thinner pitching that resulted from expansion. Frick was stuck with two difficult choices: keep two separate rule books for each season length or give all players who came after 1961 an unfair advantage in breaking counting stat records. It was popular at the time, but his choice of the latter allowed one of the most hallowed records in sports to fall under dubious circumstances.

Maris' pursuit of the record wasn't especially popular with some living legends of the game either. Legendary second baseman Rogers Hornsby said at the time, "It would be a disappointment if Ruth's home run record were bested by a .270 hitter."

Partially because of the controversy surrounding his quest for 61, Maris was heckled and even had objects thrown at him on the field. He received hate mail, death threats and claimed his hair fell out "in clumps" as the season progressed. He had 59 HR after 154 games and hit his 61st on the last day of the season in the home half of the fourth inning against the Red Sox.

Maris spent five more seasons with the Yankees but his peak had decidedly past. While he was an above average hitter each of those five years, Maris never hit more than 33 home runs in a season and missed large chunks of 1963 and 1965 with injuries. He was ultimately traded after the 1966 season to the Cardinals in exchange for Charley Smith.

Despite breaking one of the most hallowed sports records of all time, Maris remained sour about the experience. During an interview at the 1980 All-Star game, he said:

They acted as though I was doing something wrong, poisoning the record books or something. Do you know what I have to show for 61 home runs? Nothing. Exactly nothing.

He passed away 5 years later from Hodgkin's Lymphoma at the age of 51.

Maris was a victim of our casting. Despite the fact that sports are unscripted, we still expect the right characters to come out on top. Mickey Mantle was the former farmhand, Yankee legend, the Hall of Famer, the rags to riches story from Oklahoma. He partied with the rat pack, Joe D. and Marylin Monroe, and had the key to the city. He was supposed to be the one to break Babe Ruth's record. Maris was the ostracized Kansas City transplant, who should have came up short. But that's not the way life works and while Maris' peak was far too short to earn him a spot in Cooperstown, he has a place in Monument Park.

Jeter, Rose, Rodriguez & Record Projections

The question of whether or not Derek Jeter will pass Pete Rose's all-time hit mark is not a new one. From what I can find on these here internets, Rob Neyer addressed the possibility in a mailbag back in 2006 as Jeter was approaching 2,000 hits and was, like he is now, slightly outpacing Rose based on seasonal age and number of hits accumulated. It came up again in 2008 as he neared 2,500 hits and probably a few times in between.

Since then, essentially nothing has changed except the people who bring up the question - usually not bloggers but relative outsiders who haven't heard it discussed ad nasuem already. Back in that 2006 Neyer mailbag it was a reader named Yehuda Hyman and yesterday it was the pinch hitter at LoHud named Lucas Vanderwarker. Lucas's post got picked up over at Baseball Think Factory and Neyer got in on the action again, adding some new relevant assumptions to the equation:

Now, let's think about how Derek Jeter's career is likely to play out. One, everyone seems to think that Jeter will retire as a Yankee; that they'll do anything keep him around and that he won't be interested in playing elsewhere. Two, he's a shortstop. There's essentially no such thing as a 42-year-old shortstop. Three, the Yankees have Mark Teixeira under contract through 2016, when Jeter will be 42. They've also got Alex Rodriguez under contract through 2017, when Jeter will be 43.

David Pinto also chimed in, offering up Robin Yount as a comparable who, as a 35 year old was over 100 hits ahead of Rose but played only two more seasons and finished with 3,142 in total.

As Rose said Joe Posnanski, "You tell Derek the first 3,000 are easy". Of course, the implication is not that they're actually easy, but they're a lot easier than the next 1,256, which, as every other person ever to have played the game has figured out, is a true statement.

Jeter is 35 and a half years old and although we've seen very few indications to the contrary, the Cap'n is not invincible. No one is.

I learned this the hard way last year when I took issue with Nate Silver's projected home run totals for Alex Rodriguez, which predicted he'd end up with 730. I eventually ventured a guess as to what his career home run tally would be. I used an exhaustive 8 step methodology and arrived at the number 792. That involved a prediction of 42 for the 2009 season.

