It's a free country.

Perhaps you were driven away.

Best of luck in Los Angeles.

But this is not loyalty. This is the opposite of loyalty.

I actually enjoy Curt Schilling's blog.

I found this more interesting and oddly insightful than 100 Lupica columns where he compares baseball to boxing:

"Filing for free agency is weird. I never knew or thought about how it happened. Representing myself I rounded up the legal details and figured out exactly how it works. For the next 15 days I can speak with other teams, and they can contact me, but no details can be discussed. They can only express interest. For the next 15 days the team that remains my first choice, the Sox, have exclusive rights. I guess I’ll find out how closely teams follow rules…..

So this huge thing, free agency, was accomplished by doing the following.

Place a phone call to the MLBPA, tell them you want to become a free agent, hang up.

Weird. Something that can be so life altering was pretty much a 48 second phone call. They file a letter with the commissioners office 'A letter of intent' that lists all the players filing that day, and it’s official."

Clueless Joe.

My first thought is that it would be utterly hilarious if ARod ended up playing for the Dodgers with Torre as his manager.

My second thought is that Torre doesn't know what he's in for.

First time he tries to get a table and a restaurant and gets snubbed because Tyra Banks showed up. Not Tyra Banks, but the guy from the Trya show who does the makeup.

"Sorry, Mr. Lasorda baseball player thingy person."

The Bottom Line.

Read this article and pretend it was written about you.

It isn't nice.

I wouldn't like to be called a phony.

There's actually a lot of mean-spirited stuff in there.

Really think about it. Absorb it. Let it sink in. Doesn't feel too good, does it?

This is the kind of sentiment that ARod knew he'd foster when he opted out of his contract.

This is the exact article that Lupica (and others) have been waiting to write.

Now, balance the sting of this article against the extra $200 million you're going to make.

Suddenly, the article doesn't seem so bad, does it?

I may be a phony ... but there ain't nothing phony about dollar bills, y'all.

Is that the best you've got? Tell you what. Here's $15 million I left in a coat pocket. Go get a new haircut and maybe a small Caribbean island while you're at it.

I hope the Yankees win the next ten in a row ...

... but why would ARod necessarily choose to stay in New York if he wanted to win a Chamopionship?

I know ARod wants money above all. Just like almost everybody else. I also know that the state of flux within the Yankee organization had very little to do with ARod's decfision to opt out. I would think ARod would be happier with Girardi as manager than with Torre as manager.

But this observation simply makes no sense:

"We know only this: Rodriguez will go where the money is best. He obviously doesn’t care what people think about him. His legacy will always be more about his contract than championships."

If a major league baseball player wanted to win a championship above all other things, for which team would he choose to play?

For the Yankees or for the Angels?

For the Yankees or for the Red Sox?

For the Yankees or for the Cubs?

For the Yankees or for the Rockies?

For the Yankees or for the Tigers?

For the Yankees or for the Mets?

For the Yankees or for the Cardinals?

I don't absolutely know the answer. I know that Jeter's range is slipping, Posada is getting old, Rivera is getting old, and Pujols/ARod would make a good 1-2 punch.

I also know that some of the team mentioned above probably couldn't even afford ARod, so the question is moot.

But you put ARod at ss for the Dodgers and you don't think they can win the World Series? In the weak-ass National League?

Maybe he's getting out of the A.L. East simply because he wants to win a World Series.

Yes, he's selfish. Get over it.

These are the same reporters who lick Reggie Jackson's taint and work every day in the House that Ruth Built.

That would be Babe Ruth.

The guy who saved baseball but went and played for the Boston Braves because he selfishly wanted to be offered the job as Yankees manager.

The guy who spit in his hand before shaking Gehrig's hand for the b&w photos.

The guy who never saw an advertisement he didn't like.


It's not even worth discussing, y'all.

Mike Vaccaro says "good riddance" and Peter Abraham says (ahem) "Perhaps the Yankees are better off without such a player."

