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Photo by Rebecca Glass.

This isn’t supposed to happen. It can’t end like this. There is an overwhelming sense of denial that comes through: that we have to be dreaming, that this has to be some sort of joke. The Greatest Of All Time (or so we dubbed him), the one who seems immortal and impervious to all earthly manifestations of age and decline, is crumpled on a warning track in Kansas City, clutching his knee and writhing in pain. The game hasn’t even started.

I say it to anyone who asks: I started following Rivera’s career because I fell in love with his name. The subtle way the vowels melt with the R and the N…maybe it’s a foolish way to pick your favorite player, but I did it with every team I follow. I was rewarded in this case (and with the Devils, too, where Patrik Elias has had a long, extremely productive career). A 12 year-old girl doesn’t always realize what she’s getting into, that loyalties, if they are to be respected, don’t get thrown out or changed at will. It’s a hard lesson to learn, but Mariano Rivera makes it easy.

Days spent away from the internet are rare in today’s universe, but when you do so, you don’t expect to come back to the news that Mariano Rivera, of all people, was taken off the field on a cart after injuring his knee while shagging flies. In the ever-changing world of baseball, Mariano’s supposed to be your constant, your Penny while you’re Desmond stuck on the Island. Other players get hurt. Other players get ill. Other players age and decay. Not Mariano. Never Mariano.

I don’t remember the first time I saw Mariano Rivera pitch in person, but it took a while. The first few games I ever went to involved the Yankees losing or winning by too large a margin; but other moments I remember quite clearly. There was the streak of scoreless postseason innings in 1999 and 2000, the Game Seven heroics in 2003…I don’t need to go into details about these things. You’ll remember them quite clearly. 

We watch sports for various reasons. Sometimes it’s the thrill of the competition, sometimes it’s because it provides our deepest bonds with our parents or siblings or friends, and sometimes it’s our escape. The celebration, the glorification of what the human body can achieve in peak form is a distraction from a harsher truth: life is short, and youth is shorter. Now take that perfect human specimen, endow him with a sense of humility that will bypass most of us, and give him the ability to throw a pitch so good that he can make a nearly 20-year career by throwing just that one, and you can begin to understand the deification. Sure, there are setbacks and (very) occasional blown saves, but they are the exception that proves the rule.

I remember a moment from the 2009 postseason. It’s Game Three of the ALCS, the Yankees are in Anaheim—that place where the Yankees had so much trouble playing in the last decade—and Yankee Stadium has thrown its doors open for us to come and watch. In the ninth inning, after misplaying a bunt, Rivera is on the mound with runners on first and third with no one out and a tie score. Somehow, some way, he escapes the jam without allowing a run. Like the way Pippin ascertains that it’ll be okay because they have the White Wizard, we also ascertain that it will be okay somehow because we have Mariano.

When does a really good baseball player cross the line and become a legend? When did we decide Mariano wasn’t just the best at his job now but the best ever? Was it after his heroics in 2003? Was it later? Was it as late as his phenomenal 2008 season, where he walked just six batters all year? We remember, he needed shoulder surgery after that year; the greatest season he’s had since 1996, and he’s done it all with an injured shoulder. As die-hard baseball fans, we know how scary the words “shoulder injury” can be when concerning a pitcher; for any of us who have ever hurt our shoulders, we’ll know just how incapacitating it can get. You’re not supposed to be able to throw a baseball 90 miles an hour when you have calcifications in your shoulder (if you’re supposed to throw a baseball that hard at all); never mind have one of the best years of your career.

There’s a photo I took of Mariano in 2010. It’s the last time I saw him pitch in a postseason game. He’s standing on the mound, his back to the fans, holding the baseball, head down, as though he’s learning all of its secrets. Is he praying? Is he strategizing? Is he thinking of something that has nothing to do with baseball? It’s blasphemy even to suggest it, but part of you wonder, is this what G-d would look like, if he were human and a baseball player, and he was about to make some important decision? Mariano isn’t G-d, of course, and maybe if I knew him I would know his faults, but I don’t.  I am, after all, still a fan, and part of the fun is keeping the barriers in place. I can pretend he has no faults. We can pretend. On a team that’s no stranger to tabloid pages, to accusations of centaur paintings and less savory rumors, we can pretend that Mariano is our bastion of constancy, our refuge for when all else goes astray. He’s never given us a reason to doubt it—maybe we don’t even need to pretend.

