Why is everyone in the New York area pretending to be so outraged at the revelation that Rudy Giuliani amended the Yankees lease in the team’s favor before leaving office? Isn’t that just the logical extension of the crap we were handed all through the fall? I mean, if the Yankees’ pursuit of another World Series victory was really a selfless effort to provide emotional glue for all New Yorkers after Sept. 11, then why shouldn’t George Steinbrenner — who gave so much to the city while receiving so little in return — be given carte blanche to build a new stadium? If the Yankees’ postseason heroics really meant so much to the city, then why shouldn’t a new Yankee Stadium take precedence over schools, churches, subways, or even new twin towers? So many New Yorkers merely risked their lives or devoted their time. Did any of them fork over $120 million for Jason Giambi?
Or, to turn the argument around a bit, how could anyone familiar with Steinbrenner’s or Giuliani’s personal ethics pretend to be surprised at the extent of the sleaziness involved in this deal? From the day in September that the games were resumed, Steinbrenner let Giuliani campaign from a prime box seat in Yankee Stadium on an almost daily basis. Are we now surprised to find out that Giuliani gave Steinbrenner a “Get Out of Jail Free” card to leave New York any time he wants as a payback? And, of course, since what the Yankees have the Mets must have also, Giuliani’s act of moral cowardice stands as one of the most blatant screw-yous ever handed to the working man since Walter O’Malley took the Dodgers to Los Angeles.
Fortunately, for new mayor Michael Bloomberg there’s an excellent and very easy countermeasure to Giuliani’s and Steinbrenner’s greedy tricks: Veto Giuliani’s deal and call Steinbrenner’s bluff. Because, of course, that’s all Steinbrenner’s threat to move the Yankees can ever be, a bluff. This isn’t 1958, and there are no more West Coasts out there for Steinbrenner to move his team to. In the NFL, you can pack up and move from a larger market (say, Los Angeles) to, say, St. Louis without a loss of income. In fact, if you get a juicy enough deal from the city you’re moving into, you might even make money by moving to s smaller market. But Steinbrenner, and for that matter, the Mets’ Fred Wilpon, have no place to go. They’re tied to their enormous local TV revenues, which means they’re tied to the New York area.
There’s no getting around that, and it amazes me that the New York area press and politicians don’t ever seem to understand it. Essentially, they don’t have to offer George Steinbrenner anything at all in order to keep him there; in point of fact, after the Yankees took in an estimated $120 million in postseason ticket and merchandise sales, New Yorkers ought to be asking what Steinbrenner is going to give back in order to maintain such an incredible sweetheart deal. Incredibly, they never do.
Steinbrenner’s only options would be to move the Yankees to Connecticut, but that’s wildly improbable for so many reasons that it doesn’t bear serious discussion. For one thing, there’s no way attendance could be kept up following such a move. For another thing, American League owners would howl, and rightfully so. Who is going to pay money in Cleveland, Minnesota and Seattle to see their team play the Connecticut Yankees? New Jerseyians, God bless them, long ago made it clear that not a penny of public money will go for a new Yankee Stadium, and in any event, there’s no available location that wouldn’t turn a new ballpark into a logistical nightmare.
And if all of these other reasons mean nothing, consider just this one: Why would Major League Baseball — a self-governing body, remember, exempt from most antitrust laws — allow the richest franchise in the game to move to a new stadium which would make it perhaps twice as rich? Let’s hope New York’s new mayor understands this and has the fortitude to stand up to the inevitable temptations Steinbrenner will be waving in front of him. A man who could probably afford to buy the Yankees doesn’t have to jump through hoops to get box seats.
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Question: If Barry Bonds had the personality of Derek Jeter or Sammy Sosa — hell, that’s asking too much, let’s just say what if Barry Bonds wasn’t a total asshole — would anyone deny that he is more than deserving of the five-year, $90 million deal he has just signed with San Francisco? Does anyone doubt that if baseball salaries were predicated on the basis of production, that Bonds already earned a big chunk of that money last season?
OK, you say, but what about his age? Well, the fifth year of that contract isn’t guaranteed, so if Bonds’ production drops off sharply around age 40, the Giants don’t have to get stuck paying him $18 million for that last season. Second, what if Bonds’ home run production should tail off over the next three seasons to a dismal 40 home runs a year. Wouldn’t that leave him with 687 going into the 2005 season? And suppose he hits, say, a lousy 35 in 2005. Would that not bring him to 727? Would anyone care to place a big bet right now that he won’t pass up Hank Aaron’s career record for home runs in 2006 and that ticket sales from that alone wouldn’t pay his entire salary? But that’s not the only bonus that the Giants are going to get for their $90 million. Think of the fuss as Bonds approaches and then surpasses his godfather, Willie Mays? And then the hype when he does the same thing with Babe Ruth’s 715. It’s arguable that a good 40 percent of Bonds’ proposed salary will be made up for just from the revenue generated by these home run chases.