Abraham, by the way, implicitly seems to believe that Curt Schlling and Manny Ramirez are gritty, selfless role players.


I have little doubt that ARod is an arrogant prick. I'm consistently amused that so-called reporters can't tell the difference between a Good Player and a Good Interview.

So, then, everything is "stunning."

Sun stuns New York Daily News by rising in the East and setting in the West.

Tuesday stuns New York Daily News by following Monday.

Halloween sneaks up on New York Daily News. Who knew it was October 31 this year?


I mean, maybe I'm a tiny bit surprised that Boras didn't even wait for an offer from the Yankees, and maybe I'm a tiny bit surprised that ARod acted so quickly, but I'm hardly stunned by an event that has been 99.9% certain to occur and has been discussed as such for over a year.

Rockies are money while Mets are spent.

Ask a stupid question ...

After four years of unqualified support, Mike Lupica's opinion of Alex Rodriguez changes suddenly.

Mike Lupica thinks Alex Rodriguez should not come back to the Yankees:

"Because here is the question, not just for Yankee fans, but for any good sports fan of the city of New York: How much do YOU think A-Rod is worth?"

I think it's difficult to quantify this answer.

Take Joe Torre. He is worth something to a baseball team.

Now, multiple that value by a hundred million, and that is what ARod is worth.

I would take the cumulative value of Mike Lupica and his entire family, throw in the bullpen, both catchers, and Long Island. That is what ARod is worth for one year.


"Pay A-Rod this way and they are officially making him the centerpiece of their franchise and the face of their franchise for the next decade."

Good.

Or maybe Wilson Betemit can be the centerpiece of a third-place team.


"It won't be Derek Jeter, won't be the new manager and won't be Joba Chamberlain. It will be A-Rod, who puts up huge numbers except at the time of year when the greatness of the New York Yankees has been grandly defined. Bucky Dent has a more impressive October résumé with one swing."

That's wrong and you're a fool.

ARod will get his World Series "moments."

The question is, will he do it in pinstripes.

Smoke Signals.

Just to prove I wasn't making it up or deriving my information from an aspartame-induced trip into an alternative reality:

"Later, when asked in a radio interview if he had heard that Levine wanted him out, Torre said: 'It's only secondhand. You hear a lot of people talk. ... I don't like to send smoke signals secondhand.' "

You just sent smoke signals secondhand, didn't you?

Then, the press eats this stuff up.

"Mike, did you send secondhand smoke signals? I know I didn't.

Malucis, did you send secondhand smoke signals? Anybody?

Joe, I gotta tell you. Somebody sent secondhand smoke signals and it wasn't anybody in this room besides you.

Bad job outta Joe."

Am I hallucinating?

I must be wrong.

I could have sworn Millar played for the Orioles.

I also could have sworn the Orioles were an AL East enemy of the Red Sox.

Let me check ... phew ... I thought so.

Post number 1,001.

Once again, I'm puzzled by the notion that double-talking passive-aggression is classy and dignified:

"That sets the stage for Torre's revenge. When someone asked how he envisions his future role – as ambassador to the new Stadium, perhaps, or the star of a future Old-Timers' Day event – Torre's expression went dead-cold. He said, 'I'm not ready to comment on that.' It was the equivalent of Joe Cool telling George, Hank and Hal Steinbrenner: This isn't over. Not by a long shot."

Classy.


I heard a portion of yesterday's interview with Mike and the Mad Dog.

When asked about Randy Levine, Torre responded in typical Torre fashion.

Torre said that he hadn't heard any negativity firsthand from Randy Levine, only secondhand. But since it was secondhand, he wasn't going to mention it.

So, if you're not going to mention it, who just mentioned it?