It’s not news that 2012 was quite possibly going to be Mariano Rivera’s final season. He had stated that he made his decision prior to spring training, something that Mike Mussina did before finally winning 20 games in 2008. For the best, though, we only ever want the best. If this was to be Mariano’s farewell tour, we wanted MAR-I-AN-O chants at the Stadium while he was on the mound in the ninth inning of an elimination game in the World Series, needing just three more strikes for the Yankees’ 28th championship. You might say that we’re spoiled as Yankees fans, that we want an awful lot, but in this case you would be wrong. We didn’t want this for us—or, at least, not only for us. We wanted it for him, because of what Mo’s given us, because of what he’s given baseball, he deserved no less.

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“The drunk” and “the rapist” are labels that sting, ones that once applied, can’t be torn off or rubbed away; they’re there to stick. As humans, we are prone to judging, and fitting things squarely into nice labels makes this a much easier task. Josh Lueke is an alleged rapist; Matt Bush is sitting in a jail cell until further notice. These are nice, simple labels, and they make further discussion seem pointless. Josh Lueke raped someone—why does anything else matter?

We’ve been conditioned to to extol the virtues of the Tampa Bay Rays.  They are Moneyball taken up a notch; unlike the Athletics the Rays compete directly with the Yankees and the Red Sox, so their disadvantage is that much greater. Everyone loves an underdog, especially if the underdog comes equipped with stories that are easy to like—the Legend of Sam Fuld, for example.

The Rays are the genius of Andrew Friedman and Joe Maddon; they are lovable, they rise to the challenge, they can perform miracles (like the last night of the 2011 season, when, as you’ll remember, they came back from a 7-0 deficit to win the game, and the AL wild card berth). They (at least, the 2008-and-beyond version) are not supposed to be the team that hires players with dubious off-field records, ones that you have to work to root for, even if somehow you can will yourself over the moral hazard of doing so.

There is the argument that sabermetrics are about exploiting market inefficiencies, and one joke common among sabermetrically-inclined fans is that “____” is the new market inefficiency, with the blank being whatever the flavor of the day happens to be (speed guys, power guys, defense guys, guys who are supposed to be washed up..). The thing is, saying that baseball players with unsavory pasts are the new market inefficiency becomes problematic when these pasts involve criminal records—and accusations of offenses that qualify as felonies, not minor misdemeanors.

Baseball players—good ones, anyway—are celebrities, and celebrities often get a free pass where many others don’t. How many times has (insert young Hollywood star) been arrested for driving under the influence, and how many times has the result been actual, serious jail time? Other athletes in other sports have been accused of heinous crimes, but with the notable exception of Michael Vick, few ever seem to pay the full legal price. We put people we admire on a pedestal, and we forget that they, too, are not untouchable.

Neither Lueke nor Bush’s past legal troubles were unknown to the Rays. At some point, the desire to win, or at least the desire to field as competitive a team as possible overtook the desire to sign players who did not have such troubles. The Rays, of course, are not the first team to do it, nor will they be the last, but with so much emphasis placed on the Rays as a “likable” team, they may be the most striking.

The Rays need fans. This is one of the most well-known quandaries prevalent in the majors today on a team level. Despite the team’s ability to go from worst-to-first, there are still serious attendance problems. As Jonah Keri mentions in The Extra 2%, the location of Tropicana Field itself is a problem; few believe the Rays will be able to stay in St. Petersburg long-term. Winning is supposed to be the way to get said fans; the correlation between winning teams and attendance would be obvious to even the least sabermetrically-inclined audiences. Unfortunately, for the Rays, winning—even being American League champions as they were in 2008—has not done enough.

Last season, the Rays ranked 29 of 30 teams by average attendance, just under 19,000 per game, while the majors’ most successful team attendance-wise, Philadelphia, averaged over 45,000. If winning cannot help bring fans to the ballpark, a team’s options to increase attendance become limited, and whether the team in question can afford to take on less-than-savory characters becomes magnified.

It would be one thing if Bush or Lueke produced like Albert Pujols or Miguel Cabrera (indeed, one might argue that the latter’s legal troubles have, rightly or wrongly, been outweighed by his on-field production). This, however, is not the case: Lueke pitches out of the bullpen, and Bush is only the third player to be taken first overall in the MLB draft to have never made the majors (Brien Taylor and Steve Chilcott being the others).

The Rays ostensibly signed these players with the belief that they could help the team win in 2012, but the question that has to be answered is whether it’s more likely that the efforts of these players to help the team win will draw fans, or that their personal travails will keep fans away. Baseball fans tend to have a lot of patience and there’s no rule that says baseball players have to be saints off of the field, but one can’t exactly imagine running a marketing campaign centered around Lueke or Bush.

