The LoHud Yankees Blog

I’m a little late on this, but here’s the Associated Press story about Brian Cashman that began making the rounds last night.

NEW YORK (AP) — A woman stalked and shook down New York Yankees general manager Brian Cashman, getting him to pay her $6,000 and demanding more by threatening to harm his reputation, prosecutors said Thursday.

The case represents “a long-term effort to control and manipulate the victim,” Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Eric Iverson told a judge as Louise Neathway, 36, was arraigned on grand larceny, stalking and harassment charges.

Her lawyers said Cashman had had “an inappropriate relationship” with Neathway, a medical sales worker and single mother of a 14-year-old daughter, and he turned on her when it ended badly.

“The Manhattan district attorney’s office bought his account of how this happened, hook, line and sinker,” lawyer Stephen G. McCarthy said. He and fellow Neathway lawyer Alan M. Abramson said Neathway denied the allegations.

Cashman said through spokesman Chris Giglio that he is “very grateful that this matter is in the hands of law enforcement.”

The Yankees declined to comment.

Neathway — who has a history of arrests on similar charges, prosecutors said — sometimes called and texted Cashman more than 10 times a night and threatened to harm someone he knew, prosecutors said.

After he told her last April that he didn’t want to talk to her anymore and even changed his contact information to avoid her, she asked him to pay for a $15,000-plus medical procedure and threatened to contact the press and his family with claims that would hurt his personal relationships and professional standing, according to a court complaint.

In response, he put $6,000 into two of her bank accounts Jan. 18 and tried again to extricate himself, but she instead demanded more money for operations, the complaint said.

A British native who also goes by Louise Meanwell, Neathway has a record that goes back to a 1998 trespassing arrest in North Carolina, Iverson told a judge. She’s still on probation stemming from a 2008 trespassing conviction in a New Jersey case that involved allegations of stalking and sending someone as many as 200 text messages in a weekend, and she has an open 2010 Manhattan harassment case, Iverson said.

McCarthy noted in court that the Manhattan case had been put on track to be dismissed, and he suggested prosecutors were making too much of the New Jersey case.

As for the current case, “it would be unfair to all of the parties involved to speculate about what occurred,” he and Abramson said in a written statement.

Neathway was being held on $300,000 bond. Her next court date is Tuesday.

Associated Press photo

In the Yankee Stadium press box, I sit directly between Mark Feinsand and Marc Carig. Let’s just say they view advanced statistics … differently. And I am appropriately somewhere in the middle.

I like advanced stats. I like that there are people out there trying to come up with defensive metrics that work, and I like the idea of a nice round number to tell us a player’s overall value. When I voted for the American League MVP this season, WAR factored heavily into my ballot. I think these stats mean something, and like Matt wrote in this morning’s Pinch Hitter post, I think they’re important to our understanding of the game (and can become important to our enjoyment of the game).

But I also think they’re only part of the bigger picture.

Part of the reason that traditional statistics are so prevalent is that they’re simple — you don’t need a formula to explain RBI or runs scored — and I think people who are accustomed to traditional stats are turned off by the notion that they’re “wrong.”

Of course RBI is a bad way of determining baseball’s best hitter, but it’s not an awful place to start. Last year’s RBI leaders in the American League were Granderson, Cano, Gonzalez, Teixeira, Young, Konerko, Cabrera, Ellsbury, Beltre, Bautista and Martinez. By any statistical measure, that’s a pretty good group. Not a perfect ranking, but a pretty solid snapshot.

Wins are a bad way to measure a pitcher, but there aren’t many “bad” 20-win seasons. There might be a 12-win season that’s better than a 20-win season, but as the sample size gets larger, wins become more relevant. It’s not the best stat to quote, but it’s not meaningless, not in a large enough sample size.

As for me, I always like the triple slash line for hitters. I feel like it gives me a chance to determine how good a hitter is, and what kind of hitter he is. That’s just my personal preference. Plenty of people prefer WAR because they don’t care what kind of hitter a guy is, as long as he’s productive. Some prefer RBI because they don’t care about the other factors that contributed to getting the job done, as long as the job was done.

Ultimately, I’m glad we all see the game — and its numbers — differently. And when it comes to advanced stats, I’m happy being somewhere in the middle.