What in the world is the matter with the Colorado Rockies management? Doesn’t someone there have a calculator? If they had signed Bonds, they’d be collecting that extra ticket money by the year 2004.
But all of the home run talk is a little bit beside the point. Isn’t Barry Bonds, along with Alex Rodriguez, one of the two best all-around players in the game? Doesn’t he do a lot to help his team win even when he doesn’t hit home runs? Bonds was arguably the most valuable player in baseball when he was hitting 34 or 33 or 37 home runs per season. He was a remarkably consistent hitter even when his batting average dipped below .300. (In fact, he led the league in On Base Average twice, 1991 and 1995, while hitting below .300.) Cut Bonds’ 2001 home run total, and I’ll still give you a spirited argument that he contributes as much to his team’s winning as, say, Sammy Sosa. Is the contract a gamble for the San Francisco Giants? Well, yes, but it’s not that much a gamble, and frankly, Barry Bonds at age 37 still seems to me like a heck of a bargain.
Fifty or 40, even 20 years ago it was an article of faith that it was a good thing for baseball for the New York Yankees to win, or at least win enough to be competitive. Now, it is just as strong an article of faith that it’s a bad thing; as long as baseball is dominated by its biggest market team, the game can never truly regain the stature it had in times past. The ratings from the recent World Series prove this, or so the argument goes; the fans are never going to come back to the World Series in old-timey numbers till they’re sure the Yankees aren’t going to keep winning it all.
This is double talk, the residue of attitudes coming from the commissioner’s office as the baseball owners get ready to push their revenue-salary cap plans on the players and public.
First of all, the Yankees dominated the game in every one of the so-called golden eras, and that was always considered to be one of the things that made them golden. Second, back when baseball pretty much had the top of the sports pages to itself, the Yankees were generally in the World Series and ratings were just fine.
Third, the World Series is never again going to have those kind of ratings because baseball, once it enters the postseason, becomes a largely localized sport with less national interest than, say, football or basketball, sports that thrive mostly because of national postseason TV money. (In many NFL and NBA cities, just a tiny percentage of local fans even see the regular season games in person.) That, of course, is the subject for another column at another time, but the point is that if the Yankees and Braves didn’t send World Series ratings through the roof, then the A’s and Cardinals or the Cubs and Indians or the Phillies and Twins isn’t going to do it, either.
Nonetheless, the sports press, even a growing segment of the New York sports press, continues to push the premise that it’s bad, bad for baseball for the Yankees to win, and good, good, for Minnesota or the Phillies. As a result, no one takes George Steinbrenner’s whining very seriously anymore, except to note the fact that the old George, who lashed out at his players in Tuesday’s New York Times, is back and whining again. I really don’t think the old George, the classic George of the ’80′s, will ever be back. He’s older, more tired-looking, and infinitely wiser than back in the Billy-Reggie days, and when he complains out loud I think Yankees fans should listen. Well, for a while anyway.
He’s certainly right this time, though the New York sports press doesn’t seem to have caught on to it yet: The Yankees are playing like crap. They’re only two games behind the Red Sox (going into Tuesday’s games), which is often where they are this time of year, and overall the pitching hasn’t been bad, but the team has not been hitting, not a lick, and they’ve lurched from one uninspired performance to the next.
There are those who say, what the heck, what does an owner want? The Yankees have won four times in five years, aren’t they entitled to tail off a bit? Isn’t it likely they’ll straighten out by September? All of which I answer by saying that no team should ever be allowed to get by without its best effort and that I’m happy Steinbrenner has spoken up for the paying customers who are not getting their money’s worth. He has every right — every obligation — to speak up, and as long as this team continues to play like it has, I hope he continues to do so.
Amazingly, Steinbrenner did not criticize Mike Mussina. After all the talk of how the Yankees were “buying” another World Series by obtaining the former Orioles star, Mussina has been a major letdown, another talented player who looks great in the second division but melts down in situations where the games mean something. Instead, Steinbrenner criticized the hitters, and he was absolutely right. In an age when hitting records are broken almost weekly, the Yankees, over the last year and a half, have lost the patience at the plate and the edge that once defined them.