In fact, Bush’s troubles are such that Andrew Friedman has acknowledged he won’t play for the Rays this season:

“I think it’s safe to say that he’s not going to play for us on the field,” Rays executive vice president Andrew Friendman said (via the Tampa Tribune). “But even that, with the ongoing criminal investigation, with all of the different dynamics in play, it’s hard to talk about the 40-man [roster] spot and everything else, because until things advance more, it’s difficult to know exactly which way we will be able to go.”

Bush’s story might be the most tragic. Bush’s tragedy comes not from his crime, but because his attempt at redemption failed. Stories of redemption are popular (look at Josh Hamilton) and can become the stuff of legend, but they only work when the promise is fulfilled. It’s not enough merely to attempt to redeem oneself; one has to actually proceed to do so. Hamilton’s story works because not only did he work his way back, but because he became an All-Star, put on a Home Run Derby performance for the ages, and has helped his team make back-to-back World Series appearances.

Lueke’s story is not any easier to read. The alleged rape of a California woman in 2008 will follow him the rest of his life, though, on his acquisition Friedman stated:
We researched the 2009 incident that Josh was involved in thoroughly and in great detail. We’re satisfied that he is going to be the kind of person and teammate that we look for and we expect him to contribute positively to our group.

However, as Mr. Destructo argues, there is no easy way for a fan to work around the so-called incident:

A Rays fan can root for every batter to have a good day and for Josh Lueke to give up some walks, without penalizing the Rays offense or giving away a game on defense. But making choices like this unavoidably sounds like making excuses. A simpler fan choice is simply not rooting, not handing over money until Lueke is gone. An even easier choice awaits the Rays front office, which is to decide that the benefit of a marginal bullpen arm is neither likely to provide the difference between going to the playoffs or going home, nor worth the possibility of alienating fans.

Victim-blaming and non-reporting of sexual assault are issues in society at large, and Lueke’s talent as of right now does not appear to be such that the Rays would be paralyzed without him.

There is an interesting point to be made here: despite their off-field issues, Lueke and Bush are far from the first or only players of questionable character to be hired by the Rays. Jae-Kuk Ryu intentionally killed a bird, Elijah Dukes has a long history of domestic violence, as does Willy Aybar (the latter doing time in a Dominican jail for domestic violence while a member of the Rays). The first two were members of the Rays prior to the team’s 2008 turnaround, but Aybar was on the Rays from 2008-2010, firmly Friedman territory, and played at least 95 games each season.

Indeed, baseball history at large is littered with unsavory characters—Ty Cobb, for one, Ben Chapman another, and Marty Bergen was actually an axe murderer. There’s no character test necessary to pass for admittance to the major leagues; whether this could potentially create an image problem (as is occasionally assumed with other leagues) is of secondary importance to an ability to do things with a small spherical object that the vast majority of humanity cannot.

Earlier, perhaps, while the Rays were still a team synonymous with losing, the character faults of their players could be overlooked, the thought process being that the team wasn’t drawing because it wasn’t winning. Now, however, that excuse doesn’t hold. The Rays have finished clearly over .500 every year from 2008 on; they have won the ALCS, the AL East, and appeared in every postseason save 2009. They’ve been successful on the field, but, as noted above, they still don’t draw. Whether it’s because of the inaccessibility of their stadium, the by-consensus ugliness of the stadium, or because a city with a large transplant population has a hard time shedding their old teams for a new one, the problem remains.

Perhaps questioning whether the recent additions of Lueke and Bush will help the team is the wrong angle—instead, consider (with apologies to Mr. Keri) the dark side of The Extra 2%: maybe a team that doesn’t worry about keeping fans in the seats is the one most suited to a win-at-all-costs philosophy. The idea is slightly unsettling if only because it would indicate, to some extent, giving up on its ability to draw fans, and while acknowledging one’s weaknesses is important, there are few teams with the financial clout to be able to afford to pursue this strategy long-term. Still, for all their success, the Rays have yet to win a World Series, and that remains the sport’s holy grail. Whether Lueke and Bush are good enough players to push the Rays over this edge (well, Lueke, anyway, given Friedman’s statement that Bush won’t pitch for the Rays) is doubtful, but then again, there aren’t many who would have expected Cody Ross to hit five postseason home runs, either.

The Rays are still a young enough team to be building the mainstay of their fanbase; this includes not just the adults of the Tampa-St. Petersburg area, but the children as well—how many of us, after all, decided upon liking a team because it was who our parents or our grandparents liked? Maybe there are some parents out there who can figure out how to tell their children that it’s okay to root for baseball players accused of indefensible felonies, but it’s hard to imagine that’s a widespread skill.

