Let's Try This Again

I had to abandon this blog last season due to time constraints. I'm giving it another go . . . and now, with the off-season soon to heat up, seems a good time.

Yankees trade Sheffield.

Great move. I'm bemused by the talk-radio idiots, who continually rag the Yankees for:
1) Having a bad farm system (demonstrably not true, but that's another post)
2) Having too many older players
3) Having too many stars and not enough role-players
4) Having old and creaky starting pitching

So, the Yankees trade an aging "star" in exhange for three young pitching prospects. One could expect the talk radio goons to be overjoyed, that finally the Yankees are heeding their "wisdom."

Nope. I heard almost nothing but cirticism of the trade on WFAN and ESPN Radio.

The Yankees won 97 games with basically zero from Sheffield last year. He just turned 38, was going to make $13 million, and is prone to taking little vacations for weeks at a time. Those on talk radio who say, apparently with a straight face, that, "Sheffield plays hard every game" apparently didn't watch too many Yankee games. Sheffield gets in a sulk and dogs it badly at those times. Only when he's 1) playing for a new contract, and/or 2) is made to feel like the most important player in the history of the team he's playing for, does he give consistent effort.

It will only take a couple of months and six or seven would-be home runs to fall into outfielder's gloves in cavernous Comerica Park before Sheffield launches one of his personal "job actions." Having signed a two-year extension with Detroit for $28 million for the two years after this coming year, Sheffield has absolutely nothing to play for, knowing that his next time "free" he's 41 years old. Even that cross between Abner Doubleday and Dr. Schweitzer (eyeroll), Jim Leyland, won't be able to turn this sow's ear into a silk purse.

On the Yankees' side of the deal of course it's a risk. Pitching prospects are just that -- prospects. But you have to have four or five, often, to get one winner out of the bunch. And Humberto Sanchez just might be the real deal. And he was raised in the Bronx. Instant star if he can pitch at all on the big-league level.

Sports talk radio is fun to listen to sometimes, but really, it's hard to take seriously.


Carl Pavano Update.

Pavano is um, tanned, rested, and ready. Joe Torre says he's our fourth starter for 2007.

There are a lot of jokes I could make but none of them are as funny as that previous sentence above.