Part of the problem is age and stubbornness: The Paul O’Neill problem needed to be dealt with in the off-season, and now it has resounded with a sickening “pok” — which is, if you don’t watch ballgames in person, the sound a weakly hit ground ball makes as it skips into a happy shortstop’s glove to begin a double play. O’Neill has become a deadly rally-killer, wiping out so many runners on DPs that he often has Yankees fans wishing that in crucial situations he would simply strike out. Which might help if he didn’t then turn and bait the umps, which then take it out on the rest of the batting order.
The fiction that O’Neill can still start, let alone bat in the same spot in the order once occupied by Mickey Mantle and Babe Ruth, is a delusion, but perhaps not a more serious one right now than the Yankees’ cheerful belief that superstar Derek Jeter will pull them out of their tailspin. I’m sorry to say this because he is mine and my daughter’s favorite player, but he is not a superstar.
As I write this, Jeter is hitting .289; he has not hit with significant power for nearly a season and a half (just 15 home runs last year and only five this year); and he has deteriorated into one of the most uninspired defensive shortstops in the league, ranking high in errors and low in range factor. What is so upsetting — or what would be upsetting if Jeter’s performance wasn’t given a nightly free pass from the New York press — is that he is supposed to be at his peak right now. The truth is that he was a much better player two years ago than now.
I’m glad Steinbrenner has spoken up, because I think the game is more interesting, not less, when the Yankees win and threaten to win it all, and right now, payroll or no, I would make them no better than the sixth best team in the league, or at least sixth best when the A’s finally get untracked. All George is guilty of right now is getting there before the press.
What can happen to transform a team that has won the last two World Series — a team that was favored to win a third straight World Series just three weeks ago — into the grieving, pathetic mess that the New York Yankees are as I write this?
I don’t know about you, but what I saw was just about the ugliest 19 games of baseball in a row (I’m counting the first playoff game against the Oakland A’s) that I’ve ever seen. They may be the 19 ugliest games I’ve ever seen, period. I’m really not old enough to have vivid memories of the ’62 Mets, but I know that that team can at least plead that it didn’t have Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams, Jorge Posada, Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte and Mariano Rivera. Some hustling statistician has come up with the information that no team has played so poorly for such a span since the Cleveland Spiders in 1898. This gives the Yankees the distinction of playing the worst baseball in three centuries.
The Yankees aren’t “sluggish,” as Dave Anderson suggested in the New York Times, they’re slugged out. They didn’t “slump,” they dumped. This team hasn’t been coasting, it’s been drifting. This isn’t about the collapse of the starting pitching, but the collapse of a team, from the bullpen to the dugout. What happened to the 2000 Yankees is that they quit; they took off three weeks with pay. All year long the Yankees complained about injuries, and when they finally got the team together physically it was gone mentally. Down the stretch, they didn’t stretch. They played without pride or guts. They played like a team that was satisfied with what it had done in the past.
The 2000 Yankees gave a clinic on how to turn yourself from a winner to a loser. First, they slacked off in the race for home-field advantage throughout the playoffs, as if being the best team in the league was no longer a big deal. They started to feel complacent, and the men who run the team allowed them to feel that way. Complacency is great for dairy cows, poison for ballplayers. After deciding they didn’t care that much about being the best, the Yankees then seemed to collectively decide that starting off the playoffs at home was nothing worth breaking a sweat for. Before you knew it, they were looking back on the astonishing possibility that the only thing that kept them from the greatest collapse in baseball history was that time ran out on them.
Who, we are entitled to ask, is going to snap this team out of its sleepwalk? Not Joe Torre, who doesn’t have it in him to tell David Cone that a 4-14 record and an ERA of 6.91 might be an indicator that he’s slipping, or to tell Paul O’Neill, who hasn’t had an extra base hit in four weeks, that he can no longer cut it hitting in the same spot in the batting order as Babe Ruth. Not any of the players, apparently, who appear incapable of motivating themselves.
Excuse me, did I say “motivate”? That’s not quite the word for what this team can’t do. Chuck Knoblauch, the first second baseman ever to start as a designated hitter because he can’t field or throw, said on Monday that he doubted if his team were capable of turning around in the playoffs. “That scares me a lot,” he said.
I tell you what scares me: that a neurotic whiner like Knoblauch could say something publicly about his team’s chances without someone coming down on him. But Torre won’t make needed changes for fear, he said, of “hurting our confidence.” A team that just went 3-16 has confidence?