The Rays still have a lot of talent and a lot of likeable players. Evan Longoria is a household name, Matt Moore is one of the top prospects in all of baseball, and few managers have received more praise in recent years than Maddon. Whatever the issues of their roster additions off the field, the team is unlikely to be hurt on it. Unfortunately, as we have seen, the team’s on-field success won’t succor their attendance woes, and some of their recent additions will have quite a long way to go before the team will be able to use them to help in this regard.

Note:  Lueke was optioned to triple-A Durham on April 14th.

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In 1936, there was still time.

Kristalnacht was still two years away, and the Nazi empire had yet to reach its furthest expanses. Yes, the Jews were being persecuted, yes the Nuremburg laws had been passed and Jews were no longer citizens, and yes, the rest of the world at large seemed indifferent to Jewish plight, but merely being Jewish wasn’t a death sentence.

The Nazi persecutions were not an unknown to the outside world; by 1938 a conference had to be held to discuss what to do about the growing Jewish refugee problem. Thirty-two governments sent representatives, including the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom; of all of these, only one country agreed to take on Jewish refugees – Rafael Trujillo’s Dominican Republic.

In 1936, though, with the Evian conference two years away, there was still a sense, however delusional, that some veneer of a normal life could take place for Jews in Nazi-held territories. That year, the concern of Americans was not so much anti-Semitism (and indeed, with the likes of Father Coughlin on the radio, one could say that many Americans were anti-Semitic), as it was the Depression, and all that went with it.

Baseball was an escape from the Depression, and, as the 1936 season dawned, it was a Jewish player – Hank Greenberg – who was the reigning American League MVP.

No matter what, 1936 would have been an odd year for baseball – the first year since 1914 that Babe Ruth would not appear as a player in a major league uniform. Although the Black Sox scandal and deadball era were past, baseball would still need a superstar. It could have Lou Gehrig, who for so long played in Ruth’s shadow, but hit at least 30 home runs every year since 1929, or it could have Hank Greenberg, the Jew.

Greenberg’s Judaism was important enough to him to bring about his famous decision to sit out on Yom Kippur in 1934 – a move that might not have otherwise been so potentially controversial save for Yom Kippur’s mid-September timing. One wonders, as Greenberg sat in synagogue that year, how much he knew, and if word of the Nuremburg laws and intensifying persecutions had made their way to Michigan, whether or not he believed it.

The thing about the Holocaust that isn’t always made clear is that the Jewish population in Germany itself was so small that many ordinary Germans had no experience of Jews, so for them the minority remained only a distant concept. The worst crimes of the Holocaust would not be carried out in Germany; they were carried out in Warsaw and Lodz, Babi Yar and the Baltic. It might seem like a long reach from 1930s and 1940s Eastern Europe to Hank Greenberg, but it shouldn’t be: Greenberg’s parents were Romanian immigrants.

Although Greenberg wasn’t in danger of losing his United States citizenship, he was no stranger to anti-Semitism, even in a milder form: as Greenberg would later recall, “If you struck out, you weren’t just a bum, you were a Jewish bum.” It may be tempting to argue that when taunting, players and fans naturally gravitate to the opponent’s most apparent vulnerability, and in Greenberg’s case, this was his religion. The problem, however, is that 1930s America suffered from more than opportunistic anti-Semitism. While the American population may not have shared the Nazi viewpoint of Jews as rats trying to take over the world, universities, including the Ivies, still used a quota system to keep Jewish enrolment down, and America’s greatest folk hero at the time, Charles Lindbergh, was not shy about his views that Jews held too much influence in public sectors.

So in 1936, Hank Greenberg’s World Series win and MVP season the previous year did not absolve him of his great sin, which was that he happened to be born into a Jewish family. The anti-Semitic taunts and attitudes had disastrous consequences for Greenberg when, just 12 games into the season, the Senators’ Jake Powell crashed into Greenberg, breaking Greenberg’s wrist and ending his season*.

Powell was far from baseball’s most savory character – his comments about “beating n—— with a nightstick” provoked such a response that necessitated a reprimand, even while baseball still remained segregated – and he would meet a less-than-glorious end in a police station in 1948.

The injury to Greenberg, though season-ending, would not end his career, but the incident is more significant than that. Even though the probable knowledge that two years later pitchers would intentionally walk Greenberg to keep him from breaking Babe Ruth’s home record might, by some, be considered to be the bigger deal, the collision with Powell involved actual violence.

