Boondoggle--Boone Logan May Be the Key to the Yankees' Bullpen . . . and Season

Despite achieving considerable success at the helm of the Florida Marlins and New York Yankees, Joe Girardi doesn't always look the part of a respected baseball manager. His appearance lacks a Piniellaesque gravitas.  Maybe it's his diminutive stature, somewhat baggy uniform or mouth full of braces. On Tuesday night, though, when Joe marched out of the dugout to make a pitching change in the ninth inning of the Yankees' win over the Cincinnati Reds, I wouldn't have crossed his path if you paid me. It wasn't so much that Girardi looked angry, he looked downright murderous. Not that I blamed him, mind you. Watching Boone Logan pitch can do that to a man.


Logan, who had just come on in relief of the similarly unreliable Luis Ayala, inherited a runner on first and was tasked with retiring reigning NL MVP Joey Votto. If successful, he probably would have been allowed to mop up the final outs to give Mariano Rivera the night off. Alas, it wasn't to be. Logan promptly plunked Votto with his first pitch and out stormed Girardi in a hot funk.

A Yankee fan, upon realizing that Boone Logan
may have to face David Ortiz in the ALCS. 

BOONE OR BUST?

Here's the problem with Boone Logan--he's a LOOGY (Lefty One Out GuY) who's not very good at getting left-handed batters out. Over the course of six MLB seasons, lefties have a .252 batting average against him, and while that's not terrible, it's not really the kind of dominance contending teams are looking for out of a left-handed specialist. And this year, as Logan has relied on a low-90s fastball and slider, lefties are hitting him at a .286 clip.  It's a small sample size, of course, but it's unimpressive and indicative of his mediocrity. Ultimately, it's his career numbers, compiled over more than 800 batters faced, that put to rest the argument that the Yankees have to wait until Logan "comes around." At this point in his career, what you see is what you get--a guy with WHIP nearing 1.6 who doesn't miss enough bats (his K/BB ratio is only 1.77).


Now, here's the other problem with Boone Logan--he's the only LOOGY the Yankees have, and he's out of options, meaning he cannot be sent down to the minors until he clears waivers. Given the sad state of the LOOGY population throughout the league, if the Yankees let him go, he'll get snapped up by another, still more desperate team. It wasn't supposed to be like this. Logan was supposed to be a guy who kept his warm up jacket on and watched from the 'pen as Pedro Feliciano, fresh off a dominant 2010 campaign with the Mets, handled high-leverage LOOGY situations in the Bronx. Feliciano, though, turned out to be a carrier of the dreaded Mets injury bug and was diagnosed with a torn shoulder capsule that has kept him out since April; the date of his return is still uncertain. That means, for the time begin at least, Logan is the Yankees' man. That's not good. Over the past couple of days, you can sense the unease in Yankeeland as people begin to realize that the Yankees will eventually need a lefty to face guys like Adrian Gonzalez, David Ortiz or Carl Crawford in late inning situations in September and October. It's becoming clear that if that lefty is Boone Logan, this season could turn out to be a bust.

Let's Face It, Rioters Are Fans, Too

In the wake of the instantly infamous riots that gripped Vancouver after the Canucks' loss to the Boston Bruins in the NHL's Stanley Cup finals last week, I heard a couple of media personalities try to rationalize the debacle by claiming that  the perpetrators weren't "real" hockey fans or Canucks supporters. This tired excuse, which is faithfully trotted out in the U.S. whenever fan hijinks devolve into mob violence, begs an obvious question. Here, one has to ask who, exactly, were those troublemakers kitted out in bespoke Canucks' paraphernalia? Were they a particularly organized flash mob of anarchists? Probably not. In fact, a lot of them probably were passionate Canucks fans. They were too passionate, clearly, and quite stupid, as well, but fans, nonetheless. It's probably time for us, as a sporting culture, to put on our big boy pants and realize that.

