Utterly Meaningless

“Damn Yankees” —

I do not think that means what he thinks it means . . .

😉

The full lyric goes: “Those damn yankees, why can’t we beat ’em?? Yer blind ump, yer blind ump, ya must be outta yer mind ump!”

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“Damn Yankees! was quoted in a very famous cartoon of Don Zimmer whining when the Sox blew one of the largest mid-season leads in history to end up losing to Bucky Dent’s homer over the Green Monster.

One of the Philly papers reprised the headline (if not the cartoon) today.

And in one of those grand coincidences that the FSM occasionally throws out to give us hints of his existence, Don Zimmer eventually ended up coaching the Yankees. During an ALCS game in ’03 with the hated Sox, a melee broke out and Pedro Martinex threw the 70+ year old Zimmer to the turf. The same Pedro who got his ass kicked by Godzilla last night.

Good essay and utterly meaningless. The Yanks pay something like $50M in “fines” for having that big payroll. Guess what most of the owners do with that free money.

The Yankees are good now because Steinbrenner was and is willing to spend the money to make them good. He invested in the team when the revenue WASN’T there because the team had been pretty bad for a number of years.

Could LA (Dodgers or Angels) or the Red Sox duplicate what the Yankess have done? Sure they could. If they had owners who were willing to spend the money to build a team.

I have to admit the game-saving base-running of the Traitor Johnny Damon (as he’s known in our house) in Game 5, was stunning to see even on replay when you knew what was coming.

And the reason he got that moniker from us for donning pinstripes was indeed MONEY — although that’s not what made him such a good player. He was a great Idiot first, for less money.

You know, I’ve never been able to really trust Damon or Clemens before him. To me, they were always Red Sox, even after wearing the pinstripes for years.

And Damon’s one of the worst left fielders I’ve ever seen. Slow and no arm.

BTW, something new you and COD might enjoy from Slate:

The cards, which depict 103 Negro Leaguers in their primes, were released this month. Like Simkus, I was a Strat-O-Matic fanatic in my youth. I relished the opportunity to play a game with the creator of the Negro League cards—and to correct retroactively the greatest injustice in sports history. And so that’s how we came to integrate the 1927 Dodgers and the 1927 Yankees.

I play the Dodgers. Simkus plays the Yankees. We draft five Negro Leaguers each. For historical accuracy, we choose only players who were active in 1927. I take Satchel Paige, Cool Papa Bell, Dihigo, Judy Johnson, and George Henry “Tank” Carr.

Adding five great black players means I have to drop five white mediocrities. So in this alternate universe of equal opportunity, I send Doug McWeeny, Jesse Barnes, Chuck Corgan, Overton Tremper, and Irish Meusel to the minors.

Simkus’s picks make the Yankees’ Murderers’ Row lineup even more murderous. Now it consists of Tony Lazzeri, Charleston, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, John Beckwith, Biz Mackey, Bob Meusel, and Mark Koenig. But they have to bat against Satchel Paige.

It’s a close game . . . .

I didn’t play Strat-o-matic, I played the Avalon Hill baseball game. In fact I still have it. Breck and I pull it out occasionally. It’s been out of print for 20 years, but some guy in GA reverse engineered all the math to create new player cards, and he creates a new set and sells then via PDF every year.

I had to mail something at one of those shopping center package franchise shops, and the owner was wearing his NYY cap. I congratulated him and made a few good-natured complaints and he was a GREAT pains to tell me the Yankees absolutely didn’t buy the series. . . what does that mean, I wonder??