The line between teasing and taunting, and actual violence is often disturbingly thin. Blame mob mentality, blame human nature, blame an inherent need to “other” the outsider, but the pattern remains the same. In a prosperous world, deep-seeded prejudices remain hidden by a thin layer of decorum. The worse the situation, the more the veneer is eroded, until all that’s left is blatant hate.

The Nazis, who never hid their anti-Semitism, came to power at such an economically desperate time for Germany. In 1936, the dehumanization of the their Jewish minority was already well under way, and more than once the taunts turned to outright violence.  There was still time that year for Jews to emigrate from Germany — indeed, this was the Nazis’ preference — but, for those in denial, for those who thought that their middle-class way of life could last forever, the window was closing fast.

In 1938, a series of pogroms took place over one night that became known as Kristalnacht.  The synchronized vandalizing of Jewish synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses marked the shift from sporadic attacks to outright government-sponsored violence.  Kristalnacht, it can be said, was the night the Holocaust began.

That year, Greenberg would hit his 58 home runs and years later, analysis would be done to show that Greenberg was walked at a greater rate than other batters later in the year, ostensibly an effort to keep him from breaking Babe Ruth’s record.  That Babe Ruth’s record was involved has caused this incident to receive more attention, but this was not ultimately the most dangerous one Greenberg faced.

What if Powell hadn’t been such an unsavory character?  As it is, there’s no record of Powell having ever been reprimanded for a collision that Greenberg would later opine could have been avoided.  Was the violence acceptable because it was just a part of the game?  Was it acceptable because the teams and the umpires and the fans believed it was inadvertent?  Or was it acceptable because Greenberg was Jewish?  What if Lou Gehrig had been the first baseman then, or Jimmie Foxx?  Would it have been acceptable then?

There was never a Holocaust in America, but it would not have taken all that much to occur.  After all, the United States did intern Japanese-Americans, and while they didn’t build gas chambers, the concentration camp still denies its internees one of their most vital needs for emotional health:  their dignity.  American students are taught that the country is a melting pot, where all are welcome, but they are not taught that the man who came up with the melting pot term — Henry Ford — was himself a virulent anti-Semite.

Greenberg was baseball’s first Jewish superstar, and it’s tempting to think or teach that once Greenberg played and won the World Series and the MVP, all the anti-Semitism in baseball, and elsewhere, would dissipate because, well, Greenberg was just as good as the rest of them, but history isn’t a fairy tale.  Even after 1936, anti-Semitism still had yet to see its worst days.

*As an aside, that the broken wrist cost Greenberg the entire season so early on might, for those with an interest in such things, be interesting to compare to Albert Pujols’ broken wrist of 2011, and the advances sports medicine has been able to make in almost 80 years.

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Well, this wasn’t supposed to happen. The Yankees weren’t supposed to have bad starts from CC Sabathia and Hiroki Kuroda, and then watch their offense get three-hit, all in the season’s first three games. The results create two camps—those who remember the Red Sox’ 0-6 start last season and are ready to panic, and those who remember the 1998 Yankees’ 0-3 start, and are still absolutely sure the Yankees can still win 110 games and the World Series. The truth is probably somewhere in between—the Yankees probably won’t get swept by the Orioles, and there is a reason a season like 1998 comes with the addendum “once in a lifetime”.

The series with the Rays was closer than it looked, perhaps a couple of defensive miscues the difference between winning two games and winning none. Baseball depends an awful lot on random chance, and that the Yankees’ offense only struck out 16 times over three games suggests making a lot of contact, and eventually some of that contact will fall in for hits. Yes, there are plenty of reasons one should be wary of an aging offense, but it’s not the reason the Yankees just got swept.

On the other hand, the team had better hope for improved pitching performances in Baltimore. Sabathia’s Opening Day struggles are nothing new—of the four times he’s pitched the first game of the season, the Yankees have won just once—and one poor start shouldn’t make Kuroda’s Yankees’ career, but the Yankees are now hoping Ivan Nova, the pitcher who had the worst spring by far, can play stopper. Nova was more than up to the task last year, so there is some precedent, although one gets the feeling there would be more confidence all around had Nova had a better March.

The Yankees aren’t the only “good” team slow to get off the ground—the Braves, Giants, and Red Sox are all 0-3 as well, while the Twins, Mets and Orioles are undefeated. Few, if any, baseball fans would think that the season will end with Minnesota and Baltimore hosting playoff games and the Yankees and Red Sox in their division’s basement. This is an indication of just how long the baseball season is, that three games into the season and there is not a single thing we can say definitively about any one team other than that in most cases they won’t got 162-0.