And the most appalling part of all this is that George Steinbrenner doesn’t see anything wrong with it. “Hey, man, we’re the New York Yankees,” he said in an interview last week. “We don’t have to win. No team has to win.” A player doubts if his team can win again? The owner says his team “doesn’t have to win”? What in the world has happened here? Uh, yes, George, this is the New York Yankees, the team that won one out of every four championships last century. If you don’t intend to field a team that really, really wants to win this year — if you’re a little tired of winning — simply let us know so we can make plans to see the Newark Bears. Or, at least, knock a couple of bucks off Yankee ticket prices.
This kind of thinking had best be nipped in the bud before it spreads. You don’t have to be a Yankees fan to agree with me. Trust me: If this can happen to the Yankees, it can happen to anybody.
Oh, my predictions. Andy Pettitte has just done his usual playoff thing and the series is tied 1-1. First, the Giants will beat the Mets in four, the Braves, now down 2-0, will storm back to win, then lose to the Giants in four. The Yankees will win on Friday night and wrap up the first round against Oakland on Saturday. After that, they’ll win a tough seven-game series with Seattle for the American League pennant. Hey, man, these are the New York Yankees.
Mendy’s, the real-life Murray Hill restaurant made famous on “Seinfeld,”
is about as authentic a kosher deli as you can get. It’s got
excellent matzoh ball soup and it’s closed on Friday nights for
Sabbath. Satisfied? So when a Semitic superstar is indoctrinated onto
Mendy’s “Jewish Athletes Wall of Fame,” you know he has received the
rubber stamp of an authority almost as high as the Big Guy himself.
Only problem is, there are very few fellas on the wall. Sure, you’ve got
your baseball heroes of old — Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax — and
All-American poster boy Mark Spitz. But the rest of the mural space is
taken up by significantly lesser figures; indeed almost a third of the
names belong not to athletes but to coaches and local sportscasters,
like Len Berman and Bill Mazer. (There’s also a hilariously defaced Marv
Albert, whose name has been scratched out.)
We Jews are not exactly renowned for our athletic prowess — we’re
usually better at the management side of things. The four major
professional sports leagues in North America know from what I’m talking
about, as three of them have Jewish commissioners (Major League
Baseball’s Bud Selig, the NBA’s David Stern and the NHL’s Gary
Bettman).
But recent developments in the sports landscape indicate that Jews are
through wandering the athletic desert: Suddenly, bar-mitzvah boys are
kicking ass on the diamond, the hardwood and the ice and in the ring. Soon,
Mendy’s might have to commission a new muralist.
Consider:
- There are currently nine Jews on Major League Baseball rosters –
almost enough for a minyan. Detroit outfielder Gabe Kapler enjoyed a
much-heralded rookie season and three other chosen people — Toronto
outfielder Shawn Green and catchers Mike Lieberthal of Philadelphia and
Brad Ausmus of Detroit — were chosen for their respective leagues’
All-Star teams, a religious record of some sort.
- Green is considered one of baseball’s future superstars, and rumors
have circulated in Gotham City that George Steinbrenner is eying Blue
Jay Green in Yankee pinstripes, hoping to put Jewish fannies in his
seats.
- Baseball will unveil its All-Century team next week during the World
Series, and three Jews are on the ballot. Pitcher Sandy Koufax is a
lock to make the squad, and this summer Koufax was a Sports Illustrated
cover boy as the magazine’s all-time favorite athlete.
- This summer, amusingly named Lenny Krayzelburg, a Ukrainian-born
American, won the 100-meter backstroke at the Pan-Pacific Championships
in Australia. He broke the world record and has his sites set on gold in
Sydney 2000.
- Much has also been made of the up-and-coming young Orthodox basketball
phenom in Baltimore, Tamir Goodman. Dubbed “the Jewish Jordan” by the
national press, he was offered a basketball scholarship to the highly
competitive University of Maryland Terrapins basketball program in his
junior year of high school. Just last month Goodman rejected the
offer, as he said the Maryland coaching staff frowned upon his refusal
to play on the Sabbath. (Interestingly enough, the high school senior
just transferred from his Talmudic yeshiva to Takoma Academy, which
plays a tougher hoops schedule. It’s also a Seventh Day Adventist high
school.)
Jews also seem to be making gains in sports that would never meet with a
rabbi’s approval, let alone a mother’s:
- In the inexplicably popular world of wrestling, the WCW’s No. 1-ranked grappler is Bill Goldberg, whose nom de ring is, remarkably,
just Goldberg. He sports a startling physique and a gaudy record of
161-0 — impressive even for a faux sport.
