The Sky Is Falling! The Sky Is Falling!

"Goodness gracious me!" said Henny-penny; "the sky's a-going to fall: I must go and tell the king."

One thing that has been not missed in these days in England: the Beatlemania-like hysteria over The Madness of King George, Mad Scientist George and His Bad Chemistry Clubhouse, the rise and fall of Chemical George, and a string of other epithets to describe the ruination of the Evil Empire, the last, vile twistings and strainings of the death row prisoner as he suffers his fatal injection. Despite the defections and sour reasoning, King George is still around to save the day and the sky has not yet fallen.

At the onset of every Yankee Haters Annonymous Meeting, there is always one set of lungs calling out the slogans of rationality one cannot encounter merely picking through the tidbits of the newswires. Google searches would show you that King George is hated almost universally and these days, even his own faithful, the Bronx Bummers have expressed their outrage and all because a man like Andy Pettitte was allowed to escape unscathed.

In running through Pettitte's stats, I was trying to find the flaws. There must be good, sound, rational thought behind Steinbrenner's thinking, I was thinking to myself, despite my Yankee-hating. There is a long and well-documented history of "sound" and "rational" theories behind all of King George's decisions, isn't there? After all, Pettitte, although a model of consistency by virtue of having started at least 30 games in 7 of the last 8 seasons since his rookie year, has always seemed on the verge of injury, at the very least. The left elbow has always awaited that final, fat contract before squawking its last protest and blowing out entirely. I'd even imagined that while signing the contract with the Astros, it will later be revealed, the final flourish in his signature was the telling blow and that horrific ligament damage had been sustained in the left elbow even as the ink was drying.

Well, I figured further, there must be a telling tale of the stats, a team that has repeatedly hammered him, a time of day, a certain stadium where Andy Pettitte does not have a winning record and learned that such a world is almost mythical. Over the last three years Pettitte has a winning record (16-10 3.29) pitching during the day. He has a winning record (33-13 4.11) pitching at night, a winning record pitching on grass (no mean feat, if you ask someone like Doc Ellis, who had a winning record pitching on acid), a winning record at home, on the road, in a Dome, in an open air stadium, on land, at sea, in space...well, you get the picture. Finding negatives in Pettitte's track record is like trying to write a narrative history of sub-Roman Britain after 410: virtually impossible.

But there are a few flaws here and there which I'm certain must have made Steinbrenner sit up and take notice, the kind of glaring and disturbing trends that would scare any rational person off of re-signing his ace. After all, without Yankee Stadium, where would Andy Pettitte be? Do you know that 57% of his victories were earned at Yankee Stadium? Take away his Yankee Stadium advantage and Pettitte is a merely mortal, 21-14 over the last three years! Hardly worth $80 billion over 80 years, or whatever the Astros signed him away from the Yankees for, is it then? Worse still, he's got a lifetime 32.40 ERA at Wrigley Field! Isn't Wrigley Field where the Astros' arch-rival, the hated Cubs of Chicago, field their dreams? He's given up 6 earned runs over one and two-thirds innings at Wrigley Field for gawdssake! How will the Astros ever win the NL Central with their ace having nervous breakdowns in Wrigley Field every week, pitching with his trillion dollar elbow of gold in a sling?

And let's not forget another conspicuous point, a clear and certain factor in King George's evaluation process: Was Pettitte Mr Yankee? Certainly not.

Another good and sound rationale for letting Pettitte loose was that Pettitte is not, in the tradition of Babe Ruth and the Yankees, a wayward orphan boy. You see that in repayment of the Babe's glory and achievement, it becomes, for Steinbrenner, a legacy to uphold, a permanent cause for charity, upholding the legend of The Babe in the form of David Wells and habitual headcased drug addicts, pissheads and dopers like Doc Gooden and Darryl Strawberry. Pettitte, described by his wife as "a wonderful man" has no business in a modern Yankee's uniform. By all accounts, he's a hard-working clubhouse hero, an impeccible human being. In case you hadn't noticed, these aren't Mr Torre's Yankees anymore. These are Mr Steinbrenner's Yankees now, the result of impatience festering like a chancre: a war zone of impetuousness borne out of ego. Ah yes, we can wring our hands and grow sick with worry at the demise of Mr Torre's heroic legions that seemed to bring the World Championship to the Bronx year in and year out for time eternal. Wasn't that the same heart-warming story we were force-read every bloody October, Torre and his heroically unselfish players making the world sick with envy and admiration?