So, as you watch the Yankees take on the Orioles this week, you need not do so from your window ledge. Losing streaks happen; there is no team that won’t, at some point, lose three games in a row, and most will lose four or five at least once during the 162-game season. The phrase “any given Sunday” is football parlance, but it can easily apply to the baseball diamond as well—in any given game, any one team can beat another, and it’s not until the end of May that anything close to a picture of how the season might shake out will begin to take form.

Would fans have preferred the Yankees to start the season 3-0? Of course, that goes without saying, but 0-3 isn’t a harbinger of doom the way an 0-2 start in the NFL often is, and if one remembers that the Yankees played close games all three in Tampa (even if the second wasn’t close until the game’s end), it would seem that all the Yankees need is a little bit of luck.

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So the Yankees have traded George Kontos for Chris Stewart (SFO) and sent Francisco Cervelli packing to triple-A. The immediate reaction seems to be the following: sure, Cervelli’s defense is bad and his offense is mostly bloopity-bloop, but Stewart’s not really an upgrade (certainly not on offense), and the Yankees might have actually been able to find a use for Kontos.

Truth is, if this is the type of trade that is making headlines across Yankees Universe today, the Yankees are in pretty good shape. After all, barring injury, neither Cervelli nor Stewart will be the team’s regular catcher (and if there is an injury, Cervelli at least, has extensive experience), and Kontos would have been unlikely to crack the team’s rotation or any of the first three spots in the bullpen hierarchy.

Of course, the Yankees do have other concerns, both among their rotation (oh hey by the way Andy Pettitte pitched today!), and with their designated hitter—Raul Ibañez has been more impressive of late, but there remain doubts. Still, the Yankees are in fairly decent shape, and we can afford to discuss the merits of a trade for a back-up catcher.

The trade does raise questions about what the Yankees plan to do with Austin Romine, who should, one thinks, start year with Scranton the Empire State Yankees. How is he supposed to get the necessary playing time if Cervelli ends up as the starter at that level? Or are Romine’s medicals that concerning to the Yankees? The latter is a serious problem, because the assumption has been for a few years now that one of Romine or Jesus Montero would be the Yankees catcher-of-the-future; Montero is no longer in the system and a Romine that’s not healthy enough to help makes the farm system seem that much less intimidating.

The Yankees farm system had taken such a big step forward in the 2010 season that last year’s regression almost felt like a down year; 2012 was supposed to be the year the system bore its first fruit with Montero’s rookie campaign, but the Yankees’ need for pitching outweighed the perceived benefits of Montero’s bat, so once again, fans are still left waiting.

Cervelli, fans will remember, missed most of the 2008 season after his wrist was broken in spring training by Elliot Johnson on a collision at home plate; his debut in 2009 was an emergency scenario, after both Jorge Posada and Jose Molina got hurt. One can argue Cervelli should have never had the career with the Yankees he has, but he did, and now a trade that shouldn’t have attracted much attention is the topic du jour.

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While you were busy paying so much attention to Michael Pineda’s velocity, another Yankees’ pitcher has had a miserable spring. It might have passed unnoticed, but then there’s the small problem that this pitcher in question—Ivan Nova—won 16 games for the Yankees last season (including a streak where he didn’t lose in nine starts), becoming their number two starter in the postseason. Younger than Phil Hughes, though never as highly rated a prospect, Nova should have the best years of his career ahead of him.

Say what you will about spring training stats, but an ERA close to seven prior to today’s start isn’t good. It doesn’t matter that these games count for nothing; by this point in the spring one would expect any decent, non-injured pitcher to have fully shaken off the rust. The regular season starts in less than five days (well, not including the Japan games, but that’s besides the point), and it’s no longer good enough to be getting in shape; pitchers and position players should theoretically be good to go now.

Yankees fans might remember that Nova ended last season with a forearm strain; the injury was not a severe one but there’s a reason arm injuries in pitchers inspire so much discomfort. Unlike Pineda, Nova’s arm injury was known to the Yankees’ staff, so  one would think if this was another injury scenario, the team would have been on top of it.

One can take the sabermetric route and take a look at Nova’s previous peripherals, noting his low strikeout rate and high ground ball rate, and surmise such a pitcher would be heavily dependent on the defense behind him, but jokes about Derek Jeter aside, the Yankees’ defense shouldn’t have fallen off a cliff between October and now. At any rate, faults of ERA aside, a number approaching seven can’t be explained away by luck or defense. At some point, it’s just bad pitching.

