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Hideki’s final pinstriped season

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Every time I think Hideki Matsui is done, he comes back to life. Last week, Matsui went 0 for 5 and left five runners on base as the Yanks fell to the Phillies in extras. At that point, he was hitting an anemic .241/.325/.429, and I was looking forward to the return of Xavier Nady as a way to eliminate some of the Matsui at-bats.

But since then, Matsui, the streakiest of streakiest hitters, has turned it back on. In 19 at-bats spanning five games and 22 plate appearances, Matsui has hit .421/.500/.895 with two home runs and three doubles. He has raised his season numbers to .263/.347/.487 and is outperforming the AL DH average OPS by .057 points.

Despite this recent uptick in performance, it’s highly doubtful that Hideki Matsui, a free agent this winter, will return to the Yankees, and I have to wonder whether his overall future in Major League Baseball is in doubt. Today, MLBTR points us to a Joel Sherman column on Matsui. While we are often skeptical of Sherman’s work, I think he’s onto something here:

The Yanks have long been concerned about the inflexibility of their roster due to having too many DH types, such as exists this year with Matsui, Jorge Posada Jorge Posada and Xavier Nady (if he returns from his elbow injury). Yankee officials envision a 2010 in which Posada takes more at-bats as the DH, and in which Joe Girardi could better rest everyday players such as Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez and Mark Teixeira without losing their bats.

In spring training, Matsui told me that he prefers to stay a Yankee, but is not wedded to the Yanks and would consider other teams here if he decided to keep playing. He is a total pro and – when healthy – a clutch, productive hitter. But with his lingering knee issues that guarantee he cannot play left field with any regularity – if at all — I wonder if any team would be willing to invest even a few million on Matsui. That is part of the death of the traditional DH.

Poorly constructed sentences aside, Sherman raises some valid concerns the Yankees have for next season. In Jeter, Posada and A-Rod, they have three key players under contract and over 35 next year, and to keep them healthy, the team will have to make use of a rotating DH spot. Meanwhile, the Yankees are rather publicly committed to getting younger and more athletic. Resigning Hideki Matsui isn’t part of that equation.

If Matsui and the Yanks are destined for a post-season divorce, will another Major League team pick him up? When he’s on, he can hit with the best of them, but he will be an old 36 next June. With the market as depressed as it currently is, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Matsui jobless or back in Japan come April 2010. His will have been a good run, and while it’s not over yet, 2009 is in all likelihood his Yankee swan song.

The decline and fall of David Ortiz

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It was Thursday evening in New York when the Angels walked off with a 5-4 win against the Red Sox. Jeff Mathis singled home Reggie Willits in the bottom of the 12th to end what was a very frustrating game for the Red Sox.

No one was worse for the Sox on Thursday than David Ortiz. He went 0 for 7 with three strike outs and single-handedly left 12 runners on base. After the game, he sounded like a defeated man. “I’m sorry, guys. I don’t feel like talking right now. Just put down, Papi stinks,'” he said to reporters.

For Ortiz, the 0 for 7 capped off what had been one terrible start to the season. He is hitting .208/.318/.300 and has not homered since September 22. Brett Gardner, the Yanks’ outfielder, has a slugging percentage nearly .125 points higher than Ortiz’s, and Papi has been benched this weekend as the Sox take on the Mariners.

Around baseball, Ortiz’s spectacularly bad spring has been the talk of the town. Earlier today, The Times Bats blog profiled Ortiz and three others off to uncharacteristically slow starts. Alex Belth compares Ortiz to Mo Vaughn, another large DH no longer a force at the plate after his age 33 season.

Where Vaughn suffered through a wrist injury though, Ortiz is simply missing Manny. As Ed Price tweeted, Ortiz has hit .240 with a .783 OPS since the Red Sox shipped Manny away. Perhaps that’s just a coincidence. After all, Jason Bay has put up some very good offensive numbers too. Perhaps Manny’s protection forced pitchers to attack Ortiz. Either way, that’s not what the Red Sox expected for their $12.5 million.

For me, this decline has been bittersweet for a number of reasons. First of all, I basically predicted it back in January 2006 when I analyzed Ortiz’s contract situation for the now-defunct Talking Baseball blog. I’m also glad that the Yankees no longer have to face the David Ortiz of old who would refuse to make outs against New York.

As a fan of the game though, I hate to see the competition go out this way. I’d see the Yanks face Ortiz and win that battle while he’s at his finest. We can watch A.J. Burnett or Joba Chamberlain strike out Ortiz now, but that’s hardly an accomplishment today. With 30 strike outs in 157 plate appearances, that’s all Ortiz does anymore.

Now Ortiz may just be slumping. It’s still early, and while 157 plate appearances is a decent number, I’m not ready to dance on the baseball grave of Big Papi until the season is over. For now, though, an era is drawing to a close, and while the Yanks didn’t always win, that era was never lacking for drama, excitement and good old baseball.

