Monday, June 19, 2006
Know Thy Enemy: Phillies v. Yankees
The Phillies square off with the evil empire tonight at 7.
Perhaps it has something to do with the inferiority complex people from Philly have about New York, but when the Mets or Yankees come to down there is more tension, more of a hatred. Maybe it comes from the tendency of New Yorkers to view the world as centering around their city (and Manhattanites as seeing little outside of their little island) that makes them so easy to dislike. And the Yankees are easy to hate: perpetually buying their championships, dominating the media, wallowing in their storied history.
The current team is a gallery of contemptible figures: over-rated and over-hyped Derek Jeter, a man sabremetricians take particular pleasure in needling and criticizing; Johnny Damon, who greedily abandoned the plucky Red Sox for the Yankees' big bucks; Alex Rodriguez, the greedy, self-absorbed metrosexual; Randy Johnson, the mercenary in search of a World Series title … I don’t like the Yankees. Nobody outside of Manhattan can.
The Evil Empire circa 2006 seems to be a diminished lot. They struggled out of the gate and have to deal with the fact that they:
1. Don’t even come close to having either the best or the second-best record in the AL.
2. Have extra competition for the AL East this year, in addition to the Red Sox, the Blue Jays are pretty good this season. Gotta love parity, don’t ya New York?
To be fair, the Yankees pitching has looked pretty decent thus far. Mike Mussina has really had a nice season for the Yankees, however Randy Johnson has really struggled since coming to New York: in his final year with the D-backs he had a FIP ERA of 2.18. His FIP ERAs with the Yankees: 3.77 in ’05 and 4.99 in ‘06. Mariano Rivera is great as usual, but the Yankees pitching seems a little weak.
Meanwhile, anyone noticed that A-Rod is in a major slump? One home run in June, his sole extra-base hit, and a .283 OBP for the month. With A-Rod slumping and Gary Sheffield out of the lineup, the Yankees have been relying on Jason Giambi. Giambi, much-maligned for his steroid abuse, has had a decent year with a .442 OBP and .621 Slugging percentage: .354 GPA, .347 ISO …
How do the Yanks match up to the Phillies? The Yankees have really become grinders this season: they lead the AL in OBP and are in the upper-middle for slugging percentage. Their pitchers have done well, but I cannot help but think that is party because they have improved tremendously in terms of defense in 2006.
The Phillies finally snapped their six-game losing skid. I'm still befuddled that they lost two of three to the D-Rays. That could sting in October. That said, I think the Phillies matchup well with the Yankees. The Yankees aren't really hitting for power and if Phillies pitchers can throttle Giambi, they can take care of the Yankees offense easily. Still, this is going to be a hard series for the Phillies to win.
Here is some news to cheer everyone up! I checked Baseball Prospectus’ website and according to them, the Phillies have an 8% chance of making the playoffs. The Mets? 97%! The Braves have just a 3.5% chance of making the playoffs.
I’ve been watching “The Revolution” on the History Channel and I couldn’t help but compare the Phillies and Yankees to the Colonial Army and the British Army. The British Army was a solid machine, generally thought to be the best in the world, fearless, well-equipped, while the Colonial Army was under-equipped, scrappy and rag-tagged. Washington described the Colonial Army’s camp as having a “mercenary” air to it when he arrived outside of Boston following the Battle of Bunker Hill. The Phillies have always had that mercenary, scrappy feel to them, haven’t they?
I’ve seen all three episodes of “The Revolution” as well as “Washington: The Warrior” on the History Channel and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed them. Someone wrote recently that there are two phases from American History that people obsess over, the Revolution and the Civil War. Right now we are in the middle of a swell in interest concerning the Revolution: David McCullough’s “John Adams” , as well as his “1776” are part of a spate of books on the subject to have been released within the last few years. There have been a number of biographies of Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and the Founding Fathers generally put out in recent years, as well as several books talking about the Revolution. Right now I am reading George Leckie’s "George Washington’s War" , which is a very good, readable one-volume on the revolution. If anyone is interested I wanted to suggest two books: “The Cousins’ Wars” by Kevin Phillips and “The Crucible of War” by Fred Anderson.