Our next Pinch Hitter is Matt Hunter, a senior philosophy major at Carleton College in Minnesota. Matt grew up in Northern California, but his dad is from New Jersey and raised Matt to be, “as much of a Yankees fan as any New Yorker.” Matt says he’s not sure what he wants to do after graduation. “But I would like to write in some form or another at some point in my life,” he said. “Right now, I’m just hoping that my analytical and critical thinking skills will lead me to a job opportunity, and I’ll figure out where I’m going from there.”

For his post, Matt took a philosopher’s mindset into a search for baseball knowledge and understanding, and asked to write a reasonable argument for sabermetrics.

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The job of a philosopher is simple: Strive to discover the truth about humanity’s fundamental questions. In this quest for objective knowledge, the philosopher may be forced to challenge the beliefs and values that are central to his worldview and question the truth of all he had previously assumed.

As a philosophy major I have come to assume this mindset in all areas of life. I have questioned my religious beliefs, my political beliefs, and, most importantly, my beliefs about baseball, all in an attempt to uncover the truth about these vitally important matters. I often end up reaching the same conclusions that I had previously assumed to be true, but through this process of rational thought and thorough research, I have come to have more confidence in what I believe and a better appreciation of opposing viewpoints.

This brings me to what you all came here for: Baseball. I could not leave baseball out of my yearning for truth, so began to question the assumptions that I had always believed: That batting average, home runs, and RBIs determine a hitter’s prowess; that ERA and wins determine a pitcher’s; that there is such a thing as clutch hitting, that sacrifice bunts are useful, and so on. I read a book by the staff of Baseball Prospectus, I started reading FanGraphs, and before I knew it, I was a full-on SABR nerd. I used obscure stats to measure performance, I rolled my eyes whenever anyone cited wins or RBIs or used small sample sizes, and I obsessed over sabermetric articles and studies.

You know what happened next? I began to love baseball, and the Yankees, more than ever before. Because I grew up as a Yankees fan in California, I never had the experiences that a lot of you likely had. I only watched the games during the playoffs. I didn’t have any friends that were Yankees fans, and the ones who cared about baseball hated the Yankees as much as I loved them. I looked at the box scores in newspapers and followed the games online once I had internet, but I rarely saw the players play outside of highlights.

I still cared deeply about the team, which made it that much harder to follow the team closely. However, my discovery of sabermetrics gave me an appreciation of baseball that went beyond watching Yankees games and talking about them with my friends. I felt like I had been following the game naively all these years; I started to understand the complexity and sheer volume of variables that go into every game, and how those variables can be modeled and predicted. It sounds incredibly nerdy, yes, but it reinvigorated my love for the team.

This is not the way that most fans follow baseball or the Yankees, and there is nothing wrong with that. There is nothing wrong with loving Derek Jeter for his clutch hitting and intangibles, or hating A.J. Burnett for the utter frustration he causes us. When I see Derek Jeter, though, I see a fantastic player – my childhood role model in fact – but a player who has always been overrated and is in serious decline. And when I see A.J. Burnett, I see a pitcher who doesn’t deserve the criticism he gets and actually has a pretty good chance of significant improvement.

This is not what many fans see, and that’s not only okay, but completely understandable. Sabermetrics is only one of many ways to be a baseball fan. It is not a blind attachment to obscure stats and an ignorance of scouting and intangibles, but an approach towards baseball that, like philosophy, focuses on discovering the truth above everything else. Also like philosophy, sabermetrics carries a negative stigma because of its tendency to throw away many of our intuitions. It doesn’t do this just to be different or because of a disdain for traditional stats, but in order to gain a better understanding of all aspects of baseball.

This is how I follow the game, and I love every minute of it.

Associated Press photo

Joe Girardi is going to be in Times Square tomorrow morning, distributing Giants caps to benefit the  Children’s Alopecia Project. Here are the details.

Giants fever is heating up all across the NYC metro area and New York Yankees manager Joe Girardi is set to join in on the party with the team one win away from another Super Bowl title.

Girardi will be on-hand with Children’s Alopecia Project Founder Jeffery Woytovich and Modell’s Sporting Goods CEO Mitchell Modell to donate 1,000 NFC Championship hats to CAP children at the Flagship Modell’s Times Square store tomorrow at 11 a.m. A four-time World Series champion as both a player and manager, Girardi is ready for the Giants to bring home the Lombardi trophy on Sunday and continue the winning tradition of New York’s sports teams. As the anticipation continues to build toward the big game, fans are expected to turn out in full force for the opportunity to meet with the Yankees skipper and support their hometown team.