What Steinbrenner correctly realises is that to believe in such myths, to remain static in one's philosophy is to allow the soul to atrophy, the franchise to crumble. He could see through the smoke and mirrors of the Torre myth. After all, Mr Torre has seemed pretty mortal once the bread and butter of those championships, the unbeatable bullpen, was laid to rest, hasn't he? Having the likes of the workman-like predictability of Nelson, Stanton, Rivera, and even Wetteland carving their craft made that late inning thinking alot easier, didn't it? Added years to Torre's life. Look at him struggle, look at the mighty Torre's Yankees swirling miraculously down the drain now that they are left to the wits of Mr Torre and an abominable bullpen! So Steinbrenner recognises that it is not some mythological genius to be respected, it is a pathology to regulate: nice personalities and happy clubhouses mean nothing without bullpen support.

Recognizing this, big money is to be spent rehabbing the bullpen. King George loves the rehab. King George, the sugardaddy to the legend of the Babe Ruth orphan, the vicarious addict through the contracts of the Goodens and the Strawberrys has found his primary reclamation project for the winter, the key to unlock the secret millions and the World Championships galore: Cy Young Gagne's set-up man, Paul Quantrill and his 2003 1.75 ERA comes on board. Felix Heredia is re-signed, the apocryphal Flash Gordon, the one arm you'd thought for certain, had retired a decade ago, is donning Pinstripes after striking out 91 in 74 innings over 66 games last season. This doesn't even begin to recite the tangible possibilities in the forms of wunderkinds like Gabe White and the nearly crippled Steve Karsay. And let's not forget the maestro himself, Mariano.

The Yankees will have so many arms in their bullpen by Spring Training, they wouldn't even NEED a starting rotation anymore, so why overpay Pettitte to blow out his elbow and stay at home to play the wonderful man for his wonderful wife in the wonderful world of Pettitte? And let's not forget the name itself; "Pettitte" is a Louisiana patois for "petite" which is in reality, a French word used for women in recounting their form: slim and slender.

And let us also not forget that losing Pettitte was a package deal. Losing Pettitte allowed King George to unload the hideously underachieving and overly trembling, trepid Bronx faint-of-heart with the dainty psyche, Jeff Weaver. When dealing in the fractals of the Yankee pitching staff, one must calculate that the loss of Pettitte plus the loss of Weaver is in the end, a victory for the staff as a whole. Especially when you know innately, as King George most certainly does, that Pettitte is going to spend the majority of the remainder of his career on the disabled list anyway.

And as the banks of the East River and the Hudson begin to overflow with the tears of Yankees fans over the loss of the "wonderful man" Pettitte it should be remembered that losing Pettitte also allowed King George to get Kevin Brown. This will play a very vital role in the coming season.

The only thing we've heard about Kevin Brown is whining. Because Pettitte was the equivilent of St. Francis of Assisi, the Medici of the clubhouse, Kevin Brown must, for some reason of weights and balances in the illogic of Yankee whiners, be immediately pilloried as a walking, talking ebola of a man, a clubhouse Saddam, a chancre, a virus, a wart and the remnants of a fetid Michael Moore beer queef. Kevin Brown is none of these things. He is the victim of bad PR, professional jealousy, the ranting and raving of lunatics.

Let's set aside for the moment what over the last three years' time, Pettitte has started 86 games and won 49 of them whilst Brown has started 61 games and won 26 of them or that Pettitte has pitched 543 innings to Brown's 375. If we think only about the here and now, which is clearly the only thing King George's tactical strategies account for, we could note that last season Pettitte started 33 games to Brown's 32, that Pettitte won 21 games, sure, but he won them with a bloated 4.02 ERA while Kevin Brown, pitching with virtually no run support from the flaccid Dodger bats, won 14 and held opponents to a 2.39 ERA. Using Ptolemy's Theory of Run Support in a Fictitious Galaxy, we would note that pitching for the Dodgers, Pettite would have gone 12-10 with a 3.89 ERA and Brown, pitching for the Yankees, would have gone 28-7 with a 3.01 ERA. So there you have it. Pointing out that Pettitte is a robust 31 while Brown is a decrepit 38 is quite frankly, a cheap shot and quite probably, cheating.