Much to my chagrin, not even two weeks later A-Rod was out in Colorado having surgery to repair a torn hip labrum, missed over a month of the season and had to hit two home runs in the same inning in Game 162 just to reach 30. Not only that, but his hip injury also cast serious doubt on his long term health.

While it's still a distinct possibility that A-Rod breaks Barry Bonds' Hank Aaron's record, it doesn't seem nearly as likely as it did just a year ago. But the picture is a lot rosier than it was the day after he had surgery. And that likelihood will probably fluctuate countless more times before he either breaks the record or retires.

I understand why fans like to talk about these far-flung possibilities and we are outrageously lucky to have two players on the Yankees pursing perhaps the two most hallowed career offensive records in Baseball. But at the same time, I'm not interested in reassessing what a projection system - using a bunch of players as comparables who, by definition didn't break the record - predicts the odds are that A-Rod or Jeter will reach that milestone every time one of them passes a round number, gets injured or the offseason news cycle grinds to a halt.

Projections can be a very useful tool in the right context but these kinds of records get broken on a very infrequent basis and only then by extreme statistical outliers. And besides, the left side of the infield still has a long, long road ahead.

Yanks Hit Their Numbers, Take Regular Season Finale

You know what time it is. Time for the bullet points, Fackers:

• A.J. Burnett pitched fairly well today, giving up two runs (one earned) over 5 innings. Evan Longoria homered off Burnett in the first inning and also came around to score on a passed ball in the fifth. Burnett worked into and out of trouble in third and fifth but escaped largely unscathed, getting Willy Aybar to stirke out to end both threats. He threw 84 pitches and allowed 7 hits, but only walked one batter. It was the 100th win of of his career and the 13th of his up and down first season in Pinstripes.
  
  
• After Burnett, David Robertson, Joba Chamberlain, Phil Coke, Phil Hughes and Mariano Rivera all pitched without allowing a single baserunner between them and recorded a strikeout apiece.
  
  
• The Yanks were held scoreless in 8 out of their 9 frames, but the top of the 6th was a duesy. Ten Yanks crossed the plate, and seven of them were driven in by A-Rod, which is a new American League record. In between the blasts, Johnny Damon added an RBI double and Freddy Guzman scored with the bases loaded when Andy Sonnanstine couldn't handle a tapper from Jose Molina.
  
  
• A-Rod's season ended as spectacularly as it began. The first pitch he saw this year turned into a three run homer and the last one ended up as a grand slam. He came into the game with 28 HRs and 93 RBIs and amazingly, incredibly, rounded out a 30HR, 100RBI effort for the 12th straight season in the 6th inning alone. The salami also tied him for 8th place all-time with Mark McGwire at 583.
  
  
• The Yanks hit win number 103, tying their mark from 2002 and broke and set their single season home run total with #'s 243 & 244 off the bat of A-Rod.
  
  
• The only person who didn't get to a dangling milestone was Mark Teixeira, who was stymied at 39 homers and will end the season tied with Carlos Pena for the AL lead. The Rays walked him in front of A-Rod before the grand slam which seems kind of weak but A-Rod made them pay.
  
  
• George Steinbrenner made a visit to the clubhouse before the game and saw the Yanks play in person for the first time since July 29th.
  
  
• And in AL Central News, the Twins and Tigers both won and will square off in a play-in game on Tuesday. That game should be good theater on what would have been an eerily quiet night in sports and helpful for the Yanks as well.
  
  
• Justin Verlander was dominant until the 8th inning for the Tigers. He gave up three runs in the frame but Fernando Rodney bailed him out and then closed the game down as the Tigers won 5-3.
  
  
• With the Tiger's victory already in the books the Twins came fairly close to gagging away the victory in the 6th inning. Pavano gave up three runs in the frame before getting yanked. Ron Gardenhire burned through three more pitchers to get the final two outs and at one point Kansas City brought the tying run at the plate via a HBP. As they are so adept at doing, the Royals blew the chance and the Twins went on to win 13-4.

See y'all tomorrow, there's more football to watch.

