-Now that Joba is a reliever for the short term, everybody has an opinion on his long-term role. I won't bother rehashing the details. I do want to point out the difference between causation and coincidence though.
Nobody has really bothered to ask which had the greater impact (positive or negative) on the team's chances last season- the 50 good innings Phil Hughes threw out of the 'pen, or the 90 terrible innings Gaudin and Mitre threw out of the rotation. (Yes, Gaudin was terrible; he gave up a homer every six innings as a Yankee, and was simply lucky to have the bases empty for all but one of them).
The Yankees won the World Series, so it's easy to assume they made the right choice leaving Hughes in the bullpen. But, they probably didn't.
I hope they don't repeat the mistake again. Joba should be slated to be the 6th starter for 2009. I don't care how good he is in the bullpen; the difference between him and the third-best reliever on the team(Aceves, Robertson, or someone else) is going to be much, much smaller than the difference between Joba and the team's next best starter (Mitre?), should one of the top five go down with an injury.
-Listen to this, Yankees Haters:
It is not accurate to say that the Yankees "bought" the 2009 world championship.... But it IS accurate to say revenue sharing forced the Yankees to "buy" a piece of the Florida Marlins, and to give this piece away to Jeffrey Loria. If I were a Florida Marlins fan, I’d worry less about what the Yankees are buying, and I’d focus instead on why I pay more for a seat on the first base line than my team’s owner paid for the entire team (emphasis added). (Marlins fans can read here how Jeffrey Loria got his team for free.)
Wow. I'd be willing to bet that the top five low payroll/poorly managed franchises also have received more in revenue sharing dollars than their owner bought the team for, and that's before you account for the publicly financed (a.k.a free) stadiums many of them had built over the last 15 years. The system IS broken.
-Good luck, IPK. You're finally going to get your second chance.
-Kevin Long thinks Brett Gardner can be very, very good....or just like a guy who's really, really overrated.