6-4-2 — an Angels/Dodgers double play blog

Now that the Yankees have started 8-11, tied with the lowly Devil Rays for the worst record in the division, the fair-weather Yankee fans have started in on them, and not the least of these is Jay Jaffe, a self-described Yankee "carpetbagger". The team that could do no wrong from 1997 through 2000 has now started its descent to mediocrity, such as Yankeedom reckons it, which means their higher aspirations include "getting in to the playoffs" and the usual star-crossed hopefulness other teams exhume publicly on opening day. That is to say, their offseason has been a widely derided trainwreck, as Jaffe made plain in a recent Baseball Prospectus:

On the heels of their unprecedented collapse in last year's American League Championship Series, and on the eve of a 2005 season that opens with them facing the same archrivals who subdued them, this Yankee team fills me with dread. The jig is up; the Yankees have created severe problems for themselves, and the money they've used to solve those problems is in considerably shorter supply than they've led us to believe. They're a $200 million tightrope walker, and I have to admit, I'm curious at what the splatter would look like if they tumbled.

The part of me that's rooting for the splatter is the same part that sees a roster built with all the grace of a congressional spending bill fraught with dozens of tacked-on pork-barrel amendments. Well, that or the car Homer Simpson designed for his half-brother Herb. In other words, ick.

The key -- or at least, one number of the combination to the Yankees' braintrust padlock -- was the unloading of supposed future ace Javier Vazquez. Jaffe moaned that "it's painfully clear the Yankee front office is, if not out of ideas, then at least at an impasse as to how to implement the ones they have with creativity and foresight." Though I wrongly bet against a trade, the Yanks decided his postseason meltdown justified exiling the young right hander. Was it a case of Mel Stottlemyre finally wrecking one arm too many? I think so, a failing the Yanks acknowledged by unloading their longtime pitching coach. (Update: apparently reports of Stottlemyre's demise were greatly exaggerated.) Vazquez, paying for Mel's mistakes and the insane and stupid pressures of pitching in the Bronx, got FedEx'd to Arizona after a tumultuous offseason in exchange for a triple-scoop of Randy Johnson.

In Johnson, the Yanks were certain they were going to get the kind of real ace they lacked last year, and the year before, and the year before that. Johnson's off to a slow start, with a 4.19 ERA that, amazingly, isn't his worst April record; that would be 8.10 in 2003, when he went down with injuries most of the year. Whether this was a good move will be noted at the end of the year, but by the time Johnson's contract is over, the smart money's betting Yankee Stadium will become the House of Boos every fifth turn. The 41-year-old's knee is held together with regular injections of Synvisc, a medication whose long-term effects are unknown, so new is it.

So as with the Yankees unloading a good if inconsistent pitcher in the guise of Jeff Weaver, so did they unload Javier Vazquez. Despite his earlier insistence that he didn't want to pitch on the west coast, once traded to Arizona they signed him to a three-year, $33.75M contract. And, as we might have expected, Vazquez, despite his atypical five earned runs allowed against the Dodgers on April 9, has settled back down and looks like the crotchety skinflint from Montreal. The Snakes got the better of the Yankees by far on this deal; I might even be tempted to go so far as to say they now have the second best pitcher in the division at this point, after the Giants' Jason Schmidt.

All that said, the Dodgers have the best depth in the division, something they exhibited with their cheap-yet-effective bullpen. If Lowe doesn't blow up in the first, or Vazquez wasn't quite nails, the Dodgers should have had a decent shot to win this game. The Dodgers missed some key opportunities, though:

• In the third, Derek Lowe bunted into an inning-ending double play. Instead of getting the bunt down the first base line, he killed it about six inches in front of the plate, where former Dodger prospect Koyie Hill easily grabbed the ball, tagged out Lowe, and got off a throw to cashier the runner.
• On a borderline bad luck play in the fifth, Bradley hesitated on a grounder hit to first that cost the team a GIDP.
• Finally, in the eighth, Tracy had Olmedo Saenz come to bat against Vazquez. Now, Saenz had never seen Vazquez before, but Choi had a couple hard-hit balls into the outfield. Was it worth it to get Choi's bat out of the lineup? I don't think so, and this is what John's Dodger Blog meant when he wrote

  But my argument all off-season (not in this space, but just in talking to people) was that this was the year Tracy had to give Choi 500 AB's. The only way to really see if Choi's potential is going to be tapped as a Dodger is if they give him the chance to show it over the long haul. ... The conventional wisdom is that Choi is a stiff, a numbers-geek favorite because of his minor-league OBP, and that he has a slow bat. I don't think this is something that should even be debated until we've seen him get enough chances to prove himself.

I'm of two minds about Choi; on the one hand, the statheads are right, we won't know about Choi until he actually collects enough at-bats to make a statistically significant contribution one way or another. On the other hand... he's getting there at a rather high pace, and Tracy continues to lessen his playing time. Lefties? Nakamura, you're up. Power righties? Saenz, come on down. Not-so-power-righties in a clutch situation with men on base and two out? Uh, I need a pinch hitter.

Furthermore, there's signs that Choi's carrying his offensive failures to the first base bag with him. In the top of the fifth, Choi didn't even bother to make an ole play on a Luis Gonzales smash down the first base line, instead just trotting in the general direction of the ball and watching it go past him. Maybe that's just his reputed slowness, but I wonder; I've seen him make similar plays before.

Arizona should be rightfully proud of what they've done this offseason; as of tonight, they're only a game and a half back of the Dodgers. I don't know if they'll be able to keep this pace up through the season, especially if/when Bonds returns to the Giants. But I find the sabermetric CW on Green and Glaus -- namely that they're overly risky signings considering the Snakes' payroll situation -- a bit overdone. Both are far from done, though they may be less than productive toward the end of their contracts. But to date, Arizona's had a nice run in the early season, and has reason to hope that, if a few breaks go their way, they could end up in the postseason.

Finally, a couple words about the Dodger broadcast itself: somebody needs to grab the sound guy by the lapels and explain to him that the crowd needs to be mixed beneath Vinny, so we can hear him at all times. This includes outros to commercial break. Secondly, the new wraparound scoreboards, while very nifty in the park, freaks out contrast on the cameras on night games. What we get is an extremely dark crowd scene with a nicely visible scoreboard, which makes the park look like a Las Vegas funeral. This needs to be fixed ASAP.

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