Phillips is a political writer who started out as a political writer who famously forecast the rise of the Republican Party in 1967 with the book “The Emerging Republican Majority”, which stunned people by predicting that the Great Society would fail and give birth to a renewed conservative movement. Phillips was right, but progressively turned away from the Republican Party when it abandoned “sound money” principles in the 1980s in favor of Reaganomics and has since written a number of books and articles critical of the Republican Party’s embrace of theology and, particularly, of the Bush Family. “The Cousins’ Wars” looks at the English Civil War, the Revolution and the Civil War as being a conflict over faith. e.g., Phillips draws parallels between the divide between Low Church Loyalists to the King and High Church Parliamentarians in the English Civil War to the split in the American Civil War between Low Church Southerners and High Church Northerners. The eventual outcome of these three wars was the triumph of the core values of the Protestant faith. It is an ambitious book full of information and it will open your eyes.
"The Crucible of War" is fascinating. The author’s theory is that the French & Indian War, the conflict fought from 1755 to 1763, which was arguably started by George Washington in Southwestern Pennsylvania, placed the seeds for the Revolution by forcing the colonial armies to take a pivotal role in their own defense and it put the British treasury is so big of a hole that their decision to levy taxes after the war ran up against the colony’s newfound sense of independence and triggered the Revolution. It is a terrific book that I highly recommend, if only for Anderson’s work shattering the myths surrounding the climatic Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759: popular history credits General James Wolfe, whose daring assault on an undefended bluff led to the battle, as a hero and credits the British victory as the death-blow to the French in Canada. Not true, Anderson argues, and makes a compelling case that Wolfe knew he was dying and wanted to go out in a blaze of glory, so he launched the attack hoping to get killed, not hoping to win. Anderson also says that the Battle of Quiberion Bay, where the English fleet annihilated the French fleet off the coast of France, was the decisive battle of the war because it ensured that the French couldn’t re-supply their forces in Canada and had to quit. Anderson goes on to argue that the debt the British government had to enter to win the war led to the revolution because Parliament was forced to tax the colonies. The taxes, combined with the contempt regular British politicians and military officers showed the colonials during the war, gave birth to the revolution.
If anyone is interested, check out the links to those books.
Oh, I'd be remiss if I didn't point this out and gloat about it: anyone notice who is in dead-last in the NL East? The woefully under-manned Marlins? The Nats? Nope, the Atlanta Braves, the team "built to win" by their self-annointed genius G.M. They are mired at 30-40, fourteen games out of first place. Assuming that a team will need 90 wins to make the playoffs, that means the Braves are going to have to go 60-32 the rest of the way (.652). Good luck with that, Braves fans.
Perhaps it has something to do with the inferiority complex people from Philly have about New York, but when the Mets or Yankees come to down there is more tension, more of a hatred. Maybe it comes from the tendency of New Yorkers to view the world as centering around their city (and Manhattanites as seeing little outside of their little island) that makes them so easy to dislike. And the Yankees are easy to hate: perpetually buying their championships, dominating the media, wallowing in their storied history.
The current team is a gallery of contemptible figures: over-rated and over-hyped Derek Jeter, a man sabremetricians take particular pleasure in needling and criticizing; Johnny Damon, who greedily abandoned the plucky Red Sox for the Yankees' big bucks; Alex Rodriguez, the greedy, self-absorbed metrosexual; Randy Johnson, the mercenary in search of a World Series title … I don’t like the Yankees. Nobody outside of Manhattan can.
The Evil Empire circa 2006 seems to be a diminished lot. They struggled out of the gate and have to deal with the fact that they:
1. Don’t even come close to having either the best or the second-best record in the AL.
2. Have extra competition for the AL East this year, in addition to the Red Sox, the Blue Jays are pretty good this season. Gotta love parity, don’t ya New York?
To be fair, the Yankees pitching has looked pretty decent thus far. Mike Mussina has really had a nice season for the Yankees, however Randy Johnson has really struggled since coming to New York: in his final year with the D-backs he had a FIP ERA of 2.18. His FIP ERAs with the Yankees: 3.77 in ’05 and 4.99 in ‘06. Mariano Rivera is great as usual, but the Yankees pitching seems a little weak.