CAP is devoted specifically to children living with the incurable automimmune hair loss disease, Alopecia. The Mission of the Children’s Alopecia Project (CAP) is to help any child in need who is living with hair loss due to all forms of alopecia. Additional information on the Children’s Alopecia Project can be found at the following link, childrensalopeciaproject.org.

WHEN: Friday, February 3 at 11 a.m

WHERE: Modells Sporting Goods, Times Square
234 West 42nd St. (between 7th & 8th)

With Edwin Jackson and now Casey Kotchman off the market, we might as well take another look at what’s left on the free agent market. This is my second crack at the best team made entirely of players who don’t have one, and as you can see, the market is getting awfully thin.

Lineup
DH Johnny Damon
SS Felipe Lopez
1B Derrek Lee
RF Yoenis Cespedes
LF Raul Ibanez
3B Miguel Tejada
CF Rick Ankiel
C Ivan Rodriguez
2B Aaron Miles

Yikes. Not only am I taking a shot on Cespedes, I’m counting on him to be the cleanup hitter in a left-heavy lineup full of veterans in need of a serious rebound. There’s no guarantee any of these guys could stay healthy enough to play an entire season, which is a problem because…

Bench
OF Kosuke Fukudome
UT Bill Hall
IF Eric Chavez
C Jason Varitek

More veterans fill the reserve roles, each with his own concerns and potential for injury or performance problems. There’s plenty of possibility on this team — I have to think one or two of the position players on this team will turn in legitimately good seasons this year — but there’s a considerable roll of the dice at each spot.

Rotation
RHP Roy Oswalt
RHP Rich Harden
RHP Brad Penny
RHP Tim Wakefield
RHP Jon Garland

Aren’t you glad the Yankees took care of their rotation issues earlier this winter? Maybe you’d rather have Kyle Davis or Doug Davis, or maybe you’d rather take a chance on Scott Kazmir being healthy. Whatever your preference, there are nothing but risky, uncertain options left on the market.

Bullpen
RHP David Aardsma
LHP Mike Gonzalez
RHP Luis Ayala
RHP Scott Linebrink
LHP Arthur Rhodes
RHP Sergio Mitre
RHP Ross Ohlendorf

My closer might not pitch this year, but at least my top lefty throws kinda hard. I always liked Ohlendorf, so I’ll take him as a long man with hopes of a return to form. And heck yes I’m taking Serge. There’s a solid chance he’ll be in my rotation by mid-April!

Associated Press photo

It seems Edwin Jackson is finally off the market after agreeing to a deal with the Nationals. Jackson seemed to be the top free agent still available, and now I guess that title falls to Roy Oswalt.

The Yankees clearly haven’t been in the market for a starting pitcher since making a pair of deals on Friday the 13th. The players who matter most to the Yankees are hitters, and Brian Cashman has made it clear that he’d like to trade an arm for a bat.

Why not jump into the deep free agent market for designated hitters?

It could be that the asking prices are still pretty high. Jayson Stark reported this afternoon that Vladimir Guerrero and Johnny Damon are each still looking for roughly $5 million, and I’m not sure the Yankees are looking to make that sort of commitment to players who are clearly trending the wrong direction.

The ballgame experience is about so much more than the game itself. It’s the people you’re with, the food you eat and whether you were in the bathroom for that three-run homer in the seventh. It’s the weather, the atmosphere and the trip to and from the stadium. It’s the full experience, and all of it matters to some degree.

In the Bronx, Yankee Stadium is a monster. In a lot of ways, it seems over-the-top by design. It’s huge — from the video board to the Steinbrenner monument — but what else would you expect from the biggest name in baseball? For me, it’s a comfortable place to work, and the two times I’ve watched a game from the seats — when my best friend was in town two years ago, and when my parents were here last year — I’ve enjoyed it.

It’s hard for me to compare the new place to the old one because I wasn’t at the old Yankee Stadium enough, but I don’t think the current Yankee Stadium is a bad one. Like Matthew pointed out in this morning’s Pinch Hitter post, the stadium has its flaws, one of which is that it’s not a perfect replica of a stadium fans knew and loved for decades.

But the ballgame experience really is about more the game itself, and it’s about more than the stadium itself. My three favorite road trips are probably Minnesota, Oakland and Tampa Bay, and those three have little to do with the stadiums or the teams. My sister lives 10 miles — at most — from the Oakland Coliseum, my girlfriend lives in Minneapolis and I’ve spent so much time in Tampa that it feels like a second home.