Musings on A-Rod’s ‘historic milestones’ contract

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For one night with A-Rod back in the lineup and CC wheelin’ and dealin’, everything seemed right in the Yankee Universe. Of course, A-Rod was booed by the Orioles, but the Bronx cheers weren’t any louder than usual. He’ll do with that around the leagues, and some places — Boston and Texas — will be less forgiven than others.

Of the field, though, reporters are still trying to stir up something of an Alex Rodriguez story. To wit: A Jayson Stark column on A-Rod’s historic milestones clauses. As Stark reminds us, Hank Steinbrenner, in seemingly his last act of any importance atop the Yankee chain of command, gave Alex Rodriguez a ten-year contract with some heavy marketing bonuses for reaching certain home run totals.

While Nate Silver doesn’t think A-Rod will reach all of those milestones, the Yankees are operating on the belief that they will have paid A-Rod around $300 million over the life of this contract. In light of A-Rod’s PED admissions earlier this year, Stark asks around baseball, and his anonymous sources suggest that the Yanks should try to get out of those clauses of the contract.

Stark writes:

These are not questions the Yankees are asking — yet. But they’re questions we have heard asked around baseball lately, as A-Rod’s reputation, approval rating and marketability have plunged to somewhere south of Rio de Janeiro.

“If I’m the Yankees,” said an official of one team, “I think I’d be doing everything I could not to pay that money, and let him sue me for it.”

“I think the Yankees ought to challenge it and baseball ought to challenge it,” said an executive of another club. “And then it’s up to A-Rod and the union to determine how much they want to fight it. Does this guy really want to continue to go through this stuff? Does he really want to continue to explain himself?”

The rest of the column gets into your typical anonymous-source complaining about the Yanks’ alleged special treatment and how this contract just isn’t allowed within the rules of Major League Baseball. That part is more hot air than excerpted part above.

But anyway, I think Stark is full of it, and I think his unnamed baseball executives are full of it too. Imagine that you are a worker at a company, and your boss calls you into to say that, in fact, you won’t get paid those performance bonuses included in your contract. No one I know would be too thrilled about that, and you can bet that A-Rod and Scott Boras wouldn’t be either.

For better or worse, through sickness and through health, the Yankees and A-Rod are stuck with each other for this season and eight more afterward. The Yankees aren’t going to rock that boat by investigating a way out of these contract clauses, and Stark and his sources should know that just as well as the rest of us do.

Rooting for U.S. Steel

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In the mid-1950s, when Casey Stengel’s Yankees were doing a whole lot of winning, some bemused and frustrated baseball writer (or executive or player) coined a phrase: “Rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for U.S. Steel.” This year, as the Yankees are seemingly involved in more off-field controversies than ever before, I am reminded of that phrase but for all of the wrong reasons.

The big story yesterday concerning the Yankees and the way the organization treats its fans focused around confusing communication during Monday’s rain delay. As I reported yesterday, some fans were told by employees that the game was being canceled. When those fans attempted to return, security guards refused to let them in.

In truth, everyone was to blame for that debacle. The fans shouldn’t be leaving without official confirmation from the team, and the team’s employees at the stadium should not be spreading false information about the game. That’s the short of it though. There was an undercurrent to the events on Monday that really bothered me. It goes well beyond a story told in The Times today about a guard who refused to let one fan see someone he knew in another section. At the time of that incident, the only thing on the field was the tarp and some rain.

When a riot nearly erupted outside of Gate 6, a Daily News photographer happened to be nearby. As he started snapping pictures of the brewing dispute, Yankee Stadium security guards threatened him with a revocation of his press credential if he did not vacate the scene. That’s a pretty egregious abuse of power.

The rain delay melee overshadowed what, on any other day, would have been a fairly shocking column by Bob Raissman’s mustache. The Daily News columnist is known more for his facial hair and outrageous opinions than anything else, but his column on the Yankees’ heavy hand in the stadium is well worth our attention.

Basically, members of the media are pretty unhappy with the way the Yankees are treating the press at the new park. The team has jacked up the park-and-power fees and live broadcast fees by 300-400 percent. The Yankees are trying to charge networks $12,000 per game, up from $3000 at the old park, just to broadcast. The team is jamming internal communications frequencies and isn’t allowing off-duty broadcasters into media-only areas that go unused.

According to Raissman, even Paul O’Neill was hassled by security. The beloved ex-Yankee was watching the Yanks take BP when a security guard told him he couldn’t loiter by the indoor cages. What an odd turn of events.

Having read Jane Heller’s book the Yanks’ efforts to block her access to the team, having seen Yankee officials defend obscenely high ticket prices, exclusionary access to the Stadium and blatant abuses of political power, I feel like I am rooting for some evil version of U.S. Steel. I know some RAB readers will accuse of me of being overly sensitive to the Yanks and buying into some anti-corporate portrayal of the team’s leaders. Still, from stadium issues on down, the Yankee Front Office has been rubbing me the wrong way this year. They certainly know how to lose a PR battle.

