Mike Pagliarulo was selected by the Yankees out of the University of Miami in the sixth round of the 1981 Amateur Draft. Recalled in July of 1984, Pags served as the Yankee third baseman for the next five years before being traded to the San Diego Padres. He won a World Series with the Minnesota Twins in 1991, and played for the Baltimore Orioles, Seibu Lions in Japan, and the Texas Rangers before retiring at the conclusion of the 1995 season. A fan favorite during his time with the Yanks, Pags has been a frequent guest at Old Timers’ Day since his retirement.

Since retiring, Pags has worked in scouting and consulting. He founded the Baseline Group which seeks to provide business solutions for baseball and recently started the non-profit start-up Baseball Institute of Development.. He agreed to answer some questions from Matt Bouffard of Fack Youk. What follows are some highlights of the conversation. The full interview will run at Fack Youk in the near future.

Matt Bouffard: What’s it like being a former Yankee living outside Boston these days? Do you get any flack for that? Didn’t you grow up as a Yankee fan, and if so, how did that come about, and what was it like to be a Yankee fan in Medford during the 1970s?

Mike Pagliarulo: My dad was the biggest Billy Martin fan ever. We grew up in Boston and everyone was a Red Sox fan except him. When I was a kid I always thought my father was right except when it came to the Yankees. Well, after my first big league spring training where I met the big league guys for the first time; I said, “Dad you were right again!” The Yankee organization was built on class and respect and everyone I met there was the same way. Back in Boston I still caught heat, but nobody gives out that much crap without being scared!

MB: After coming up in mid-1984, you’re first full season with the Yanks was 1985. That was a tumultuous year: Yogi Berra was fired just 16 games into the season and Billy Martin returned for his fourth stint as Yankee manager. You guys spent all summer chasing Toronto, clawed back into the race, and went north of the border for the season’s final weekend needing a three game sweep to force a playoff. What was that pennant race like for you and what was the let down like getting eliminated that Saturday?

MP: Tumultuous is a word associated with New York. And it’s not a bad word. I’d like to refer to playing under certain scrutiny and pressure as the way it is supposed to be! We aren’t babies and people pay lots of money to see you play. I hate it when tabloids side with the poor player who’s under so much pressure while making 10 million dollars. That doesn’t appear to match.

1985 was the year in which I learned more about Mr. Steinbrenner than any other. I never realized how much he wanted to win until the last month of the season. One example was during September when we returned from a night game in Milwaukee. The game was late and the flight was delayed. We’d got into Newark airport about 6 AM and the Boss has limos waiting for everyone to take them home. We had a game that night. I couldn’t believe that such a cool and generous thing could be done without being in the press.

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The fine folks at Talking Chop were kind enough to engage in a Q&A with us leading into the Yanks-Braves series this week. What follows is our exchange. You can check out Talking Chop’s questions and our answers here.

1) Is the Nate McLouth acquisition enough, or the Braves have to swing a move for another outfielder? Any chance Jordan Schafer makes a return appearance later on?

The McLouth trade was a great start, and a surprising one in which we didn’t give up anything that we needed from our minor league system for at least the next two years. But no, it doesn’t seem to be enough. The question we keep asking ourselves is, “do we wait for the guys currently on the team to start hitting, or do we jettison some of them for more of a sure thing.” Just about everyone in Atlanta has had enough of Jeff Francoeur, and just about any mediocre replacement player would be better than him. I don’t think Frenchy is in an Atlanta uniform next season, one way or another.

Another problem with adding another bat, is that we can’t really add that much more salary. This is why the McLouth deal was a good move (he’s signed affordably), and this is also why we will probably see Schafer again (he’s currently out with a hand injury that he actually suffered pretty early in the season),

2) What’s the general feel for Kelly Johnson? His OPS is down over 100 points from last year and 150 points from 2007. Is he just suffering from some bad luck (.250 BABIP way down from the past two years)? It seems like his Iso-D and Iso-P are right in line with 08 and 07…

Like I said in the previous answer, he’s one of the guys we keep waiting on to start hitting. If Omar Infante were not on the DL right now, there’s little doubt that Johnson would not be starting, and that might happen when Omar returns next month. So Kelly’s got a few weeks to put it together, but he seems to have gotten the Jeff Francoeur disease. I’m not sure advanced stats can measure what’s wrong with KJ, it’s more about watching him every day and seeing him pop up or ground out when last year he would have hit a line drive somewhere. Kelly’s a guy who, once he figures it out (if he does), can go on an absolute tear and carry the team for a week or two (and again, we’re still waiting on that to happen).

3) As the Braves blog of record, what is your recommended course of action regarding Jeff Francoeur?

DFA.

But seriously, I offered the Red Sox blogger last week to trade him Francoeur for a pair of Monster seats. I guess I should offer you guys the same deal, Francoeur for a pair of reasonably priced Yankees tickets (do reasonably priced Yankees tickets exist?).

But seriously, seriously, the Braves are trying everything they can to trade him and the sooner the better. In the end, I think we’ll end up releasing him this off-season, and every team knows that so they’re not going to give us anything for him.

