Rush Phil Hughes up again and let him get rocked so we can completely destroy any confidence he has since we’ve already turned Kennedy into a toad.

Great plan.

He made terrible moves year in and year out as GM. They had 3 100 loss seasons. I don’t care who his owner was. His owner wasn’t making the trades & signings that he was making in his 6 years running the ship.

But what, he gets job offers after he gets canned and that is supposed to make me upset that he didn’t land with the Yankees? Ed Wade got another job after running the Phillies into the ground. Jim Bowden is STILL a GM. I don’t care about crappy GMs who just so happen to be “highly regarded baseball people” by you and your sources. The industry is an incestuous joke where people who are shown to be completely incompetent can talk themselves back into positions of authority and just keep coming back from the dead, regardless of how bad their track records are and how little they’ve accomplished. The fact that Allard Baird got hired by the Red Sox is in no way causing me Red Sox Envy or making me wish the Yankees’ front office had landed him. Honestly, I am not going to spend one second fretting over whether all the team’s white collar employees are perfect or not. I prefer to worry about the players and the potential to fix the team’s roster.

I don’t care about the front office soap operas going on across baseball, because it’s all the same garbage being dressed up in different outfits, across 30 different organizations. “This team doesn’t have enough baseball men so they’re going to make a once-great player who has a feel for the game to work in the front office”, “This team needs to take more of a statistical approach to running the ship so they’re hiring this young Ivy League grad”, “This guy has been a company man who has learned from this other incompetent guy and is going to improve on his past mistakes” and so on and so forth.

Allard Baird being a plus for the Red Sox is not a factor in anything the Yankees do this year, this fall, or this winter, so I don’t give two damns about it. The fact that this is supposed to somehow be disconcerting to us Yankees fans is like crying wolf when you spot a dog on a leash. You want to rip the team for not making the right moves, fine. I can even deal with the same post over and over again about how the Yankees need an outside evaluation, because it’s not a bad idea. But somehow making this a “Boy we really stink, look at how great THESE guys are!” discussion is silly considering every organization is full of its fair share of imbeciles, and I am not buying that the Sox have somehow assembled this “smartest guys in the room” group that is blowing us out of the water.

Try your other hand … it’ll feel like someone else is doing it for a change.

Their SOLE GOAL has to be to make the New York Yankees better. That’s it. Make it about TEAM and not about any one person or player. NOBODY who draws a NY Yankee paycheck is above the team. That has to be the mantra.”

It’s sort of a contradiction, because historically, dynasties are fueled by the transcendence of its star player. The Bulls had Michael Jordan, and the Patriots have Tom Brady. The Yankees Dynasty of 96-01 were mostly the sum of its parts, but its transcendent player was Mariano Rivera. There were other stars, and it was a team effort on all levels. But Rivera was the guy that everyone feared, the go-to guy, the constant in the Yankee universe. Get the ball to Mariano, and the Yankees will win. The whole purpose of playing the game was to get the ball to Rivera. Rivera is in the twilight of his career, still possibly the best in the game, but the key word there is possibly. 8-10 years ago, there wasn’t even a conversation.

For these Yankees, it could be Joba, it could be someone they sign from the outside, but on these Yankees, there’s no one that has that mystique around them. I think a big part of the problem is that everyone, including Rivera, is putting too much pressure on themselves to succeed, perhaps because they don’t trust that the guy behind them or in front of them to get the job done. I don’t get the feeling that everyone on this team is out for themselves, I do get the feeling that the pressure is getting to them.

Everyone needs to know their roles, and how to execute their roles, and what’s expected of them. With the dynasty Yankees, it was simple. The offense’s job was to get the lead, the pitching was to hold the lead or keep it close, all leading up to Rivera. Rivera was the X-Factor. If everyone did their jobs right, if we get the ball to Mo, we’ll be alright, we’ll win. With these Yankees, it seems like the pitching has to worry about whether or not they get enough offense, the offense has to worry about whether the pitching is going to hold up. I even believe that the reason why Rivera struggles with tie games is because he doesn’t know if he has to stay for 1 or 2 or more innings. He has no clue if the offense is going to pick him up.

If we’re looking at the past dynasties, the whole “sum of the parts” mantra and front office “putting team first” isn’t entirely true. It’s one thing to win a championship, but if we’re talking DYNASTY, you need to have that transcendent star, you need someone that gives the team the edge mentally. When the chips are down and the team is struggling, you need someone to point to and say “I don’t have to worry about carrying the team, he’s got it covered, I just have to do my job.”

He he he, thanks. I actually don’t consider myself boring most of the time. I was just trying to help Seriously? out with his dilemma.

Anyway, what I dislike most about you Ray is that you are very likeable! That always causes me great angst because it forces me to divide my loyalties. It’s just so much easier for me to hate all things Sux (see I even have trouble using that word when I am posting to you!)

It’s just not fair I tell you.

Actually, a person who has become one of my dearest cyberfriends began as an archenemy on the NY Times Yankee forum. We were definitely oil and water, and his “hatred” of all things Yankees parallelled mine of all things Sux. Truly. But the odd part is that we had such simpatico that we actually started being friends! We both grew up in the Hatfield-McCoy battlefield, and as such we totally understood the intense rivalry that seemed to alude people who were more geographically removed or just didn’t understand that the title “the most intense rivalry in sports” was actually more than a title!

Okay, now I am starting to bore myself! But I hope you understand what I’m saying. You are really a good guy. (But I will always be a superstitious sports fan. The guy to whom I referred is also a member of my other baseball forum, and we have banned him from hanging out there when games are on! That was a group decision by the Yankee fans there. But he is very good about it.)