October 2007 Archives

Congratulations to the Red Sox on winning the 2007 World Series in decisive fashion! And congratulations to Mike Lowell for winning the award for Most Valuable Player in the Series!

Now here's a bit of advice for the Sox: forget about A-Rod and re-sign Lowell. Here's why.

You've now won two World Series titles in four years, and commentators are suggesting that you can become a dynasty, particularly now that the Yankees seem to be in disarray. You've won eight straight World Series games. Your last Series loss was Game Seven in 1986 to the New York Mets.

Remember who won the Series MVP that day? It was  a veteran third-baseman named Ray Knight. In many ways, he was the embodiment of the championship spirit of the Mets that year. Knight wanted to re-sign with the team, but the Mets had other ideas and let him leave as a free agent. Knight became the first person ever to join a new team the year after winning the World Series MVP award.

After the 1986 Series, commentators were predicting that the Mets would become a dynasty. It never happened. The Mets have won exactly one World Series game since 1986  (One explanation can be found below, in my post "The Crypto-History of the Historic Collapse of the New York Mets.")

Nothing against Howard Johnson, Knight's annointed successor, who was an appealing player, had some great season with the Mets, and is now one of the team's coaches. But we're talking about chemistry and karma. Subtracting Knight from the team subtracted something much more than a third-baseman and a bat from the line-up.

So, Red Sox, learn a lesson from the New York Mets: re-sign Mike Lowell and keep chemistry and karma intact! 

I'm watching the fourth game of the World Series, which the Red Sox are leading 4-1 going into the bottom of the eighth. They already lead the Series 3-0, so a win tonight would win it all.

I'd been telling my friends who cared that I thought that whichever team won the first game of the Series would win the second and eventually the whole thing (though I was agnostic about the question of a sweep).

I figured that all the talk about how the eight-day layoff might affect the momentum of the Rockies, who had won 21 of 22 games going into the Series (including all of their playoff games), would, in fact, affect the Series.

If the Rockies were to win game one, they (and the Red Sox) would believe that their momentous streak was continuing and that would propel them to victory in the second game. If, however, the Red Sox, were to win, they (and the Rockies) would believe all the doom-sayers who predicted that the layoff would kill the momentum (as had been the case with the Detroit Tigers last year) -- effectively killing the momentum.

The impact of psychological factors on a baseball team is not to be underestimated. Just ask the Mets.

Meanwhile, Fox has just announced that agen Scott Boras has told them that his client Alex Rodriguez would in fact be opting out of his contract with the Yankees in order to become a free agent. A-Rod has ten days after the conclusion of the World Series to make his decision about whether to opt out. Boras apparently cited A-Rod's uncertainty about the future of the Yankees -- about the managing situation, about whether the team would be able to re-sign its prominent free agents, about the "ownership transition" -- as the factors in his decision.

I can't say I'm surprised. A-Rod proves himself to be the solo operator that I described below.

Hmm ... the Rockies have just hit a two-run homer to cut the lead to one run. It ain't over 'til it's over? We'll see ... about both the Rockies and the Rod.

POSTSCRIPT

The following day Major League Baseball criticized both Boras and Rodriguez for the timing of their announcement. MLB's chief operating officer, Bob DuPuy, wrote in an e-mail to the Associated Press: "We were very disappointed that Scott Boras would try to upstage our premier baseball event of the season with his announcement. There was no reason to make an announcement last night other than to try to put his selfish interests and that of one individual player above the overall good of the game. Last night and today belong to the Boston Red Sox, who should be celebrated for their achievement, and to the Colorado Rockies, who made such an unbelievable run to the World Series."

The Yankees' brass maintained that they would not negotiate with Rodriguez once his decision to opt-out of his contract with them was made official. Hank Steinbrenner said, "The bottom line is ... do we really want anybody that really doesn't want to be a Yankee?" He pointed to Derek Jeter, who, "since he was a little kid, all he ever wanted to do was play shortstop for the Yankees. That's what we want." A-Rod may want to be a Yankee, but clearly it isn't what he wants most.

