The greatest decline-and-fall stories involve the mightiest empires. Ancient Greece. Rome. The borscht belt.
In the mid-1960s, it was the Yankees’ turn to collapse while the rest of baseball delighted in their misfortune. The Yankees not only lost the pennant, to echo the Douglass Wallop novel that was adapted into “Damn Yankees,” they fell down and died.
They had just played in five consecutive World Series and won two of them, in 1961 and 1962. But in 1965, they suddenly finished sixth, with just 77 victories. The next season, when few thought it could get worse, it did, with the Yankees tumbling into last place beneath teams like the Kansas City Athletics, whom the Yankees often strip-mined for talent as if they owned them….
If this is the year the Yankees really, truly stumble for the first time in a very long time, the YES Network, where a sub-.500 Yankees campaign has never been televised, let alone imagined, might lose its moorings. On radio, John Sterling might have to tone down his contrived home run calls….
As the newly hired Russian doorman at a Park Avenue apartment building said in 1920, “I never thought it could happen to me.”
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1. bobm Posted: March 17, 2013 at 02:58 PM (#4389962)http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=qQ0rAAAAIBAJ&sjid=kpoFAAAAIBAJ&dq=march 1965 yankees&pg=2584,5581168
They're trying to get their payroll below the luxury tax minimum by 2014 to reset the tax rate.
They can save fifty million or more if they have a payroll under the tax threshold next year (they become eligible for revenue sharing refunds and the tax rate is reset to the one for first-time offenders).
from the link:
Edit: Shasta on sale for Pasta beating me on the sheath news.
No it promises to be even uglier next year. 2015 is when they'll start big-time spending again.
If Teixeira really has a torn sheath, I'm surprised he isn't just getting surgery. Even Ortiz took several seasons to get his power and bat speed back after skipping surgery for a similar injury. I can't recall a player with this kind of injury doing well with just rehab. Isn't this the injury that resulted in Bautista getting surgery at the end of last season?
A torn sheath does better explain Cashman's attempts to sign guys like Lee and Chipper though. They're going to have to make some kind of trade to shore up first base now though; Dan Johnson and Juan Rivera can't possibly last the season as the solution at 1B. I guess theoretically they could bridge the gap until Rodriguez returns and pushes Youkilis across the diamond, but even expecting one of Tex or ARod to make it back for most of the season seems foolish at this point.
When it comes to the Yankees, I wont believe it until I actually see it, and they actually tally loss #82. Which still wouldnt necessarily mark a bad season.
I've seen it happen before, and it's not in the Constitution that it can't happen again, even though there should be a law against it. But you can't just put pinstripes on a claiming horse and expect him to show in the Kentucky Derby.
Right. The Yankees gain their dominance via money. So, if they aren't spending, they aren't the Yankees.
It's the Cardinal uniform that turns claiming horses into Derby winners.
And yet, the '66 Yankees weren't a bad team at all; they were a .500 team (outscored 612-611) with horrible luck (-9 Pyth, 15-38 in one-run games). They had no obvious holes and the pitching staff wasn't bad, 5th in runs allowed. With a few young guys like Roy White and Steve Whitaker and Mel Stottlemeyer, that should've been something to build on.
Then in 1967, everybody got old and/or forgot how to play baseball. They brought in guys like Jake Gibbs and Ruben Amaro. That was a bad team, folks: 72-90 (which was actually 4 games ahead of their Pythagorean!). They returned to respectability in '68, and actually won 93 games in 1970 -- which would've made them contenders if the Orioles weren't blowing out the league with 108 wins. Not til the mid-70s would the Yankees return to the top of the heap.
You know all this talk about how it's good for the WBC that the USA isn't winning it? Maybe it would be better for baseball if the Yankees were out of the chase for awhile. Have them play mediocre baseball until 2020 or so, then they can re-load with the next generation of stars.
This dancing on the Yankees grave has been stuck in my head. I wish I had artistic talent to draw the rest of the AL East mascots doing just that, but that would only work if the Yankees finish in last. Despite their troubles, I think the Red Sox and Orioles are more likely to finish last than the Yankees.
Kuroda
Pettite
Rivera
Robertson
Cano
Gardner
Youk (Hey it's baseball, he could bounce back.)
Ichiro (see above)
I think there are a lot of teams who would like to have these problems.
Kuroda (38)
Pettite (41)
Rivera (43, coming off surgery)
Robertson (28)
Cano (30)
Gardner (29, coming off an injury that took nearly a whole season to shake)
Youk (Hey it's baseball, he could bounce back.) (34)
Ichiro (see above) (39)
I think there are a lot of teams who would like to have these problems.
The average age of that little list is 35, with 4 of the 9 between 38 and 43. Nothing could ever go wrong there.
IMO the Yanks' main hope is that somehow Hughes, Nova, Phelps, Joba and Pineda all pitch up to their full capabilities, and pray that they don't need to pitch shutouts every third day in order to win. At least those five aren't about to join the AARP.
The odds on that were about a billion to one.
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