There’s an argument that Nova isn’t as crucial to the rotation as, say, CC Sabathia or even a healthy Pineda, but even if Nova isn’t the staff ace, the Yankees can’t afford to have him pitch this poorly during the season—after all, there is no written guarantee that Andy Pettitte’s return will be flawless (as much as it is our dearest wish) or that Hughes really has turned things around, never mind whether two weeks’ rest can magically restore Pineda’s lost velocity. As always, depth remains a fantastic thing until one has to use it.

Of course, it’s easy to say that everyone simply got caught up in Nova’s win total and winning streak last season, but he pitched well by a number of measures after his return to the majors in July. There seems to be little sign that his spring would have gone this poorly; last season’s success and the spotlight on Pineda has given Nova some leeway this spring, but now that it’s April the “it’s only spring training” excuses can’t hold much water.

The Yankees, on paper at least, were supposed to be the best team in the AL East going into the 2012 season, primarily because of their re-made pitching rotation, but it won’t do them a lot of good unless the hurlers come through as advertised.

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The Yankees announced Sunday that as part of the 2012 season, they will retire Joe Torre’s #6, in a special ceremony. They have not announced when the ceremony will occur, but Joe Torre’s rumored appearance at Old Timer’s Day could make for prime fodder.

The former skipper was at the helm of the Yankees from 1996-2007, during which time the team won four world series and six AL pennants. While his early success seemed to make him untouchable, his later seasons were marred by losing the 2004 ALCS to the Boston Red Sox, and refusing to take the team off the field during the 2007 ALDS when a swarm of midges attacked the field.

Derek Jeter, Andy Pettitte and Mariano Rivera are the only Yankees left who were members of Torre’s original Yankees’ teams; there’s no doubt the ceremony will be especially moving for them.

There has been some controversy over whether or not the Yankees are retiring too many numbers (indeed, within a few years the spring training prospects will be wearing numbers in the triple digits), but for someone who was such an important part of the team for so many years, despite his flaps with the Steinbrenners, perhaps an exception can be made.

For more information, please read the press release here.

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So yesterday I wrote that we shouldn’t be freaking out over Michael Pineda’s velocity, really. Whoops. Turns out, he’s got shoulder tendinitis and will start the season on the disabled list. This will solve the Yankees’ problem of how to fit six pitchers in five rotation spots for the moment, but it creates bigger problems in the long term.

The first major issue has nothing to do with Andy Pettitte or Freddy Garcia or Ivan Nova, but instead has to do with Pineda himself. Simply put, shoulder injuries suck. We’ve come a long way with elbow injuries—although not a guarantee, Tommy John surgery is now so common place that a 47 year-old Jaime Moyer underwent the procedure after the 2010 season, and was recently named the fifth starter for the 2012 Rockies. Shoulder injuries, on the other hand, are more problematic. Just saying ‘rotator cuff’ or ‘labrum’ when concerning a baseball player inspires uneasy feeling. No, shoulder tendinitis is not so severe (Pineda’s MRI reportedly showed no structural damage), but the precedent is not one you want to set, especially not with a 22 year-old pitcher, and not when it’s the type of injury that can’t be healed by any tangible method except rest.

When the Yankees traded for Pineda, the idea wasn’t to get a pitcher that could be a one-year stopgap, but rather a pitcher who could be a big part of their rotation for much of the next decade. Indeed, this can certainly still happen, but there will always be more confidence in a healthy pitcher than an injured one. Pineda doesn’t have the service time to have amassed an extreme injury history, and if the Yankees are lucky, the tendinitis will be a mere blip on the radar. On the other hand, perhaps more upsetting is that Pineda waited until after last night’s game to tell the coaching staff about his sore shoulder; while perhaps understandable in that he was fighting for a rotation spot, Pineda could have potentially aggravated the injury, which would have done him (and the Yankees) more long-term harm than simply being honest about his health. That doesn’t mean every single bump and bruise should be reported, but a pitcher’s shoulder is on a different level of importance.

Once Pineda regains his health, the Yankees will have to revisit the question of who should be in their rotation. As the season progresses, it might seem easy just to say ‘dump the pitcher who’s performing the worst’, but the problem there is that in the month of April (and even into May), there is a very limited sample size with which to work (remember Sabathia’s first month with the Yankees…). Eventually, one assumes, the Yankees will also have to deal with figuring out how Andy Pettitte slots into the mix; after all, Pettitte didn’t come out of retirement so he could spend the year pitching in the minors.