One of my close friends, a diehard Yankee fan, lays the blame at Boras's doorstep. "I think the solo operator is Scott Boras," he wrote in an e-mail. "A-Rod is his cyborg, whom he rents out to the highest bidder."

Last night, in Philadelphia, I watched my mentor, Sacvan Bercovitch, receive the American Studies Association's Carl Bode - Norman Holmes Pearson Prize for lifetime achievement. It was my pleasure and my honor to have nominated Saki for the award and to have gathered supporting letters from colleagues and students.

In conferring the award, the prize committee's chairperson, Gordon Hutner (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaigne), described Saki as "the presiding spirit, in many respects, of American Studies. Through his writings, his intellectual politics, his service to the Association, Professor Bercovitch has made an unparalleled set of distinguished contributions over the past thirty years. Perhaps no single literary historian has exerted the profound influence over his field that Bercovitch has, for he has been the key figure in the ideological turn in American literary study and indeed has played a central part in galvanizing the source of its interdisciplinary practice."

Hutner noted that the American Studies Association is "infinitely more robust" than it was the last time it met in Philadelphia, in 1982 when Saki was president and suggested that this robustness may well be "the fruit of Sacvan Bercovitch's labors."

I didn't know Saki then (we wouldn't meet for another couple of years when he had relocated to Harvard), and it was a revelation for me to hear about the central role that he had played in setting the ASA back on course after a period during which it was foundering. I was struck by the fact that he was even more deserving of the Bode - Pearson prize than my letter of nomination had suggested.

What follows is the text of that letter. As a tribute it's inadequate, but at least it achieved what it was intended to achieve.

  I've just finished reading Michael Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), which I started a couple of weeks ago because 1) I loved his breakthrough novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) and enjoyed his latest, The Yiddish Policeman's Union (2007); and 2) I was visiting Pittsburgh for the first time, and it seemed like a good thing to be reading.

Most of the people that I met there who had read Chabon's first two novels, which are set in Pittsburgh (the second was Wonder Boys [1995], which was made into a film starring Michael Douglas and Tobey Maguire), didn't care for them. They found them a bit sophomoric and precious. And to be sure Mysteries of Pittsburgh is both of those things at times. It is to Kavalier & Clay what F. Scott Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920) is to The Great Gatsby (1925), a precursor in which the author's talent hasn't yet been fully realized. And yet, there are things to admire in both Fitzgerald's and Chabon's first novels. There's something about the narrator's voice in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh that does indeed capture the simultaneous world-weariness and naivete that are often found in recent college graduates. To quote a colleague of mine, who was reflecting on a piece of writing that he had penned when he was 23: "It reads very much like I was in my early twenties: the sort of heavily crafted sentences and quirky details that all of my undergraduate friends tried so hard to write."

I had Fitzgerald in mind as I was reading the novel, and Chabon, I suppose, would be happy about that. In the afterward that he included in a 2005 paperback reprint, he described the process of writing the novel as a young MFA student in the UC Irvine writing program and noted that it was a rereading of The Great Gatsby that got him jump-started. To which he added a reading of Philip Roth's first book, Goodbye Columbus (1959). One of the crucial observations that the juxtaposition allowed him to make was this: "Roth's book was a hell of a lot funner than Fitzgerald's, which almost isn't funny at all, especially when, as in the famous party-guest catalog, it tries its hardest to amuse."

I'm taking that as a sign. After I finish Wonder Boys (which I ordered at the same time as The Mysteries of Pittsburgh), I'm going to start on a reading project that I've been thinking about lately: reading all of Roth's Zuckerman novels, ending with the new one, Exit Ghost (2007).

I'm glad to find out that The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is being made into a film. The cast looks promising, and it's in post-production. The film's website is http://www.mysteriesofpittsburgh.com/ and you can find the IMDB entry here.