"He was told of the stripped-down offer by Hal Steinbrenner, at which point Torre reminded the brain trust that he'd taken the Bombers to the postseason for 12 years -- a feat unmatched by any other manager in the big leagues. He stressed that the postseason is a merciless crapshoot, and to cement that point, he reminded them that of the eight qualifiers in the 2006 postseason, only one team, the Yankees, made it back in 2007.

What was ownership's response?

Silence."

I'm glad Torre finally realized that the postseason is a merciless crapshoot. I absolutely agree. Which is why I firmly believe Showalter could have rolled three straight elevens, too. As long as Rivera was his closer.

Torre expects all the credit and none of the blame.

Do words mean anything anymore?

Not to get all Derrida in my baseball blog, but I keep reading and hearing the adjective "shocked" and the adverb "shockingly" used to describe Torre's decision to reject the Yankees' offer.

1. Steinbrenner said Torre wasn't going to come back (probably) if the Yankees lost in the playoffs.
2. Torre's contract had run out.
3. This is at least the third postseason in a row where Torre's job status was shaky.
4. I could find twenty articles that predicted the Yankees would make Torre a lowball offer and then Torre would forced to reject it.
5. If you couldn't figure out 4. yourself, then you're not paying attention.

While I think the entire faux offer was a waste of time and a waste of an airplane ticket, I also think the Yankees would have been crucified if they'd announced their search for a new manager ten minutes after Game Four.

I am seriously wondering if the word "shocking" has any meaning anymore.

"Awesome" used to mean, like, the size of the ocean or the force created by a supernova. Today, Taco Bell burritos are regularly described as "awesome."

Are these people really shocked? Or do these people just have a limited vocabulary? Or has the word just lost all meaning?

I mean, the Torre retrospectives seemed pre-written and ready to go.

Couldn't have been too much of a shock: "Shockingly, Joe Torre rejected the Yankee contract offer. Even more shockingly, I had already written this before it even happened."

Nice guy, bad manager.

In 2001, Clemens won the Cy Young Award.

Tino and Brosius hit those homeruns off Kim.

Soriano hit that homerun off Schilling.

The Yankees wore NYPD and NYFD hats.

The Yankees did not win the World Series in 2001.

Doesn't anybody remember?:

"I always will believe that during the 1996-2001 dynasty, Mariano Rivera was the only uniformed member of the organization more important to the Yankees' success than Torre."

Crazy, and crazy.


"Joe Torre never spent hours poring over statistics or videotape like a lot of young managers do these days."

That, I believe.

Joe Torre doesn't even know who C.C. Sabathia is.


"He wasn't a workaholic type who obsessed about getting to work earlier than his peers."

That, I also believe.


"He would have a nice lunch, and then he would shave cleanly after games -- wins or losses -- as he prepared for a late dinner at a restaurant."

That's good to know.

Expert on green tea.

Not so much on Wang's home/road splits.


"He was not above playing favorites, of course, and some players felt the dark glower of his stare."

Of course he wasn't above playing favorites.

Who do you think he is?

A manager of a baseball team trying to optimize his team's chances to win? He can't do that when David Cone's feelings are at stake.


"Other managers will work harder than Torre, put in more time. His successor might handle the Yankees' pitching staff better than Torre, and moving forward, the team could benefit from statistical analysis in a way that it hasn't over the last 12 years. The lineups and lineup choices might be more informed."

That, I also believe.

So why should the Yankees have kept Torre?

Because Torre was nice to Buster Olney's wife one time.

Intellectual Virus.

Before he lost his mind with "Finnegan's Wake," James Joyce wrote his stream of consciousness masterpiece, "Ulysses."

It's more intersting to read about Joyce's works than to actually read Joyce's works.

In any case, there's a point here that I'm getting to.

Around the same time, William Faulkner was creating his own stream of consciousness masterpiece, "The Sound and the Fury."

When Faulkner was asked about the similarities to Joyce's works, Faulkner disavowed the influence. Faulkner claimed that stream of consciousness was sort of an "intellectual pollen."

