The hell with Teixeira’s meaningless .151/.270/.340 slash line…how are the Yankees ever going to replace his 12 RBI’s!? #francesspool

Up close, hitting coach Kevin Long harbored worry about his slugger. A staple of Teixeira’s pre-game routine involves hitting off a tee. When Teixeira attempted that practice left-handed, which places stress on the strained tendon sheath in his right wrist, he felt “discomfort,” Long said. His left-handed swing lacked “the whip and the bat speed that you ...

Bill Madden! Elias Sports Bureau! Partridge Pattern Cords! It’s all here!

Why have extra innings, which used to be looked upon with great anticipation, instead been replaced by a sense of dread? And why are there suddenly so many of them? According to scouts and baseball execs I talked to, it starts with the gradual decrease of runs and homers since baseball instituted its ban of amphetamines in 2006.

“There’s less power in the game,” said one exec, “less examples of one swing of the ...

I’m going to broaden the study to the beginning of the 2012 season and look at a number of possible answers. Slowly, I’ll narrow down the problem areas and identify the real problem area(s).The first task was to separate Hughes’s starts into clearly defined “good” and “bad” samples, to best construct anatomies of each. I used Game Score as a quick and simple method, by excluding all starts since 2012 in which his score was between 36 and 64—roughly speaking, average starts. ...

Terrific (yet clutch) interview with Singleton.

MW: I found that my personal appreciation of the game has increased exponentially as I’ve explored sabermetrics. I know there is a group of fans out there (and maybe they’re even the majority of fans) who cringe at the new age stats – can’t have the nerds ruining baseball with all their numbers! For me though, the metrics are not diminishing the game, rather they’re merely elaborating on what our eyes see. The “mystique,” if ...

Cue the dugout camera to Kevin Long nursing his genius.

Most of all, the game was lost because of numbers like this: Mark Teixeira, 0-for-5 and four runners left stranded; Travis Hafner, 0-for-8 and seven runners left stranded; Vernon Wells, 0-for-8 with three strikeouts, and Kevin Youkilis, 0-for-7 with three strikeouts, a double play and five runners left stranded.

In fact, Teixeira, Hafner, Youkilis and Wells, the heart of the Yankees’ batting order, were a combined 0-for-28 and struck out ...

Posing as a pizza delivery man, New York Yankees closer Mariano Rivera surprised longtime Athletics employee Julie Vasconcellos by visiting her in the mail room where she has worked going on 25 years.

600* BBWAA writers voted, but no one saw a thing.

* give or take

This, I think, was what made the Bert Blyleven-Jack Morris Hall of Fame discussion so interesting. The statistics made it abundantly clear that Blyleven was not just a better pitcher than Morris but light years better. But Blyleven just doesn’t have the Van Doren Gene … and Morris does. And so the debate over which pitcher was better raged on; in some quarters it rages on still. People don’t just see Morris as a Hall of ...

I accept responsibility for those two uhh three uhhh four uhhhh five days.

Andy Pettitte locked up his 250th career win this past weekend against the Mariners. It now could be said the win also locked up his Hall of Fame candidacy, something that many thought was dead and buried after his retirement in 2010.

The naysayers will point out how Pettitte is the anti-Hall of Famer. He is good, not great. He is more a model of consistency than dominance. You could even point out the advantages ...

A-Rodzilla?

Apparently there was a team interested in acquiring Alex Rodriguez during the offseason, prior to the Yankees disclosing his hip injury and long before the Biogenesis scandal.

Japan’s Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks contacted the Yankees “through an intermediary” in November to express an “interest in obtaining” A-Rod, according to the New York Times.

New York chose not to return serve due to Rodriguez’s injury, which likely would have ended talks right then and there, the ...

After saying he “cannot stand” the New York Yankees in a pre-draft video, Yankees first-round pick Ian Clarkin used his first comments to the New York media to say he was sorry.

I really wonder if players play better for a team they grew up rooting for or worse for a team they grew up rooting against. It seems like there could be a psychological factor there.

Because the easiest way to obtain a young star is to do so high in the draft. But tomorrow — for the 20th straight year — the Yankees will not have a pick in the top half of the first round of the MLB draft. In fact, in the past two decades the highest the Yankees have picked is 17th. Usually, it is in the 20s, sometimes in the 30s and in two extreme cases not until the 51st and 71st selections (with that 71st pick they took current Browns quarterback Brandon Weeden in 2002 as the ...

When you lose Sweeny Murti…well…

These are the first three paragraphs of a Sports Illustrated cover story by Gerry Callahan in the July 8, 1996 issue:

  In the off-season he lives with his mother, Lourdes Navarro, and shares a bedroom with his best friend, a three-year-old German shepherd named Ripper. He plays golf each morning and hoops each evening, and by 10 p.m. he is nestled in bed with his Nintendo control pad. He makes Roy Hobbs look like John Kruk, and he makes you wonder if ...

Just as Jason Keidel issued his! “Have Any Dignity Left, A-Rod? Retire Today And Don’t Come Back”

Alex Rodriguez said Thursday he is not ready to talk about the alleged connection between him and the founder of a Miami-area clinic at the heart of an ongoing performance-enhancing drug scandal in Major League Baseball.

“Myself and others are being mentioned in a media report before the process is even concluded,” Rodriguez said in a statement. “I would hope this thing would follow the ...