4) A.J. Burnett at five years, $80 million, or Derek Lowe at four years, $60 million?

With the injury problems we’ve had the last few years in our starting rotation, I’ll take Lowe and his streak of 7-straight years making 32 starts over Burnett and his streak of only performing well in contract years.

5) To follow up one of your questions, what do you think a fair price, from the Braves’ standpoint, would be for Xavier Nady?

How about Jeff Francoeur? I kid, I kid. If Nady proves he’s healthy and can hit, I would say a guy like Jo-Jo Reyes straight-up or Brandon Jones straight-up — sort of a B prospect who’s major league ready or almost there. Nady’s a free agent at the end of the year, so he’d be purely a rental, and I wouldn’t think you’d get too much for him, unless a team was just desperate.

Over the weekend, we witnessed a mini-viral baseball phenomenon. Late on Friday night, David Pinto at Baseball Musings tossed up a post with a link to a site called Flip Flop Fly Ball. The site, run by a baseball fan/graphic designer, features some fascinating infographics about America’s Pastime. The one on the right, for example, is a quiz of any fan’s baseball field acumen. It’s nigh impossible.

As I poked around the site on Saturday, I dropped a link to it on Twitter via both the River Ave. Blues account and my personal feed. It was re-Tweeted all over the place, and one RAB reader wanted to know if prints of the graphics were available.

I inhaled the site. The combination of interesting graphics and baseball made for a good amount of high-quality wasted time over the weekend. Take a look, for example, at the height of the Green Monster as compared to some well-known landmarks, the directional orientation of home plate at every stadium and the amount of travel the Royals have to do this season. The rest are equally as entertaining.

After looking at a few graphics and poking around the site, I realized that Craig Robinson, the man behind Flip Flop Fly Ball was a Yankee fan and a River Ave. Blues reader. In fact, he sent us the ticket prices infographic a few months ago. I e-mailed Craig yesterday, and he answered a few questions about himself and the infographics. The interview follows. Be sure to visit the site as well.

What inspired you to develop the infographics at Flip Flop Fly Ball?

The main reason is that I’m relatively new to the game (I’ve never known a World Series-winning Yankees team), and I was finding it difficult to retain so much information about the Yankees and the sport in general. For whatever reason, I found it easier to remember team relocations and stuff if I made charts and graphs. It spiraled out of that.

I saw you recently added an amusing new one on the felonious side of stolen bases. How often do you plan to produce new sports infographics? From where do you derive ideas for the new graphics?

Hopefully, I’ll be doing a new one every week. That may not be the case in the next month or so, unfortunately, as my wife and I just split up and, without a green card, I’ll be leaving the country soon. Ideas tend to pop up just from little things I see watching games. Just seeing Chief Wahoo; one day it just seemed an obvious question: How many native Americans live in the Cleveland area?

As a big fan of Bruce Springsteen, I loved the one entitled Really Fantasy Baseball in which the Wu Tang Clan, behind a complete game by RZA, tops the E Street Band for Eastern Division champions. What’s your personal favorite? Which ones were the most fun to make?

I’d agree that the Wu vs. E Street one is definitely one of my favourites. Mostly because I enjoyed spending a day working out how each half-inning was played out. The Cleveland Indians one is probably my favourite, though; it just seems to sum up the ridiculousness of their name quite nicely.

Tell me a little about your background. I understand from your website that you are a UK native who spent some time in Bellingham, Washington but you are a Yankee fan. How did you find your way to both baseball and the Yanks?

Yeh, I was born in the UK, lived most of the last decade in Berlin, Germany. Until last weekend, I lived in Bellingham and went to see Mariners games. I’m returning to Berlin shortly, but hopefully, I’ll be breaking the piggy bank to try to get a ticket to see my first game at the new Yankee Stadium, ironically, against the Mariners. I’d always been primarily a soccer fan, but I was on a business trip, and one of the people I was working with was an NY-based lifelong Yankees fan. His colleague was a Mets fan. When I expressed an interest in going to see a baseball game, I left it up to them to fight it out whether I’d be going to the Bronx or Shea. The Yankees fan was on it right away, and I went to a fairly pedestrian defeat at the hands of the Twins, but, I know it’s a cliche, I fell in love straight away. The sport just seems so perfectly beautiful. The next day, I watched a Yankeeography of Mickey Mantle on YES in my hotel room, and, well, the rest is a history of very late nights watching live streaming games on MLB.com, and more recently, having people in Washington continually reminding me that the “Yankees suck!”

Can you preview any upcoming FFFB infographics? And at the request of some readers, do you plan to offer prints of the infographics for sale?

Once I get my life sorted out again, I’d love to do some prints. I’m working on a few new ones at the moment. Once this current round of Interleague play is done with, I’ve got one about how each league’s teams fared in the history of Interleague play; a Venn diagram about the origins of team nicknames; a history of Japanese teams in a style like the history of the NL and AL teams; and a more research-intensive one, looking at how much of each team’s opening day roster were homegrown/traded/free agents.

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I’m looking forward to the new graphics. In the meantime, the current ones provide enough of a distraction. A big RAB thanks to Craig as he gets everything straightened out.