In truth, the idea of an "intellectual pollen" seems valid, considering how often disconnected people around the world seem to reach the same breakthrough at the same time.

That's sort of what happened when Bob Klapisch and Joel Sherman both came up with the brilliant idea of giving Torre a new two-year contract.

Double Take.

When I first pondered this passage from Bob Klapisch, I was offended by the notion that the Yankee baseball seasons should be regarded as a Joe Torre farewell tour:

"By getting a final, two-year deal, Torre would enjoy what amounts to a multi-summer farewell tour, and he'd be rewarded for keeping alive the longest golden era in Yankee history. He'd also have the opportunity to close out the old Stadium after 2008 and have a chance to manage in the new ballpark when it opens in April 2009."

Upon closer inspection, Klapisch just referreed to the years 1996 - 2007 as the "longest golden era in Yankee history."

Stuff I know off the top of my head, which I am not even paid to know, which disputes Klapisch's contention:

-- Yogi Berra has ten rings.

-- The Yankees won five straight Championships between 1949 and 1953.

-- Between 1949 and 1962, the Yankees won twelve AL pennants and nine Championships

-- Babe Ruth.

Rerun.

Bob Klapisch offers some excellent baseball-related rationale for rehiring Joe Torre as Yankee manager:

"By getting a final, two-year deal, Torre would enjoy what amounts to a multi-summer farewell tour, and he'd be rewarded for keeping alive the longest golden era in Yankee history. He'd also have the opportunity to close out the old Stadium after 2008 and have a chance to manage in the new ballpark when it opens in April 2009."

Think of the little people.

This is not such a bad idea.

But the guy whose job it is to fetch green tea?

He's going to get fired.

Oh. My. God.

Up yours, you hypocritical keyboard coward.

Of all the people to climb up this particular high horse ...

I can't even comment on this in detail. I don't have the stomach to actually read it.

You can have him, you traitor.

"I like it when he calls me 'Big Papi.' "

Fourth-best.

"Jose Reyes went from being called the most exciting player in baseball, and even a possible MVP candidate, to being the third-best shortstop in his own DIVISION."

Did Lupica forget about Renteria?

If you have nothing nice to say, say nothing at all.

Suzyn Waldman is no Walter Cronkite:

"What's the big damn deal? That I cried for four seconds of a 10-minute postgame?

The idea that I can't choke up because a man I went through cancer with 11 years ago is going to lose his job and I was describing his coaches crying? It's absolutely ludicrous'

I'm not Walter Cronkite."

Walter Cronkite cried on the air when President Kennedy died. Not when Joe Torre gave a postgame press conference.


I'll explain the problem with crying on the air when the Yankees lose or Torre gets fired.

Though you're not expected to be Walter Cronkite, you're expected to tell the fans what's going on with the Yankees.

Your emotional involvment with the players clearly inhibits your ability to do so.

We all know Miguel Cairo and Wil Nieves are bad baseball players.

You act like their protective mom.

If I relied on Suzyn Waldman for baseball analysis, I'd think that every Yankee is the best player ever, and the strongest, and the best-looking, and well-mannered, too.

Even when Lupica is right, he's not right.

I don't feel like looking up the links to all the articles that have been written recently -- by fans and sportswriters alike -- that have trashed Jeter's performance in the ALDS.

I just find it amusing that Lupica seemingly takes the pulse of the New York sports scene without reading any newspaper articles or typing "Derek Jeter" into a search engine.

So, in Lupica's mind, Jeter is the Teflon Captain.

Lupica thinks he is the first writer brave enough to call out the Captain:

"This time the shortstop, the captain of the team, hurt the Yankees every bit as much as the third baseman did. It goes on his record with all the winning.

This one goes on him, really for the first time."

Okay, you're on the right track, except:

1. Jeter hurt the team more than ARod.

2. It's not the first time Jeter has hurt the team in the playoffs.

That's just how baseball works.

I suppose it's better than the Mets, who didn't care at all.