As for The Yiddish Policeman's Union, it's not as "important" a book as Kavalier & Clay (whatever that means), but I love the fact that it is a speculative fiction. (Chabon talks about wanting to impart, as a young writer, the sense of "wonder" that he found in science fiction, without actually wanting to write science fiction). But I enjoyed it, both because of its roots in hard-boiled fiction, and because it struck me as akin to another Roth novel, The Plot Against America, because it offers an alternative history of America and its relation to the Jewish diaspora. Yiddish Policeman's Union isn't as cleverly plotted as Kavalier & Clay, but what's delightful about it is the way in which it sets up its premise, a Jewish state in Sitka, Alaska, about to revert to US control a la Hong Kong, and then imagines what daily life might be like for a down-on-his-luck detective. It's full of wonderful linguistics turns: like latke instead of "flatfoot" and shammes instead of "shamus."

I'd re-read Chaim Potok's The Chosen (1967) the previous fall, which gave me a special appreciation for both the irony and the aptness of Chabon's depiction of orthodox sects -- the "black hats" -- as the gangsters of Sitka. I often think that the power of speculative fiction -- its ability to provoke what Chabon calls "wonder" -- has to do with the larger conceptual frames into which it encourages us to enter. But sometimes the pleasure is in the details of the alternative reality into which we enter. The strength of The Yiddish Policeman's Union is its ability to imagine those details; what it lacks, I think, is the conceptual power that marks the greatest speculative fictions. 

Bart Giamatti, the President of Yale who became the Commissioner of Major League Baseball, began his marvelous speech “Baseball and the American Character” with the observation that “baseball fits America so well because it embodies the interplay of individual and group that we love.”

I've just finished watching the Cleveland Indians defeat the New York Yankees 6-4 to win their American League Division Series, 3 games to 1. Cleveland embodied that interplay of individual and group. The Yankees did not.

Tonight, I watched Alex Rodriguez drive in his first postseason run since 2004. It was a solo home run. Rodriguez drove himself in. It may well have been his last hit as a Yankee. There's no doubt that A-Rod is a baseball virtuoso, but it seems to me more and more that he's also what Giamatti referred to as a "solo operator."

In his speech, originally delivered to the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1985, Giamatti described the home run as the one situation in baseball in which the aftermath of a pitched ball “fails to involve the team.” He described the home run as “the dispositive triumph of one over the other, the surrogate kill.” In all other situations, Giamatti wrote, “the communal choreography of the team eventually takes over. . . . Whether on offense or defense, the virtuoso is subsumed into the ensemble. The anarchic ways of solo operators are subsumed by a free institution.”

Cleveland played as an ensemble. The Yankees played like a bunch of unsubsumed virtuosos and solo operators.

It’s likely that the Torre era is now over.

Or, rather, that the second half of the Torre era is now over. I tend to think of Torre I as 1995 through 2001, the years that saw the Yankees reassert themselves as a perennial postseason power, winning four World Series (1996, 1998-2000) and an AL pennant (2001). Torre II begins with the signing of Jason Giambi and is notable for the signings of Mike Mussina, Hideki Matsui, Randy Johnson, and A-Rod. The Yankees won the AL pennant in 2003, but they haven’t won anything of note since A-Rod joined the team in 2004. Indeed, the most notable event of Torre II was probably losing the ALCS to the Red Sox after leading it 3-0 in 2004, allowing the Red Sox finally to break the so-called “Curse of the Bambino” and win World Series for the first time since 1918.

If Torre II didn't live up to the expectations generated by Torre I, I'm not sure it's Joe's fault. He played the hand he was dealt and, this season especially, he played it like a master. But there's only so much you can do with virtuoso solo operators. Out of all the signings I mentioned above, only one, I think, turned out well. 

