Not that he won’t somehow be blamed if they start 1-5.

Of course.  If they go 1-5 out of the gate, it will be ARod’s fault for not being in the lineup.

Baltimore isn’t shaping up to be that bad.  Pecota has them at 76 wins and fourth place last I checked.  I suspect with Posada’s shoulder every walk and single is going to lead to a runner is scoring position.  The Yankee offense is old and the defense is laughable.

I can’t stand the Jeter worship going on right now.

A quick look at the THT stats page will show that by any measure Jeter is the WORST DEFENSIVE SS in baseball at this point. He is by no means the selfless player he is made out to be by the NY media. If he were a selfless player, he would have moved to 2B in 2004 when a far superior defensive player joined the team. Instead, he played the Yankee legend card to push A-Rod to 3B and ever since the Yankees have had one of the worst up the middle defenses in baseball.

Even so, I think what will hurt the Yankees most this year is the lack of overall depth. Their ideal starting lineup is full of great players, but they are far weaker then Tampa Bay and Boston when you get deeper down the depth chart. For example, with A-Rod gone, they turn 3B over to Cody Ransom. Their pitching suffers the same problem. 162 games will really bring this oversight to light, in my opinion.

-Matt

Opps.  Here is the link to that analysis:

http://www.replacementlevel.com/index.php/RLYW/comments/projecting_the_2009_yankee_defense_using_fangraphs_uzr

“Wait until they start 5-1 and see how much hate is shoveled on Rodriguez.”

This is what bothers me the most.  The guy has done more to help the Yankees win during his tenure than anyone else, but if they start winning without him, they’ll try to ride him out on a rail.  Well, they can send him straight to KC; we’d have a great shot at winning the AL Central with A-Rod hitting #3 for us.

Craig: The Times let Bill Kristol go because he was a CONSERVATIVE columnist prone to the lazy regurgitation of easy opinion. Surely you don’t think the current regulars on the Times op-ed pages are any more reliable! Paul Krugman is especially addicted to whoppers, and has been called on it by the Times ombudsman more than a few times. You are right about A-Rod and Jeter, of course (isn’t A-Rod playing Ted Williams to Jeter’s Joe D?) , and I agree in general that sports columnists are held to a lower standard of intellectual honesty than the op-ed types. For example, Tom Boswell is just shameless about ignoring facts that disagree with his thesis of the hour, and “Bos” is revered as one of the best in the field. But readers and editors are more tolerant of lazy writing when they like the opinion it generates. Your comment about Kristol leads me to believe that you are too, Craig…Bob Hebert isn’t lazy, when he wrote the same Bush-bashing piece about 100 times? Frank Rich? Come on. Richard Cohen and George Will both rig their arguments, but the one who’ll irritate you most is the one you disagree with. And I’m no different.

Craig…don’t get me started on Maureen!

The larger point of your post is a very important one. Baseball journalists generally are held to a amazingly low level of integrity and professionalism…listen to the stuff Rob Dibble or Kevin Kennedy says on XM’s Home Plate; listen to any game with Gary Thorne doing play-by-play; try to make sense out of the color commentary by Rick Sutcliffe. You can fill in your own examples, I’m sure. It’s particularly bad now, because a lot of the broadcast and newspaper types, and especially the ex-players, are clueless about stats and just repeat old canards over and over again…Fenway is a great homerun park; Manny Ramirez makes the whole Dodger line-up hit better; Jeter is a great shortstop; Varitek is invaluable to the Red Sox pitchers. Editors and producers tolerate it because 1) they think baseball fans are generally morons and 2) “it’s only a game.”

Craig: “Gleeful” is right. But isn’t part of the problem that Sabermetrics takes some basic analytical ability to use properly, and the typical sports talking head or ink-stained wretch is faced with the choice of either ignoring the current tools or injuring himself by using them incorrectly? So, like Dibble, they ridicule the stats. Direct quote: “Steve Garvey was a Hall of Famer! It’s obvious! Don’t give me all those phony stats…stats can prove whatever you want them to! I saw him play! He was great!” (Kennedy: “Exactly!”)

As Olsen Johnson said in “Blazing Saddles,” “Now who can argue with that?”

Craig I’m glad someone finally said it.

The Yankees should use this as an opportunity to get Jeter away from short stop, move him over to third base

The problem is that Jeter doesn’t hit well enough to be a third baseman on a team like the Yankees, much as Johnny Damon isn’t an offensive standout for a leftfielder, and Matsui isn’t going to be anyone’s idea of an All-Star as a DH. Ditto Posada, who is just another hitter if he’s not catching. This is the carousel problem the Yankees have with all these long contracts. They are going to have All-Stars playing positions where they never would have made any All-Star team….and now they have a long-term first baseman, blocking that traditional haven for aging stars. Any Yankee fan who doesn’t see this as a looming crisis isn’t paying attention.