You know the stereotype of a female reporter getting all emotional?:

"No I was okay actually until I went into the clubhouse and the coaches are sitting in Torre’s office and they are watching this. And the tears you hear in my voice are coming down the faces of the coaches in that coach's room."

Betcha didn't know Paul O'Neill was a role player.

"The Yankees have stars. Lots of stars. They have Alex Rodriguez, who has 518 more home runs than your local auto mechanic, but just as many championships."

They have Chien-Ming Wang with a playoff ERA so high, it can get into Barely Legal magazine.

"What they do not have enough of are the productive role players who lend invaluable depth and breadth to a team's clubhouse and effort. They have not had a Paul O'Neill or Scott Brosius or Tino Martinez."

O'Neill -- Great player. Zero World Series homeruns.

Brosius -- Awesome World Series MVP in 1998. If Brosius was the Yankee third baseman this year, the Yankees would have been in fourth place.

Tino -- Not only have the Yankees had players like Tino Martinez, they had Tino Martinez. In 2005. Not surprisingly, he hit .000 in the playoffs that year.

Not too shocking given his .231 career playoff batting average.

Funny.

I asked a buddy of mine if he'd ever heard of Ross Ohlendorf or Bronson Sardinha. He had not.

I don't care if I spelled the names incorrectly. They're not worth looking up.


Wang deserved the game #1 start. I know he can't pitch on the road, but he'd better learn.

Wang was making his third career postseason start.

When MLB.com hyped up the Yankees-Indians series, they showed grainy photographs of dead players wearing wool uniforms. Not Indians players, of course, but, you know, the Yankee "ghosts" with the mystique and the aura and the whatnot.

The Yankees are therefore experienced.


The Indians won more games than the Yankees this season.

The Indians sent the best 1-2 pitching combination in the American League against a team that has not gotten out of the first round since 2004.

The Indians aren't intimidated by Luis Vizcaino, as an example -- why should they be? Because Vizcaino wears the same uniform as players who won World Series title a bunch of times?


Maybe the Yankee failures in the playoffs is just the odds evening out or maybe it's just the better team winning year after year.

I just can not quite comprehend the continuing intellectual laziness: "The Yankees know how to win and they're the Yankees."

Stop acting all surprised when they lose.

Misleading stat of the night.

Batting average with runners in scoring position:

Yankees .333 (1-for-3).

Indians .125 (2-for-16).

Take the "lovable" out of "lovable losers."

I'm actually quite amazed by the willingness of the Mets players to openly admit their apathy.

Seventh Heaven.

While Mike Lupica examines the Mets' 2007 season with some pointless and bizarre numerology, Tim Marchman offers some thoughtful observations.


Randolph is apparently a well-liked person.

I even heard Peter Gammons inexplicably defend Randolph by describing him as "dignified," which struck me as faintly racist, to be honest. Gammons probably doesn't have a racist bone in his body. But it just sounded like one of those statements where the addendum "for a black man" is left unspoken.

Point is, Randolph is simply not a good manager.

Best case, even if Randolph is generally a good manager, or if Randolph has the potential to be a good manager, Randolph was an abysmal manager in 2007:

"This is the second time in three years he's presided over a late-season catastrophe — in 2005 the Mets were 1.5 games out of a playoff spot on August 26 and then lost 16 of 20 against weak competition — and his reasonableness no longer seems a virtue. Every day, his reticence seems a bit more like the silence of someone who's figured out the best way to keep people from realizing he doesn't quite know what he's doing.

...

The mathematical fact that the odds against this collapse were 1-in-500 is astonishing, but it's so abstract a figure that it tends to exculpate the guilty. ('499 times out of 500, Willie Randolph gets his men to the playoffs!') For a team, or some large important part of it, to visibly lose their will to win right there on the field is something else, that isn't easily forgiven."

In response, Mike Lupica said, "Seven, seven, seven, seven. I like turtles."