There are times in baseball when a home run isn’t what you need. For example, when you’re several runs down, and there are men on base, and a home run will clear the bases but not get you even. In those situations, it may be better to hit something less than a home run, simply to keep the rally going, to leave it to the next batter to build on your achievement. There are some times when a single would be enough: for example, the fourth inning of game 2 of the ALDS between the Indians and the Yankees, when A-Rod struck out swinging, with Derek Jeter on second base. At the time, Jeter represented a crucial insurance run; it might have proven to be the game-winner. Or the top of the ninth in the same game, when A-Rod struck out swinging again, with Bobby Abreu on second base, representing the go-ahead run and, again, possibly the game-winner.

Sometimes a home run can propel you to victory, as in game three, when the Yankees, down 3-0 early, managed to gain the lead on a home run by Johnny Damon in the fifth inning. But more often it’s the crucial, two-out single that’s the key to victory. Cleveland managed to get those. Cleveland’s first three runs in game one came on two-out singles. Three of the runs in their five-run fifth came with two outs, as did two more in the sixth. Cleveland’s winning run in the eleventh inning of game two came with two outs. And in game four, Cleveland opened up with a home run, but the rest of their runs were driven in by a double play and a some well-timed singles. The Yankees hit three solo home runs, including Rodriguez’s. The last one made it 6-4 in the ninth and brought Rodriguez to the plate. A solo homer would have made it 6-5. A single would have brought the tying run to the plate. Rodriguez popped out. And Jorge Posada, who had an amazingly prolific season at the plate, struck out swinging.

So it’s on to the championship series: in the NL, Arizona versus the surprising Rockies, winners now of 17 games out of their last 18; in the AL, Cleveland versus Boston. May the best ensemble win!

[Giamatti's speech was reprinted in the October 1986 issue of Harper's magazine. You can also find it in A Great and Glorious Game: Baseball Writings of A. Bartlett Giamatti, edited by Kenneth S. Robson, with a foreward by David Halberstam (Algonquin Books, 1998).]

"The greatest late September collapse in the history of major league baseball is now complete." That's what Mets' announcer Gary Cohen said after Luis Castillo struck out to end the team's 162nd game, an 8-1 loss in which the Mets trailed 7-0 after the first half inning. Minutes later the Phillies defeated the Washington Nationals to win the Eastern Division, a division the Mets had led for over four months but lost on the final day of the season. Never before had a team with a seven-game lead and only 17 games left to play failed to finish in first place.

All around the city, Mets fans were asking themselves, "How could this have happened?"

I'm afraid I know. And only I know.

In spring training, the Phillie's shortstop, Jimmy Rollins proclaimed that the Phillies were the team to beat. Mets fans laughed, particularly when the Phillies stumbled out of the gate. Rollins, now a likely frontrunner for the NL MPV award, finished with a rare 20-20-20-20 season (20 stolen bases, 20 homers, 20 triples and 20 doubles). Some people may want to add another 20-20 for vision in predicting that the Phillies would be the team to beat in the East. But that was only true for two days. For almost all of the season, the Mets were the team to beat. The irony is that the team that finally beat them wasn't the Phillies, but the Mets themselves.

How did it happen? I know, and I wish I didn't.

How could the Mets let themselves get swept not once but twice by the Phillies in the final five weeks of the season? How could the Mets go 1-6 in the final week of the season at home, playing against the fourth- and fifth-place teams in their division and a St. Louis team that had to fly in to Shea for a one-game make-up series? How could the Mets lose a game that they had led 5-0 on the final Wednesday of the season, and what was a rookie doing starting that game anyway? How could 300-game winner Tom Glavine give up seven runs in a third of an inning of work in the final game of the year after John Maine had pitched a near no-hitter the day before to give the Mets control of their destiny once again?

If you want to know why, read on. If you're a Mets fan, read it and weep.

What follows is the crypto-history of the New York Mets for the past 21 years. It begins on October 25, 1986.

Here's the short version: it was all my fault.