Meanwhile, anyone noticed that A-Rod is in a major slump? One home run in June, his sole extra-base hit, and a .283 OBP for the month. With A-Rod slumping and Gary Sheffield out of the lineup, the Yankees have been relying on Jason Giambi. Giambi, much-maligned for his steroid abuse, has had a decent year with a .442 OBP and .621 Slugging percentage: .354 GPA, .347 ISO …
How do the Yanks match up to the Phillies? The Yankees have really become grinders this season: they lead the AL in OBP and are in the upper-middle for slugging percentage. Their pitchers have done well, but I cannot help but think that is party because they have improved tremendously in terms of defense in 2006.
The Phillies finally snapped their six-game losing skid. I'm still befuddled that they lost two of three to the D-Rays. That could sting in October. That said, I think the Phillies matchup well with the Yankees. The Yankees aren't really hitting for power and if Phillies pitchers can throttle Giambi, they can take care of the Yankees offense easily. Still, this is going to be a hard series for the Phillies to win.
Here is some news to cheer everyone up! I checked Baseball Prospectus’ website and according to them, the Phillies have an 8% chance of making the playoffs. The Mets? 97%! The Braves have just a 3.5% chance of making the playoffs.
I’ve been watching “The Revolution” on the History Channel and I couldn’t help but compare the Phillies and Yankees to the Colonial Army and the British Army. The British Army was a solid machine, generally thought to be the best in the world, fearless, well-equipped, while the Colonial Army was under-equipped, scrappy and rag-tagged. Washington described the Colonial Army’s camp as having a “mercenary” air to it when he arrived outside of Boston following the Battle of Bunker Hill. The Phillies have always had that mercenary, scrappy feel to them, haven’t they?
I’ve seen all three episodes of “The Revolution” as well as “Washington: The Warrior” on the History Channel and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed them. Someone wrote recently that there are two phases from American History that people obsess over, the Revolution and the Civil War. Right now we are in the middle of a swell in interest concerning the Revolution: David McCullough’s “John Adams” , as well as his “1776” are part of a spate of books on the subject to have been released within the last few years. There have been a number of biographies of Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and the Founding Fathers generally put out in recent years, as well as several books talking about the Revolution. Right now I am reading George Leckie’s "George Washington’s War" , which is a very good, readable one-volume on the revolution. If anyone is interested I wanted to suggest two books: “The Cousins’ Wars” by Kevin Phillips and “The Crucible of War” by Fred Anderson.
Phillips is a political writer who started out as a political writer who famously forecast the rise of the Republican Party in 1967 with the book “The Emerging Republican Majority”, which stunned people by predicting that the Great Society would fail and give birth to a renewed conservative movement. Phillips was right, but progressively turned away from the Republican Party when it abandoned “sound money” principles in the 1980s in favor of Reaganomics and has since written a number of books and articles critical of the Republican Party’s embrace of theology and, particularly, of the Bush Family. “The Cousins’ Wars” looks at the English Civil War, the Revolution and the Civil War as being a conflict over faith. e.g., Phillips draws parallels between the divide between Low Church Loyalists to the King and High Church Parliamentarians in the English Civil War to the split in the American Civil War between Low Church Southerners and High Church Northerners. The eventual outcome of these three wars was the triumph of the core values of the Protestant faith. It is an ambitious book full of information and it will open your eyes.
"The Crucible of War" is fascinating. The author’s theory is that the French & Indian War, the conflict fought from 1755 to 1763, which was arguably started by George Washington in Southwestern Pennsylvania, placed the seeds for the Revolution by forcing the colonial armies to take a pivotal role in their own defense and it put the British treasury is so big of a hole that their decision to levy taxes after the war ran up against the colony’s newfound sense of independence and triggered the Revolution. It is a terrific book that I highly recommend, if only for Anderson’s work shattering the myths surrounding the climatic Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759: popular history credits General James Wolfe, whose daring assault on an undefended bluff led to the battle, as a hero and credits the British victory as the death-blow to the French in Canada. Not true, Anderson argues, and makes a compelling case that Wolfe knew he was dying and wanted to go out in a blaze of glory, so he launched the attack hoping to get killed, not hoping to win. Anderson also says that the Battle of Quiberion Bay, where the English fleet annihilated the French fleet off the coast of France, was the decisive battle of the war because it ensured that the French couldn’t re-supply their forces in Canada and had to quit. Anderson goes on to argue that the debt the British government had to enter to win the war led to the revolution because Parliament was forced to tax the colonies. The taxes, combined with the contempt regular British politicians and military officers showed the colonials during the war, gave birth to the revolution.