- Also dominant in the ring are two-time champion male boxer “Dangerous”
Dana Rosenblatt and two-time champion female sweet-science sensation
Jill Matthews. Rosenblatt fights with a Star of David on his trunks
while Matthews, a rabbi’s daughter-in-law, goes by the nickname the
“Zion Lion.”
- Hockey star Mathieu Schneider, a defenseman on the NHL’s New York
Rangers, was a key member of hockey Team USA when it captured the
inaugural World Cup in 1996, and was captain of the New York Islanders
in 1995-96.
- Just last week, tennis superstar Pete Sampras, following in the
footsteps of Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton, Tom Stoppard and
Harrison Ford, came out of the Jewish closet.
- Then just last Sunday, two things transpired to evoke shouts of “Mazel
tov!” from Jewish sports fans. Aaron Feinberg captured the 1999
Aggressive Skaters Association Pro Tour World Championship (an X-Games
style daredevil skating competition) and, for the first time ever, the
Israeli men’s soccer team advanced to the European Cup championship
round of 16. And they’re not even in Europe!
Why is this year unlike all other years? Is there a special prayer to
say over the Gatorade?
“Becoming a professional — a doctor or lawyer, not athlete — was novel
for Jews a generation or two ago because of the discrimination they
faced,” said a Jewish communal service professional who asked not to be
identified. “That’s why today you have so many Jews as professionals –
a totally disproportionate number, in fact. And now that things have
normalized for American Jewry — there are very few people who believe
there is still career discrimination against Jews in America — we have
become like most other ethnic groups. So it is only natural that those
who can or want to focus on sports will now do so. We’re certainly not
overrepresented in sports, but things do seem to be changing. And I can
almost guarantee you that the parents of most of these modern Jewish
athletes are professionals of one sort or another.”
While that is difficult to confirm, it is true that Goldberg’s father,
Jed, is a retired gynecologist. Anyone parsing bitter-herb leaves in this
phenomenon will learn one thing: Near-full assimilation of the Jewish
community has clearly arrived. Though it’s not nearly as alarming as Jewish
intermarriage statistics, I imagine the Orthodox community would claim
that there is a downside to the story, which is that tradition
(observing holidays and the Sabbath, putting education before athletic achievement, not eschewing yeshivas for Seventh-Day Adventist high schools) is
losing out to homogeneity. But how truly remarkable it is, in this
age of high-profile hate crimes, to see wrestling fans in the heartland
bearing placards of support for Goldberg, adorned with Stars of David. A
generation ago, the Jewish idea of sports was memorizing stats.
Still curious about why things have evolved this way, I called — who
else? — my Jewish grandmother, Alice, an 87-year-old macher born and bred in
Brooklyn.
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Grandma, have you ever heard of Michael Jordan?
The name is familiar — I see it in the newspaper. I
think he plays basketball.
That’s right. How about the Jewish Jordan?
What, the country?
Never mind. Anyway, Grandma, why are there so many more Jewish
athletes now than at any other time?
Jews were a nomadic group — we never had time to settle
down and play other people’s games. We never had time to absorb the
culture and games of a particular area. We were always on the run so
that they should not persecute us. We became a sporadic nation. We were
glad that we were not being kidnapped and held for ransom.
And now this proliferation of Jews in sports?
(Something really off topic about Polish Cossacks and
then something about how whales communicate.)
Grandma, the sports thing?
Jews started going away to college, and instead of being
in their own shtetl, they were meeting different cultures, like the guy
from Idaho who does the sports thing. They intertwined education with
advancing themselves in practically everything. The taste of education
led to higher realms and they went out of town and experienced other
infrastructures.
You had me, then you lost me.
You meet different people and look how many years are
involved in going to law school or medical school. You think, “I can
make money right away in sports. If I’m going to college, should I put
another four years into medical school, plus an internship and a
residency?” The bottom line — you need money. This is a shortcut.
Oh, I see. Do you like sports?
Not particularly. I can watch them, but I can turn them
off easily. I don’t need to see Moshe Pipik [Michael Jordan], or whatever
his name is, trying to make a basket.
Any sport in particular you do like?
I like handball.
And why is that?
It was always a poor man’s sport — all you needed was a
ball and a wall.
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When that Mendy’s muralist remodels his wall to fit in the superstars of
the next “millennium,” maybe he can leave room for the unsung handball
players from Brooklyn.