Yes, Yankee Stadium is flawed, but so is every other stadium in the country. And my guess is that you still have a good time going to the ballpark, and that it starts to feel a little more like home the more times you go.

Associated Press photo

Our next Pinch Hitter is Matthew O’Connor, who was born in western Massachusetts in 1972 but taught to be a Yankee fan by his Brooklyn-born father. “If Dad had to survive being a Yankee fan in Brooklyn in the 50’s,” Matthew wrote, “then it was only fair that I walk the New England gauntlet in the wake of Bucky Dent.”

For this post, it’s important to note the Matthew was a Yankees season ticket holder from 1996 through 2000 until he was married and moved to London (he had to work the work the day after Aaron Boone’s game winning Game 7 home run, which happened at roughly 6:02 a.m. over there). Matthew moved back to Manhattan in 2007, and says he tries not to tear his eyes out when he years about a piece of old New York dying in the name of greed progress (see: Island, Coney).

It’s with that love for history, memories and the Yankees that Matthew wrote about the new Yankee Stadium.

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The Reason We Came

The second incarnation of Yankee Stadium (1976-2008) provided some indelible memories for fans – Chambliss being bum rushed by what looked like the cast of The Warriors after ending the ’76 ALCS, Reggie’s third homer landing halfway up “the black,” the time that guy threw a full beer in the air from the upper deck as Tino’s grand slam in the ’99 Series left the yard (I may have seen replays of that homer too many times). The old Stadium always popped on TV during the big moments.

But you had to experience it in person. That ballpark, in October, could be counted on for its hostility factor – daunting for the opposition but thrilling if you were a fan. Upper deck seats seemed to hang right over the field making a bad situation worse for the other team. It was the kind of ballpark where you would hurry back to your seat after a bathroom break because you didn’t want to miss the action, but also because there was literally nothing else to do. The place was short on comforts and amenities, but who cared? You schlepped up to The Bronx to watch a ballgame and shout yourself hoarse.

As the 90’s gave way to the aughts, you could sense the change in the stands. Going to a Yankee game had become THE thing to do when visiting New York. You would notice more tourists and out of town business colleagues of finance executives. Attendance increased sharply, from 2.2 million at the beginning of their title run in 1996 to well over 4 million by the close of business at Yankee Stadium II. By this time, control of the team had been transferred over to George Steinbrenner’s sons Hal and Hank (less Hank, for reasons I love to speculate about), COO Lonn Trost and the delightful Randy Levine as President. The brass recognized a huge opportunity to cash in on this portion of paying customers at the new stadium being built across the street.

Enter the Yankee Stadium III, replete with all flavors of distraction for the non-fan. From dated pop culture artifacts for the average tourist (“Get your Hard Rock Cafe t-shirts he-ere!”) to the pre-French Revolution excess of the Legends Suite. At first glance, the new place screamed, “If you aren’t interested in watching a baseball game, you’ve come to the right place!”

But what of the core fan base, the one that came for the main event?

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Easy Fixes

The New York Yankees are a business, we all get that. Here are a few humble suggestions that can be easily accomplished without affecting the bottom line.

1. Ease up on the muscle – No need to call out the dogs on people eating sandwiches at conveniently located standing room stools two hours before game time. Encourage your security staff to use discretion before the breaking of balls for insignificant infractions. Yes, this happened to me — the steak sandwich from Lobel’s demands immediate consumption and cannot be asked to travel. The policy banning non box seat ticket holders from standing behind the dugout before games is especially heartless. Let the kids ask for their autographs.

2. Let the good people relax before game time – The impact of losing organist Eddie Layton has been huge. Even in his later years, it was clear Yankee brass were phasing out his tinkling of the plastic ivory for more bombastic ambient noise. This phenomenon isn’t restricted to Yankee Stadium – the YES network crew will often remark that Kaufman Stadium in Kansas City has the most overwhelming sound system in baseball. But time was, you could get to your seat early and soak up the sights of the ballpark with Mr. Layton as your soundtrack. Maybe you could even carry on a conversation with a friend. But does anyone, seriously ANYONE, prefer the new pre-game entertainment of a roving reporter shown on that ginormous screen loudly educating fans of all the various locations in the Stadium they can hemorrhage their hard-earned dollars?