For now, though, I’m going to take solace in the fact that I’m rooting for a baseball club. I don’t need to like what the Yankees media department is doing or how their security forces won’t let fans watch BP from the empty expensive seats three hours before first pitch. I’ll cheer on Joba and Derek, Mo and Mark and hope they do well. Maybe as the Yanks win, the Front Office will relax and just let baseball happen as it should. We all like control, but at some point, overbearing control and security just become too much.

An A-Rodian ‘What If?’

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No one elicits more back-and-forth in the Boston/New York debate that A-Rod. During the winter of 2003-2004, A-Rod was thrust into the spotlight when he was nearly traded to Boston and then was actually acquired by the Yanks. Since then, A-Rod has, rather undeservedly, come to embody the last five seasons’ worth of futile (by their standards) seasons for the Yanks. With the Yanks up in Beantown for a three-game set, Gordon Edes decided to play the “What If?” game with A-Rod. What if, he asks, A-Rod had actually landed with the Red Sox?

His answer is particularly absurd. Apparently, had A-Rod and Magglio landed in Boston in 2004, replacing Manny and Nomar Garciaparra, life would have turned out differently. The Red Sox would have won everything, and A-Rod would be the toast of Boston. The Sox would still have Hanley Ramirez, and the Fenway Faithful would have cheered A-Rod this Opening Day following Sports Illustrated’s PED revelations.

Edes’ best line though is this about A-Rod’s potential 2008 press conference :

After the press conference in which A-Rod tearfully spoke of how sorry he was and vowed that for every home run he would hit, he would make a donation to the Taylor Hooton fund, Red Sox fans gave him a standing ovation on opening day.

Somehow, by landing in Boston, A-Rod would have been able to put away his personal tendency to insert his foot into his mouth, and he would have been something more than aloof, socially-awkward superstar. He’d be an entirely different person. “A-Rod basked in the attention,” Edes writes, “but surrounded by outsized personalities like Ortiz and Damon, Pedro Martinez and Schilling, there was plenty to go around.”

Edes’ piece is an exercise in absurdity. A-Rod will be A-Rod wherever he goes. He’ll be the highest paid player of the game and among the top performers. He’ll be an offensive force and a tabloid sensation. He’ll be the guy who should just stop talking sometimes and the whipping boy for everyone else. In Boston, in New York, in Texas, it’s always A-Rod, and no destination five years ago would have changed that.

Same rivalry, new faces

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When David Ortiz takes to the field plate later tonight, it will mark his 101st regular season game as a member of the Red Sox facing the Yankees. Since 2003, no one on Boston has faced the Yankees more often than Ortiz has, and he knows the rivalry quite well.

Lately, though, Ortiz has been a shell of the player who killed the Yankees in 2003 and 2004. As Alan Schwarz detailed yesterday, Ortiz is an out-of-shape DH-only player, and those do not age gracefully. While his bat has shown signs of life over the last few games, he is hitting .220/.294/.322 with no home runs in the early going. He’s either primed for a breakout or has entered what we’ll diplomatically call the “decline” phase of his career.

Yesterday, in preparation for this weekend’s big series against the Yankees, the Red Sox vet offered up some unsolicited advice to the Yankees. Particularly, Ortiz decided to warn Joba Chamberlain about his past headhunting. “None of that, man — just play the game the way it’s supposed to be, and that’s about it,” Ortiz said “This is a guy, as good as he is, the next step for him will be to earn respect from everybody in the league. He’s not a bad guy, but when things like that happen, people get the wrong idea.”

Apparently, Kevin Youkilis can’t speak up for himself.

Anyway, when Joba takes the mound tonight, he’ll get the hero’s welcome in Boston, but he has a game to win. He has to keep his emotions — and his fastball — under control, and he will have to go toe-to-toe with the Red Sox ace. Last year, he outdueled Josh Beckett in Boston to announce his arrival as a Major League starter. This year, he’ll have to go toe-to-toe with Jon Lester, arguably a better pitcher than Beckett. It is no small task, and with boos raining down, it won’t be the easiest environment in which Joba must pitch.

But Chamberlain isn’t the only player due for some Boston scorn. While A-Rod, the object of New England’s collective affection, won’t be there, Mark Teixeira will, and you know what they say about a lover scorned. As the Yanks’ first baseman said to The Star-Ledger, he expects a hostile crowd tonight. “I’m sure they’ll be heavy boos,” Teixeira said. “I would expect nothing less from those fans. I would expect nothing less than tons of boos and tons of energy in the stadium. This is a great rivalry. It’s going to be a fun weekend.”

The Red Sox will be booing at Teixeira because he had the audacity to take a better offer in New York when the team’s owner refused to up his deal by another $10 million. Teixeira reminded anyone listening of that fact yesterday. “I enjoyed talking with the Red Sox all offseason,” he said. “There’s no question why the Red Sox are in the position they are. Because he’s an incredible GM and they have a great organization. There were opportunities for every team that I dealt with. Every team had a chance. Every team was given an opportunity to make their best offer. In the end, the Yankees made the best and it was a great fit for me.”

And so it goes. It’s the same game with new faces, and those new faces are fitting in off the field quite nicely. Welcome to the Red Sox/Yankees Rivalry 2009.