Kevin Youkilis joins a long line of Red Sox heroes who’ve become Yankees

Youk!

Yes, if pitchers and catchers have reported, it won’t be long before we’ll see Kevin Youkilis in pinstripes and Yankee fans will be cheering (again) this year for an old Red Sox fan favorite. Youk signed a one-year deal to play for the Yankees, probably playing third base while Alex Rodriguez rehabs from surgery (and longer, if the Yankees can unload A-Rod or get out of his contract).

It will be difficult for Red Sox fans to see Youkilis in pinstripes, and no doubt the cheers at Fenway will really be “Booo!” and not “Youk!” now. But Red Sox fans have become used to seeing old favorites playing for the Yankees (and vice versa).

In baseball’s most storied rivalry, lots of players, including some all-time greats, have gone over to the Dark Side, whichever side you consider to be dark. You probably could find similar connections between any pair of longtime teams, but the players who have played on both sides of this rivalry stand out somehow.

You could put together a pretty good team of players who’ve worked both sides of the rivalry, so I have.

A champion like Bernie Williams would be a sure Hall of Famer in football or basketball

If Baseball Hall of Fame selection worked the way the Pro Football Hall of Fame and the Basketball Hall of Fame selections work, Bernie Williams would be heading for Cooperstown someday. Instead, he dropped off next year’s ballot, getting only 3 percent of the vote from the Baseball Writers Association of America last week.

The most comparable NFL teams to the Bernie’s Yankees were the San Francisco 49ers of the 1980s and ’90s, the Pittsburgh Steelers of the 1970s and the Green Bay Packers of the 1960s.

I’ll leave the 49ers out of this consideration for a couple reasons:

1. Their titles were more spread out, four titles in nine years, five titles in 14 years. With a wider spread of years, they had more turnover of players. In fact, they have two quarterbacks from that era, Joe Montana and Steve Young, in the Hall of Fame.
2. More of their players remain in Hall of Fame consideration. Charles Haley is a finalist this year. Maybe Roger Craig, John Taylor, Ken Norton or Randy Cross will make it someday, too. So it’s harder to say how many 49ers will eventually make it to Canton. (Montana, Young, Jerry Rice, Ronnie Lott,  and Fred Dean are already in the Hall of Fame, along with Coach Bill Walsh and three players who made most of their case for the Hall of Fame with other teams, Deion Sanders, Rickey Jackson and Richard Dent).

Instead, we’ll examine the Steelers and Packers. The Yankees won four championships in five years (and made two more World Series in the next three years). The Steelers won four championships in six years. The Packers won five championships in seven years (and played for the title the year before winning their first championship). So all three teams won at least four championships over six years. These were some of the greatest dynasties in sports history.

Here are the Steelers from that era in the Hall of Fame: Mel Blount, Terry Bradshaw, Joe Greene, Jack Ham, Franco Harris, Jack Lambert, John Stallworth, Lynn Swann, Mike Webster (plus Coach Chuck Noll). That’s nine players, or 41 percent of the 22 starters (with only one full-time placekicker and no full-time punters in the Hall of Fame, we don’t need to count them). That’s close to a complete list, but some people still are campaigning for L.C. Greenwood.

Here are the Packers from that era in the Hall of Fame: Herb Adderley, Willie Davis, Forrest Gregg, Paul Hornung, Henry Jordan, Ray Nitschke, Jim Ringo, Bart Starr, Jim Taylor, Willie Wood, plus legendary Coach Vince Lombardi. That’s 10 of 22, and Dave Robinson is a finalist this year who could make it 50 percent of the starters. And don’t count out Jerry Kramer, a five-time All-Pro who threw maybe the most famous block in NFL history.

Let’s say that the eight daily position players, the designated hitter, the five starters and the bullpen ace are equivalent to the starters on the football team, 15 people playing roles that give you a shot at the Hall of Fame. So if the Baseball Hall of Fame selections worked the way that the Pro Football Hall of Fame does, 40 to 50 percent would mean six to eight Yankees from the 1990s would make the Hall of Fame.

Baseball Hall of Fame voting is screwed up, steroids or not

Baseball Hall of Fame voting is even more screwed up than voting in real elections.

OK, I get why Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Sammy Sosa didn’t make the Hall of Fame. There’s the drug thing (though a jury actually acquitted Clemens of perjury when he denied use).

Jayson Stark wrote a good piece for ESPN about how baseball needs to come to terms with the steroid era and how that should be represented in the Hall of Fame. But I think yesterday’s vote showed how screwed up Hall of Fame voting is, period. Even the votes on people not tainted with drug suspicion make no sense.