If anyone is interested, check out the links to those books.
Oh, I'd be remiss if I didn't point this out and gloat about it: anyone notice who is in dead-last in the NL East? The woefully under-manned Marlins? The Nats? Nope, the Atlanta Braves, the team "built to win" by their self-annointed genius G.M. They are mired at 30-40, fourteen games out of first place. Assuming that a team will need 90 wins to make the playoffs, that means the Braves are going to have to go 60-32 the rest of the way (.652). Good luck with that, Braves fans.
Comments:
Interesting piece, but it was the Dems' abandonment of "sound money" policies that was largely respoinsible for Ronald Reagan's election. Jimmy Carter was the first President to give us both high inflation and non-existent economic growth. Restoring sound money, in other words, wringing inflation out of the economy, caused a fairly severe recession in the early 80's, but the defeat of inflation and the low interest rates that's made possible has led to the strong economy (only two recessions, both mild by historical standards) since.
Aad by the way, it was the High Church crowd (the Tories) that was loyal to the King in the English Civil War. The Low Church people were the Parliamentarians. Remember that Cromwell (briefly) dis-established the Anglican Church. Note too that many of the leaders of the Confederacy, including Jefferson Davis, were Episcopalians. Phillips, who knows nothing about theology (he thinks the Baptist churches, collectively are known as "the Baptism") has his facts backwards. I wouldn't begin to trust his scholarship on much of anything.
Well the Phillies Payroll is pretty high up there too ;) while nothing like the Yankee's abomination it's still amoung the tops.
As for the Yankees, their defense has been far from great this year, albite that makes them about 100 times better than they were last year I guess, they have a real CF again, Robinson Cano manage to be the best defensive 2B for the Yankee in about a decade by posting slightly below average defense. Giambi seemingly able to hit while DHing and thus allowing an actual 1st basemen to play more has also been helpful.
Although, Bernie Williams is ever more of a joke out there in the outfield, although the relatively smaller OF in citizens should make that a bit less apparent.
In some sense, the Yankees are a bit more lovable this season because they actually have some exciting young players again, and are fighting their way through some really tough injuries.
Just how crazy have the Yankee season been? their sophmore starter Chein Ming Wang has made all his start this season and have a recorded save, that's right, he came in and saved a game in the 10th inbetween starts. and then won the next game by shutting down a powerful Boston offense. and then yesterday tried to go for complete game with a 1 run lead due to the overworked and injured bullpen. Only to get walked off homered by Zimmerman.
It should be a good series though, we get to see which side's manager are actually as stupid as their fans have been making them out to be ;)
Post a Comment
As for the Yankees, their defense has been far from great this year, albite that makes them about 100 times better than they were last year I guess, they have a real CF again, Robinson Cano manage to be the best defensive 2B for the Yankee in about a decade by posting slightly below average defense. Giambi seemingly able to hit while DHing and thus allowing an actual 1st basemen to play more has also been helpful.
Although, Bernie Williams is ever more of a joke out there in the outfield, although the relatively smaller OF in citizens should make that a bit less apparent.
In some sense, the Yankees are a bit more lovable this season because they actually have some exciting young players again, and are fighting their way through some really tough injuries.
Just how crazy have the Yankee season been? their sophmore starter Chein Ming Wang has made all his start this season and have a recorded save, that's right, he came in and saved a game in the 10th inbetween starts. and then won the next game by shutting down a powerful Boston offense. and then yesterday tried to go for complete game with a 1 run lead due to the overworked and injured bullpen. Only to get walked off homered by Zimmerman.
It should be a good series though, we get to see which side's manager are actually as stupid as their fans have been making them out to be ;)