Number of Days Until Spring Training: Roger Maris (#9)

It wasn't supposed to be Roger Maris. He didn't come up through the Yankees system, as he was acquired in the trade that sent Don Larsen to the Kansas City A's in 1959. He didn't get along with the New York media, and was considered surly.

Even though Maris won the AL MVP in his first year with the Yankees, they were still considered Mickey Mantle's team in 1961. Maris was an outsider and not considered a True Yankee(TM). In a perfect world, Mantle would have been the one to break Babe Ruth's single season home run record. Fate did not agree and Mantle suffered a leg infection late in the season that hindered him from topping the mark. He ended up with 54HR.

Before the 1961 season, the AL expanded from eight to ten teams, adding the Los Angeles Angels and the Washington Senators by way of an expansion draft. Both teams selected Yankees with their first picks; the Angels took Eli Grba and the Senators claimed Bobby Shantz. The Yanks also lost Duke Maas, Dale Long, Bob Cerv, Ken Hunt, Bud Zipfel. The expansion draft weakened the overall talent pool in the league fairly significantly, but despite the pillaging, the Yankees were among the teams least affected.

That same season, the schedule was lengthened from 154 to 162 games. Commissioner Ford C. Frick, initially announced that in order to break Babe Ruth's record, it would have to be done in 154 games. He said:

Any player who hit more than sixty home runs during his club’s first 154 games would be recognized as having established a new record. However, if the player does not hit more than sixty until after his club has played 154 games, there would have to be some distinctive mark in the record books to show that Babe Ruth’s record was set under a 154 game schedule and the total of more than sixty was compiled while a 162 game schedule was in effect.

This was met with strong media backlash. The Sporting News placed it at #15 of the most shameful acts in baseball history and columnist Leonard Koppett called the decision "a remarkably foolish thing". The negative reaction was certainly magnified by the fact that this was occurring in the first year of the extended schedule and the first year after the expansion.

The prevailing wisdom at the time said the decision was prompted by Frick's loyalty to Ruth which could be traced back to Frick's days as a newspaper man. Frick had ghostwritten for Ruth in the past, allowing Ruth to "cover" every world series from 1921-1936 and wrote glowing columns about him in the New York Evening Journal.

[Ed. Note: I leaned pretty heavily on an artcile by John Carvalho called "Haunted by the Babe: Frick's Columns About Ruth". The above links don't do it justice, so you can access the PDF here.]

Personally, I can't understand why this was such a big deal. Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs in 154 games. The tag of "single season" is arbitrary. It should have to be broken in the same amount of games. I guess people at the time felt like by keeping two separate sets of records, baseball was divorcing itself from it's storied past.

The alternative they chose, however, diluted the Babe's most prized record, and allowed for it to be broken during a longer season against weaker competition.

Aside from his boorish persona, Maris just wasn't a truly great player (see to the right). He had an extremely sharp career peak, winning back to back AL MVPs with the Yankees, but only made two All-Star games outside of those two seasons. Legendary second baseman Rogers Hornsby said at the time, "It would be a disappointment if Ruth's home run record were bested by a .270 hitter."

Maris had 59 HR after 154 games and hit his 61st on the last day of the season in the home half of the fourth inning against the Red Sox.

Due in no small way to the controversey surrounding his quest for 61, Maris was heckled and even had objects thrown at hit on the field. He said he received hate mail, death threats and claimed his hair fell out "in clumps" as the season progressed.

Despite breaking one of the most hallowed sports records of all time, Maris remained sour about the experience. During an interview at the 1980 All-Star game, he said:

They acted as though I was doing something wrong, poisoning the record books or something. Do you know what I have to show for 61 home runs? Nothing. Exactly nothing.

Maris was a victim of our casting. Despite the fact that sports are unscripted, we still expect the right characters to come out on top. Mickey Mantle was the former farmhand, Yankee legend, the Hall of Famer, the rags to riches story from Oklahoma. He partied with the rat pack, Joe D. and Marylin Monroe, and had the key to the city. Maris was the ostracized Kansas City transplant, but primarily on the strength on his 1961 season, Maris has his spot in Monument Park as well.

[Ed Note: 61* is a pretty good movie despite having Billy Crystal's annoying fingerprints all over it.]