All this way and we haven't even approached the trade for Javier Vasquez. If we examine the same three year period wherein Super Hero Pettitte started 86 games and won 49 of them with a 3.82 ERA over 543 Super Human Innings, Javier Vasquez, pitching, one might add, for a slug of a franchise, started 100 games and won 39 of them with a 3.52 ERA over 684 innings. In many ways, he's the Ueber Pettite, a Dominican miracle of strikeouts and domination. In essence, Pedro Martinez revisited.

When Pedro Martinez left the Expos for the chill of hardcore fans and the frontiers of the wild American League, he was 27. Vasquez is coming to the Yankees at 27. Over the last three years of his Expos career, Pedro started 94 games and won 44 with a 2.98 ERA. 701 strikeouts over those last three years compared to Javier's 628. Javier's luster diminishes ever-so-slightly compared to the Pedro Years in Montreal but if anything, being Pedro Lite is better for a bullpen than a soon-to-be-career DLer Pettitte, isn't it then?

For the Chicken Littles who warn that Javier Vasquez will shrivel like flesh of an aging Mexican prostitute in the face of the big spotlights of nasty ole New York and the pressure of the Metropolis, it should be pointed out that he has, after all, pitched in New York many times already. He's pitched 7 times in Shea Stadium which not only has the pressure of the big Metropolis, but the stench of Queens and the unnerving habit of commercial jetliners flying loudly overhead as well, not to mention the ineffectiveness of the beanball in a league where the pitcher must return to face his enemy with a bat in his hand and a retaliatory pitch flung at his head. In those 7 games, he's gone 3-2 with a 3.13 ERA. That's with the Expos backing him, lads. Not the brutality of the fabled Yankee lineup. Now imagine him pitching in the American League, where he will be, like Pedro and Roger Clemens before him, free to intimidate with beanballs to his own delight, drop his ERA down a full run and rack up a nice run to the Cy Young, forcing people like Peter Gammons to vote twice for Whitey just to squelch the Dominican vote.

And all this talk of clubhouse cancers, the whining and worrying over how Mr Torre's Mystery Rub of Clubhouse Magic will fare in this den of misanthropes and curmudgeons, let's not forget that the Yankees are meddled with by none other than Mr Clubhouse Cancer himself, King George Steinbrenner. So why should these apocalyptic Yankee fans be worried? The players, are after all, replaceable parts. The owner is Lord and God Almighty of the Bronx and will piss his angst and disappointment down upon the heads of his replaceable parts at a moment's whim so the only thing worse than being a clubhouse cancer is being a LOSING clubhouse cancer. That is the question to ask yourselves: If Kevin Brown wins 20 games, if Lofton has an OBP of .400+, even if a snorting pig like Sheffield is signed and hits 39 homers with 132 RBIs and a .330 batting average, (last year's numbers) well frankly, who will care that their bedside manners would send children running and screaming into the streets?

The Red Sox have the Pedro and Manny Show, the most incredible duo of malcontent high-pitched whining the world has ever seen. Headaches come in many size and packages. Kevin Brown has a bad rep but is anyone really buying the angelic Curt Schilling tale? For all of Kevin Brown's perceived immoralities and bad man titles, I ask you, is he a man who would assault a defenseless Questec machine like Curt Schilling did? Are we forgetting what a threat to society, what a menace to the public good a man like Schilling truly is? They say that he broke his right pitching hand last season when he was struck twice in the right hand by batted balls in one game. Is it mere coincidence that the week before he was using that same hand to punch the poor little Questec machine into bits and pieces? And believe it or not, fact being stranger than fiction, while Schilling was off breaking his hand, assaulting Questec machines, Kevin Brown was pitching a two-hitter and leading the Dodgers to their 10th consecutive victory late last May.

So what it all comes down to, as it always does for me: a Yankee hater who hates nothing more than Yankee fans whining and moaning about their miserable, collective fates as they spend the national defense budget equivilent on aging geezers with wound-down arms and prima donnas you would never let your own children near, is that I don't want to hear the sound of crocodile Yankee tears spattering on the pavement of the filthy streets of the Bronx. I don't want to watch the brave chest-pounding of a Red Sox Nation with some sort of insane William Wallace identity crisis in action. Is it not amazing that as millions are poured out of the coffers in a sick sort of oneupmanship, the glaring reality ignored is that since the Yankee bullpen went gasping kaput into the middle of the night, it has only been the low budget teams crowding the banquet table with the World Champions trophy held aloft. It didn't take billions for the Marlins nor the Angels, just a disturbing trend: the more you spend, the more you've got to lose.