Rotation depth is a beautiful thing, and there are a lot of baseball teams out there who will wish they had the luxury of too many pitchers for too few spots. The Yankees shouldn’t have a problem staffing their rotation in 2012, even if Pineda’s injury turns out to be more serious or take longer to heal than expected. Still, the Bombers didn’t trade their top position prospect for nothing; sooner or later (being New York, the emphasis is probably on the former) Pineda will have to prove that the Yankees’ faith in him has not been misplaced.

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It’s easy to fall in love. When someone throws a 98 mile-an-hour fastball, it’s hard not to find yourself head over heels. We’re better than this—we’re smarter than this. We know pitching involves more than just speed, that some of the game’s greatest pitchers weren’t known for their speed, but for their poise and, as the phrase goes, their ability to live on the black.

Maybe we love velocity so much because it transcends any one single game; no other player on the field can affect how hard a pitcher throws the baseball, and the harder the ball is thrown, the harder, theoretically, it is to hit. Pitchers who can throw a baseball in the upper-90s will have higher ceilings than ones who can’t, and if there’s one thing baseball fans love to do, it’s dream. Dream about what could be, what Manny Banuelos or Dellin Betances could become, and not focus on what they are at the moment. That’s the fun of prospects, and velocity is one such way to dream, without worrying about a player’s age or level or whether his defense is the problem. Pure velocity, pure speed—it’s easy, simple, free. Nectar of the baseball gods.

It’s velocity that has dominated the conversation coming from Yankees’ camp this spring. How fast is Michael Pineda throwing? Why isn’t it faster? Is he hurt? Should he get sent to triple-A? That we’re even discussion this is specious. At the age of 22—when most Americans are still in college—Pineda went 9-10 on a rather awful Mariners team, with a 3.74 ERA (3.42 FIP, 3.53 xFIP), an All-Star selection and Rookie of the Year votes. Is Pineda the second coming of Felix Hernandez? Probably not, but that doesn’t mean the biggest argument of the spring should be whether Pineda starts the season in the minors.

The Yankees traded the best position prospect they had in years—possibly since the Jeter/Posada/Williams era if one acknowledges that Robinson Cano was never considered as a potential star until much later—for an immediate need in their starting rotation. Pineda’s supposed to provide that help now (it’s not out of the question that years from now Jose Campos proves to be the more important acquisition), so it’s to be expected that he would be under the microscope from both media and bloggers, but the concoction of velocity problems to the degree that a major-league caliber pitcher with major-league success under his belt is, according to some, not certain to make the major-league roster…even for a notoriously overreactive media, this is pushing it.

You don’t have to be familiar with advanced metrics to see that Pineda’s velocity varied last season; a decline at the end of the season can be attributed to a number of problems and does not automatically portend long-term problems. Joe Pawlikowski at River Ave Blues wrote about the faults of overreacting to Pineda’s velocity, and indeed, if one takes a step back and looks at many of the game’s best pitchers, so-called sophomore slumps are quite common. Why sophomore slumps occur would be good fodder for a large-scale study—the phenomenon isn’t unique to baseball (it can refer to the second year in a university or the second season of a TV show, among other things), but baseball provides unique parameters. DIPS theory  provides some explanation in the year-to-year variance based on defense (something a pitcher can’t control), but why this so often happens in a second season is perhaps more debatable.

Does this mean Pineda’s velocity should be ignored entirely? Of course not. Any serious velocity issues that linger into the season could be a sign of injury, which would be a far bigger problem than simply losing a digit or two on average fastball speed, and starting Pineda at triple-A won’t do anything to solve any sort of injury issue. On the other hand, whether this is what the obsession should be given that there are five other starters (and, of course, Andy Pettitte) in camp all trying to get a rotation spot seems doubtful.

There’s almost a type of xenophobia at work: Pineda is a new Yankee, and unlike Hiroki Kuroda, bringing him on board required the Yankees giving up one of their own, one whose own name (Jesus) is almost symbolic of what he was supposed to represent: the fruit of a re-born farm system. It makes Pineda an easy target for all sorts of criticism, and because he has not yet pitched in games that count for more than Grapefruit League standings, there is little else on which to focus. The Yankees have too many pitchers for too few spots, and suggesting Pineda get sent to the minors is suggesting the easiest solution—but not the one that would make the most long-term sense.

Once the season starts, how fast Pineda throws doesn’t matter nearly as much as where it’s thrown; if he can get outs and win games, he’ll have done exactly what the Yankees asked of him, even if not in the way that was expected, but a Pineda that languishes in the minors doesn’t even have the chance to try.

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