3. Empty seats behind home plate are embarrassing, especially in October – Ticket prices for some field level seats have reached such levels of absurdity that it now only appeals to a previously undefined baseball fan – the person so wealthy he or she can afford to drop $1,250 or so on a single seat, but also wealthy enough to blow it off when something better comes up. If the spoiled little emperors don’t show up by the third inning, grab a group of fans from the cheap(er) seats above and let them watch the game from here. I know, I know – we’ve all read the studies proving that unmoisturized skin of the non-wealthy will degrade teak armrests (seriously, this is a trumpeted feature). But let’s let the eggheads sort that one out.

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Wish They Didn’t

If I had my druthers (and I don’t), these features would’ve hit the drawing room floor during the design process.

Mohegan Sun Sports Bar – Looks like a wonderful simulation of the experience of watching a baseball game at a sportsbook in Connecticut. Proud parent of hundreds of visually obstructed bleacher creatures and Monument Cave.

Steinbrenner monument – By all means, you guys own the stadium so feel free to erect a tribute to your father. To have the size of it dwarf the monuments for Ruth, Mantle and Gehrig redefines the word grandiose.

Legends Boxes – Mr. Levine, tear down this moat!

Upper deck – Cheers for making it harder to hit one in the upper deck. Jeers for moving upper deck fans further away from the action and most likely reducing the noise factor.

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Many Happy Returns?

My lifelong love of baseball and the Yankees ensures that I will continue to be a paying customer for the foreseeable future. The powers-that-be will continue to assault us with what this curmudgeon finds distasteful, and I’ll keep coming back for more. But if they change even one molecule of that Lobel’s steak sandwich, I might be forced to turn into one of these guys.

Associated Press photo up top, other two pictures submitted by Matthew

Some veterans are starting to settle for minor league deals at this point in the offseason — Carlos Guillen, Juan Cruz, Livan Hernandez — and you have to think the Yankees would like to get in on that action. I don’t think Brian Cashman is bluffing when he says he’d like to trade for a bat, but I also think the team could find some cheap bench options out there. Sometimes they work out (Eric Chavez) and sometimes they don’t (Ron Belliard) but they never hurt.

A few notes and links on a fairly quiet Wednesday.

By the way, that’s an AP picture of CC Sabathia at the Knicks game last night.

• Interesting little nugget from our buddy Bryan Hoch: At last night’s Thurman Munson Dinner, Thurman’s wife Diana said that George Steinbrenner told the Munsons that he was hoping to have Thurman become the Yankees manager at some point. “George said positively, he was grooming him,” Diana said. “And I always laugh. I’d say, ‘How many times do you think George would have fired him?’

• No surprise, but Cashman once again said he’s comfortable with A.J. Burnett as a piece of the pitching staff. “He’s extremely talented and has been inconsistent,” Cashman said. “But I can tell you I’m comfortable with the effort he’s giving, I’m comfortable with everything that he does, the accountability that comes with him.”

• For whatever it’s worth, Curt Schilling said the Yankees are the favorites to win the American League East.

• Interesting piece from Kevin Goldstein, who asked MLB executives to compare Yoenis Cespedes to five young big league center fielders, wondering whether the executives would prefer Cespedes or the known quantities. Of the five, Adam Jones was the only big leaguer seen as a consensus better player than Cespedes. Six of the eight executives interviewed preferred Cespedes to Colby Rasmus or Drew Stubbs.

• Speaking of Cespedes: Baseball America took a look at six other Cuban free agents who are on the international radar. 

• The International League announced that former Yankees pitching coach Dave Eiland has been elected to the league’s Hall of Fame. Most of his time as a player in the league was spent with Triple-A Columbus.

Associated Press photo

For longtime rivals, Brian Cashman and Theo Epstein have always seemed to have a friendly respect for one another, and yesterday they spoke together at Sacred Heart University in Connecticut.

Tyler Kepner used the occasion to take a look at the relationship between Cashman and Epstein.

Cashman: “The best compliment you can give is when you start studying your opponent. We actually took a lot of different things that (the Red Sox) were doing and have acclimated into our business.”

Epstein: “We tried to focus on just executing our strategy and building our organization the way we wanted to. We got some rewards from that. But I was never able to totally relax, because I felt like (Cashman) was always lurking.”

As Kepner points out: You have to wonder how long it will be before Cashman and Epstein finally make a trade with one another now that Epstein is the general manager of the Cubs, and the former Cubs GM Jim Hendry is a Cashman assistant with the Yankees.

Associated Press photo