A Set Up: Michael Kay and Yankee Stadium

The new Yankee Stadium is ridiculous.  I never want to invest 3 hours watching a game, only to see it end, when a pitcher MAKES HIS PITCH, and some skinny infielder sticks his arse out one way and flips his wrists the other and hits a 316′ “home run” into the first row of that travesty in right field at Yankee Stadium.  Not to mention that I don’t want some yahoos reaching over, as they did AGAIN today, to turn an out, into a homer for Posada–was that call overturned?  I didn’t stick around.  That’s when the game went off.  I’m sure the Yankee fans (Read: people who like watching beat-downs) got all lathered up about Posada’s 316′ fly ball.

I would never have let the Yankees rebuild the original dimensions, but of course, they did.  Not only that but the new wall is actually CLOSER by 3 to 10 feet along the right field line.  Check the blue line in the diagram.  So MLB made something that was bad, worse.  Great.

Is it me?  Or have more than half of the Yankees’ home, HR’s this short season been the cheap variety?  Seems like every one so far scrapes the back of the wall by that 314′ right field corner.  Is that the way you want to win?  On a ball that would be an out at any other park in the country?  That float your boat?  I don’t want to see that–that’s dopey.  If the pitcher makes a good pitch, he shouldn’t be penalized with a homer.

Beyond that, there is already mounting evidence this season that MLB has livened the ball and that we are in for a big homer-year.  Yup.  The current theory is that with the economy, they figured,” why not?”.

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There have been, oooh, I don’t know, about 1000 major league managers fired in the history of baseball, but there’s still one firing, that Michael Kay is holding a candlelight vigil for: Willie Randolph.  Here’s the deal:

Willie Randolph is a nice guy.  He played for both the Mets and Yankees and he was hired to manage the NY Mets, without so much as a DAY of managing experience.  None.  And he was well paid.  He was paid more than many veteran managers with over ten years of experience!  He was handed the team that had the HIGHEST National League payroll, for ALL 4 YEARS that he managed them!

He couldn’t get past the Cardinals in a playoff series that most feel, other managers would have.

He presided over the biggest “collapse” since the 1964 Phillies.

And the Mets asked him to come back!  And they paid him 4 million dollars that year, when only Torre, I believe, got more.  Most managers were lucky to make 2 million.

That’s 4 million that he didn’t deserve.  That’s 4 million that he didn’t have to give back one dime of, even though he was canned during the season.

Little boy Yankee-fans like Michael Kay and Mike Francesa, decided to rip the Mets up one side and down the other because they fired Willie at the wrong time of day.  It was a night on the East Coast–when the Mets were playing in LA.  My goodness!  The horror!

They actually complained that the mean Mets made Willie fly coast-to-coast, when they KNEW they were going to fire him!  The horror.

And the other day, a year after it happened, I heard Michael Kay making sure to go way out of his unprofessional, angry, fanlike way, to bash the Mets all over again.

Hey Mike: What are you smoking?  The Mets GIFTED Randolph an extra 4 million when just about any other people in the world would have let him go at the end of the 2006 season!  My goodness, Randolph was GIFTED 4 million dollars! And you want to complain bitterly that the Mets did something wrong?  Randolph should have held a press conference and publicly thanked the Wilpons for being stupid enough to overpay him and bring him back after the botch job he did with the Mets–the highest paid outfit in the NL.  He had to take a FLIGHT?  What assinine nonsense!

The moral of this for the slow-learning Wilpons is simple: because the media is so heavily and obviously Yankee-centric, and you have angry fans like Kay and Francesa with so much wattage at their disposal and absolutely no qualms about using it to bash you: YOU NEVER HIRE A PERSON WITH ANY “YANKEE” STINK EVER AGAIN!

Because with guys like Francesa and Kay, there would have been no pleasing them.  If you fire a beloved Yankee, they will rip you.  If it wasn’t the time of day rip-job, it would have been something else–it’s first semester, first grade.  It’s like CNN covering George Bush or Sarah Palin: If they walked on water today, the headline on CNN tomorrow would be: “Bush can’t swim!”

And doing things like this is why the Wilpons just don’t get it.  Leave the Yankees ALONE!  Hire other people.  Nobody was running out to Shea because you had a nice guy as manager–they wanted to win the bloody 2006 world series and just about any other manager would have!

And Mr. Kay, I heard you the other day trying to foist the idea on your listeners that you are harder on the Yankees than the Mets~ I nearly drove off the dam* road when I heard that.  That’s stupid, even for you!  Dude, listeners aren’t dumb–we know when you are blowing smoke up our bippys.  Why don’t you take it back and blow it up yours?  My goodness.

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My nephew got a chance to redeem himself in travel baseball today.  He pitched and didn’t walk a man in an inning and two thirds.  He retired evey man except an error by the shortstop I think.  He had poise.  He had his fastball for strikes and then his changeup down for the put-away!  It was great to see him with the confidence in it and I applaud the manager, who has gone out of his way to make the boy feel comfortable both using the changeup and pitching after a bad outing.  That’s managing!  Nice.

And the little boy called me after the game to get my opinion on it and he and I had fun going over the things in the game and how he did.  I made sure to compliment him and tell him that above all, his manager likes his poise and loves the fact that he doesn’t hurt himself with walks.  I made sure to tell him that his manager told me he was happy to see Max pitching and thinking out there.  And he does.  He makes use of his brain as much as his arm.  He watches the batter’s hacks and makes adjustments and for 10U stuff, that’s ahead of the curve.  I really enjoyed seeing my little buddy do what I know he can.  Nice.