Commemorating Derek Jeter, Forgetting Bernie Willams →

Williams played for the Yankees for 16 seasons, most of them as their star center fielder. The Yankees have a tradition of great center fielders; and while Williams is obviously not in the same class as Mickey Mantle or Joe DiMaggio, he is clearly the third best center fielder in franchise history. Williams also played more games in centerfield for the Yankees than DiMaggio, Mantle or anybody else. Williams batted cleanup and played a marquee position for a team that won three consecutive World Series, spent his entire career with the Yankees, was very popular with the fans, but the hoopla around the notion of the core four has caused Williams to be almost entirely forgotten less than eight years after he played his last game

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Derek Jeter, Still Baseball's Most Underrated Overrated Player →

Jeter is one of the most intriguing of baseball players because for most of his career he has simultaneously been overrated, he is clearly not the greatest player or even the greatest Yankee in history, and underrated. He is not strong on defense, but has not been as bad as many think. Moreover, Jeter's extremely cautious style with the media has led most of the media to cover him as some sort of baseball saint, always ready with a good team oriented quote, respectful of the game and its history and almost never willing to criticize a teammate, or opponent. A minority of fans, however, see this is as a highly choreographed image by Jeter, which of course it is, and decry him for not being genuine.

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What Does Carlos Beltran's Great Post-Season Play Mean?

Supporters of Beltran will argue that his post-season performance should inform his candidacy. That notion is also relevant for players like Andy Pettitte who started more than a full season's worth of games in the post-season. Beltran's post-season record probably should be taken into account, but so should everybody else's from this era. However, this record should not only be taken into account, but should be viewed in its proper context. One striking line from Beltran's post-season resume is that he has played in 38 post-season games, but none in the World Series. The great post-season performers from previous generations either played all their post-season games in the World Series like Babe Ruth or Mickey Mantle, or, like Reggie Jackson and Steve Garvey, played a good proportion of their post-season games in the World Series.

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Don Larsen, Manny Mota and the 1962 Giants

Fifty years after that tough defeat, and more importantly two years after finally getting their World Series victory, Giants fans can look at that 1962 team more charitably. They can recognize the impressive talent and interesting baseball stories that were brought together on that team. It is still possible, but not likely, that that great World Series will be commemorated by a 50th anniversary rematch. Even if this does not occur, it is worth taking a few minutes this October to remember this extraordinary team that came up just a foot or so short of a championship.

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And Then There Were Two: The Twilight of the Core Four

Jorge Posada, a mainstay of the New York Yankees for well over a decade and one of the best catchers in that, or any, team’s history recently announced his retirement. Posada will now be counted among those Yankee greats like Whitey Ford, Bill Dickey, Thurman Munson, Lou Gehrig, Phil Rizzuto, Mickey Mantle, Bernie Williams and Joe DiMaggio who spent their entire careers with the Yankees never playing even one game for another team. It is likely that in the next few years, Posada’s longtime teammates Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera will join him in this group.

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Don't Dismiss Bernie Williams' Hall of Fame Candidacy Too Quickly

The arguments against Williams are clear. He was not great defensively, was never one of the best hitters in the game, was surrounded by better players and did not play much past his prime. The arguments in favor of Williams candidacy are less obvious, but also very powerful. Williams was a very good hitter who had a very long prime. Between 1995-2002, a period of eight years, he hit .321/.406/.531, good for an OPS+ of 142. He did this while playing a key defensive position decently. Although he retired at age 37, thus truncating the decline phase of his career, he remained a useful player until the end hitting .281/.332/.436 during his last year with the Yankees.

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Hip Hip Jorge: Saying Goodbye to Posada and Placing Him Among the Yankee Greats

The question of whether or not Posada is one of the twenty greatest Yankees will have to be left to future, and longer, subway rides, but his place in the top 25 is reasonably secure. The same ambiguity around Posada’s place in Yankee history will probably surround his Hall of Fame candidacy, but there is no ambiguity around his role in the last four Yankee championships. If game five of the LDS was indeed Posada’s last game, he will be missed by all Yankee fans, whether hunched over their computers looking at numbers or cursing A-Rod while semi-conscious on the subway.

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For Torre, Going to the Mets Would Really Be Clueless

Joe Torre’s streak of nine straight seasons in which his team made the post-season but did not win the World Series, will come to an end this year because the Dodgers will not make the playoffs. While Torre enjoyed tremendous postseason success from 1996 through the 2001 ALCS, a period where his team went 14-1 in postseason series. He has been far less successful in the playoffs since that time, winning only five of his next fourteen postseason series. Moreover, during the first fifteen years of his managerial career, Torre only made the post-season once.

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Does Derek Jeter Have Anything Left?

Even the most devoted fans of the Yankees and their star shortstop Derek Jeter likely recognized that 2009 was a special year for the Yankee captain. Jeter’s 2009 was probably the best season by a 35 year old shortstop in at least half a century. Few serious fans could have expected another year like that from Jeter. However, as the 2010 season approached, which would be the last under Jeter’s current contract, most fans had a sense of what Jeter’s future would be.

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The Core Four in Historical Context

It is very unusual for four players to play together for this long, but it is not unprecedented. There are two other groups of four players who played together for ten years who are comparable to the core four. In addition, two other groups of Yankees played together for nine years, but not ten. From 1930-1938, Bill Dickey, Lou Gehrig, Lefty Gomez and Red Ruffing were teammates winning five pennants and five World Series. From 1954-1962 Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, Mickey Mantle and Moose Skowron another group of four teammates won seven pennants and four World Series The core four played together from 1997-2003 and 2007-2009 winning six pennants and four World Series.

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The Strange Case of Will Clark

Sometimes players who would be expected to be borderline candidates get elected, such as Dawson this year or Jim Rice last year, but sometimes similar candidates get little consideration at all. One example of this type of player is Will Clark who got less than 5% of the vote the first time he appeared on a Hall of Fame ballot and was dropped from future ballots. Will Clark’s story is well known. He had a few great years with the Giants before moving to the AL where his career took a downturn, but had one last great run in 2000, the last season of his career as a late season pickup by the Cardinals where he filled in for the injured Mark McGwire down the stretch run.

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Manny, Papi, Jeter and Mo

The Yankee-Red Sox rivalry has been particularly intense over the last decade because these years, just as in the late 70s and late 40s, both teams have been contenders. The Yankee-Red Sox rivalry is based on more than just regional loyalties; it is also based on a narrative which many fans seem to believe. The narrative can be summed up, and dramatically exaggerated, by saying it is about the Evil Empire-Best Team Money Can Buy Yankees against the Underdog-Long Suffering Red Sox. This narrative is even more nonsensical than most, but it is surprisingly persistent among casual fans.

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1964 →

Accepting this different road to 270 electoral votes will be difficult for many in the Democratic Party who have spent decades searching for the silver bullet that would bring white blue collar workers home to the Democrats. Unwillingness to accept this was at the heart of Hillary Clinton's electability narrative. Her narrative, that she was uniquely positioned to bring Reagan Democrats back home in November was prima facie absurd, but got an enormous amount of traction and was largely unchallenged in the media or, frankly, by the Obama campaign. The reality was that Clinton remained unpopular with this group, with 55% of white voters who had not completed college viewing her unfavorably in an April, 2008 AP poll.

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