Ichiro Suzuki is about to join the pantheon of the baseball gods on a statistical plateau only two other players have passed: 4,000 hits.

Including his infield single in the Yankees’ 6-4 victory over the Indians on Wednesday at Yankee Stadium, Ichiro needs only 67 to match that lofty level.

Considering his legendary durability, it will happen sometime during the months ahead, certainly before the end of the season. True, Ichiro gets there by combining the hits he accumulated playing for ...

Good, out with the righty lefty…and in with the lefty righty David Cone!

Could Al Leiter be a potential name on the long list of possible replacements for the late Sen. Frank Lautenberg? The ex-pitcher said he’d be interested.

Leiter was listed by Philadelphia Inquirer’s Matt Katz as an “outside the box wildcard” earlier this week. When the former hurler was asked by ESPNNewYork’s Andrew Marchand yesterday about it, he responded, “Who wouldn’t be interested if the governor of your state for ...

But right now what troubles the Yankees and their high command has nothing to do with A-Rod. Rather, it is everything that was troublesome for them back in March when they faced the season with an aging team that was seemingly breaking down everywhere. The loss of Curtis Granderson for the second time, combined with Vernon Wells’ prolonged May slump has opened up the new hole in right field that, against the Indians’ right-handed ace, Justin Masterson, Joe Girardi elected to fill with ...

Flink: People here seem to hate Josh Hamilton. That replaces Alex Rodriguez, who also put up huge numbers for fans here only to get booed mercifully. Is this an odd current phenomenon?

Tim Cowlinshaw: The booing for A-Rod and for Josh exists for very different reasons. With A-Rod, it’s entirely with his persona. He’s really an insufferable human being and, in many cases, completely phony. Josh is not that. Josh is honest. Josh speaks from the hip. He doesn’t measure his words and he certainly ...

Just another phoney dimension of the Trost/Levine regime.

It was the ultimate photo op: Derek Jeter, the face of the Yankees, meeting Bernando LaPallo, who at 111 years old would be older than than Yankees franchise itself. Like every other good thing, it’s probably not true. LaPallo’s age is very much in dispute, and he’s been accused of lying about it to sell books.

LaPallo met with Jeter and Joe Girardi before Saturday’s game, and regaled reporters with tales of attending New York ...

Thunderclap NEWMAN! (But hear me and hear me well!)

The players in the Yankees’ and Red Sox’ dugouts may be on opposite sides of a historic rivalry but they have at least one thing in common: Thunder is scary.

With a storm having sent the players to their respective dugouts during a rain delay at Yankee Stadium on Sunday night, both teams were startled by a loud boom of thunder in the Bronx. ESPN cameras showed the reactions of players in both dugouts, ...

I guess there’s a little Francoeur in every hitter.

After going hitless again in the Yankees’ 11-1 loss to the Red Sox at the Stadium, Wells is just six for his last 48, dropping his average to .253.

“I just have to ride it out,” Wells said, who went 0-for-4. “I know I can get back to where I was that first month or so, I just have to get back to it.”

Sounds simple, but for a player coming off two horrendous seasons with the Angels, it’s hard to think his April production will be ...

Matt Fortese came 75 miles from Hagerstown to meet Taylor Queen at Camden Yards. She drove more than three hours from Virginia. Their second date was going well, Queen said, until an hour of taunting from two fans boiled over into an altercation that left Fortese fighting for his life.

Fortese, a lifelong Yankees fan who wore his team’s cap to Wednesday’s game, suffered severe head trauma and a skull fracture. He was listed in serious condition at Maryland Shock Trauma Center Saturday. Police ...

After the Mets’ first two victories, I received an e-mail from a good friend, Peter Kurz, who lives in Israel, where he has become the secretary general of the Israel Association of Baseball. Decades ago, Kurz and I played catch at the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument in Riverside Park in Manhattan, my imagined Tom Seaver to his imagined Jerry Grote.

“To all those Yankee fans who are crying this morning into their cereal,” Kurz e-mailed, “and to all those Met fans who are now on ...

The Empire takes many forms…

A tipster who has access to these sorts of things passed along a casting call today for an AT&T commercial saluting the fine career of Mariano Rivera. (Mo, if you’re reading, we apologize for spoiling the surprise.) The memo explains exactly who is a true Yankee fan, by central casting’s lights. They wrote, “We are ONLY looking for REAL YANKEE fans.”

So who, exactly, are these “REAL YANKEE fans”?

  1. Wall Street types, men and women of all ethnicities, who will ...

But you must also recognize that Teixeira and Youkilis are mere Band-Aids, hardly sufficient to close all the wounds from which the Yankees are currently bleeding.

After all, they can only play first and third. The Yankees are are still getting precious little production out of their shortstop, their catcher and both corner outfield spots.

And the pitching, which has been the glue that has been holding this ragtag collection together, might be starting to come apart at the seams.

Phelps had ...

Sure to be a Brooke Ballentyne blast!

Hideki Matsui will sign a one-day, minor-league contract on July 28 in order to retire as a Yankee, the team announced on Thursday afternoon. Matsui, the 2009 World Series MVP, will be honored in a ceremony that day at Yankee Stadium.

The date was picked because it is the 55th home game for the Yankees this season. Matsui wore No. 55 during his seven seasons in pinstripes. He hit 140 homers during that time.