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE

Obviously, this isn't our first brush with fan violence. In an analogous incident from May 2008, hooligan supporters from Glasgow soccer club Rangers expressed their displeasure with their club's humbling loss to Zenit St. Petersburg in the UEFA Cup Final by cutting a swath of destruction through the host city of Manchester that was described as being as bad as anything the area had suffered "since the Blitz."  Sadly, tales of soccer hooliganism are legion, with Italy's Serie A providing many of the recent battlegrounds, but fan delinquency isn't cabined to European soccer. How about those lovably loyal Cleveland Browns fans who gave us a bottle tossing incident in 1991 that Nick Bakay dubbed "The Day It Rained Pilsner?" Or the night in 2004 when fans attempted a coup at the Palace at Auburn Hills during a NBA regular season game between the Detroit Pistons and Indiana Pacers? More recently, Major League Baseball was rocked by the savage beating of a San Francisco Giants fan outside of Dodgers Stadium in Los Angeles. For crissakes, this isn't even the first post-Game 7 Stanley Cup Finals riot in the city of Vancouver. The fact that lists like this are nowhere near exhaustive only speaks to my point.

And, yet, America's sports media continues its self-serving refusal to acknowledge that the whole premise of the bad-fans-aren't-real-fans argument is laughably flawed. I suppose it's bad business to tell your audience that they sometimes act like common criminals, but it's an insult to a viewer's intelligence to act like "real" sports fans are morally incapable of behaving badly.

Are these people you'd invite to your housewarming party?
No, but that doesn't mean they aren't sports fans.

FANCIER OR FANATIC?

There's some etymological uncertainty over whether the word "fan" was, when first applied to baseball fans during the 19th century, a shortened form of the word "fancier" or "fanatic." Usually, the majority of sports fans in this country (and probably the rest of the world) act more like fanciers than fanatics; however, when fanaticism takes primacy in sports, things can get ugly, just as they do when fanaticism dominates political or religious spheres.

Ultimately, people are capable of acts of malice and profound stupidity. "Real" sports fans are people. So, they, too, are capable of the kind of deviance that roiled Vancouver last week. Let's face it, good fans are capable of being bad people.

Denial in Yankeeland--The Red Sox Can (and Probably Will) Ruin Our Summah

As a lifelong fan of the New York Yankees, I have a some fond memories of the legendary 1998 team that won 125 games en route to World Series sweep of the sacrificial San Diego Padres. In particular, though, I vividly remember watching a May game against the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park. It was the second time the teams had met that season, and the day earlier, a Sox lineup of pseudo "stars" (Mo Vaugh) and bona fide scrubs (Darren Lewis, Troy O'Leary, Jon Valentin, Darren Bragg, Mike Benjamin and Lou Merloni) had, behind Tim Wakefield, somehow won the opening game of the series. The next day, normal service was restored, and as the Yankees were putting the sword to the Sox on their way to a 12-3 rout, one of their announces (Ken Singleton, maybe?) said, "This is just one team telling another, 'Hey we're better than you.'" While watching the Sox administer the second Bronx beat down of this season earlier this week, those words floated back to me in a kind of Proustian memory. Except this time, it was the Sox who were emphatically delivering that message.

You would think that even those Yanks fans who see the world though rose-tinted, pinstriped glasses issued by YES Network, the Bomber's in-house propaganda arm, couldn't deny that the Sox are a superior team. In fact, the question of whether the Sox are currently better than the Yankees is no longer a subjective one. Unfortunately, it is a fact that the answer is "Yes." These last few games served as a kind of mathematical proof. To argue to the contrary is to deny objective reality and betray a mind warped by homerism. It would be like asserting that John Sterling and Suzyn Waldman are a good radio broadcast team or that Tom Brady's haircut is actually cool. These kind of delusional statements are like dog whistles signaling your listeners that you don't know what the hell you are talking about.

And yet, if you choose to crawl down the rabbit hole of sports talk radio, you'll hear people like WFAN host Mike Francesa argue that the Yankees are as good as or better than the Sox. The current standings, this line of argument theorizes, are skewed by Boston's dominance of this year's head-to-head match-up. But doesn't that head-to-head dominance actually verify their superiority? Whatever. This kind of denial is made more irrational by the reality that it doesn't matter who is the best team in early June. Of course, Yankee fans shouldn't be too optimistic about the Yankees overhauling the Red Sox anytime soon, especially now that the bullpen is in shambles and Bartolo Colon just injured one of his ponderous legs.  That the health of Colon matters this much is, in and of itself, troubling, but without beefy Bartolo and his magic arm, we're left with the tragicomic prospect of watching A.J. Burnett pitch Game 2 of a post-season series. The Yanks will likely look to make a move before the deadline, but, then again, won't the Sox, as well? As much as I'd like to deny it, the truth is it could be a while before the Yankees can once again tell the Red Sox, "Hey, we're better than you."