The Baseball Writers Association of America and veterans committees have made the Hall of Fame selection a laughingstock for generations. The football and basketball Hall of Fame selections always make more sense (though there’s always room for argument in any such voting). But baseball voting is a head-shaker every year.

For this post, we’ll set aside Bonds, Clemens and Sosa, along with Mark McGwire and Rafael Palmeiro. Whether you agree or not, everyone understands why baseball writers vote against people who are tainted with suspicion of using performance-enhancing drugs. If the voting did make sense, you could certainly understand a few years of “no” votes for suspected cheaters (character and integrity are among the voting criteria).

And, for this post at least, we’ll mostly set aside my own usual rants about the voters’ prejudice against Yankees. Other than Clemens and the usual dissing of Don Mattingly (13 percent this year), players who played their great years for the Yankees don’t figure in this year’s voting. So I’ll note the ridiculous votes on other candidates who fell short of the 75-percent vote needed for induction (all stats from Baseball Reference):

I cross the streams, discussing Hated Yankees and journalism

“Don’t cross the streams,” we were warned in “Ghostbuster.” It can be bad.

But I crossed the streams today, mentioning this Hated Yankees blog in a journalism workshop today, then continuing the discussion later on the Twitter account I usually use for discussions of journalism and not for my opinions about the New York Yankees. That’s the topic of this blog and the related @hatedyankees Twitter account.

My Hated Yankees identity creeps into my journalism workshops occasionally for two reasons:

1. As an example of why a journalist would use a personal Twitter account separate from the account you use for work, I mention that I launched @hatedyankees because I didn’t want to annoy or bore journalists who hated the Yankees or didn’t care about baseball with my tweets about the Yankees. But I did want to tweet about the Yankees (it was October 2009 when I launched the Twitter account and this blog, chronicling and celebrating the Yankees’ drive to the World Series title that year.)
2. I mention my 2009 blog post about why Don Mattingly belongs in the Hall of Fame as an example of a bad headline for search engines. I didn’t understand SEO well then and my headline, “You be the judge: Who’s a Hall of Famer?” didn’t help people find my blog because it didn’t include the name most likely to be used in a Google search by someone who would be interested in my post.

Don Mattingly outperformed most Hall of Famers of his era

Twenty hitters who played with Don Mattingly have made it into the Baseball Hall of Fame. He was better than most of them. It’s past time for the baseball writers to recognize that Mattingly belongs in the Hall of Fame.

When I’m making the case for Yankees who belong in the Hall of Fame, I don’t compare them to marginal Hall of Famers. Wherever you draw the line for who belongs in the Hall of Fame, some players who belong in will be very close to the line, as will some who don’t belong in. The differences between the players on opposite sides of the line will be small. And reasonable people can disagree over who belongs on which side of the line. So when you start comparing someone who’s not in the Hall with the people close to the line, you have a losing argument. You have to compare your overlooked candidate to the clear Hall of Famers who are nowhere near he line.

A few years ago, I noted that Mattingly’s career statistics and achievements were nearly identical to Kirby Puckett’s. That’s a pretty compelling argument, since Puckett was a first-ballot Hall of Famer whose achievements are universally regarded as worthy of Cooperstown.

But maybe you would argue that the Puckett comparison is an oddity, a coincidence that somehow doesn’t capture Kirby’s greatness. So I compared Mattingly to all his contemporaries in the Hall of Fame. And he still holds up well. By every measure except longevity, he’s better than most of them. And even with a shorter career than most, his career statistics are comparable to several Hall of Famers from his era.

Getting swept sucks; salute the winners and enjoy what we’ve had

Being swept sucks.

I don’t want to dwell on this year’s sweep of the Yankees, which I enjoyed even less than the 2004 American League Championship Series. At least that series was a lot of fun for three games.

Let’s just concede that the Tigers kicked the Yankees’ asses this year. No excuses for injuries or bad calls. Excuses might work if you lost in seven games, but even then they mostly just make you a whiner and a bad loser. When you don’t win a game, you salute the winner, appreciate the highlights of getting to the sweep and lose with some class and dignity.

You start looking to next year and hoping for hot-stove deals (a trade with Miami would be nice). You enjoy the World Series with a little less stress since your team’s not playing. And, if you’re a Yankee fan, you should appreciate how long we’ve been due to be swept.

This is the first post-season sweep of the Torre and Girardi generation of Yankees. Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera still haven’t been swept in the post-season. In fact, the last time the Yankees were swept in the post-season, George Brett took Goose Gossage deep for the exclamation point in the 1980 League Championship Series.

The 2012 Yankees need to study the 1996 Yankees and 1985 Royals

The Yankees are pretty much dead now, having lost two games at home and facing Justin Verlander in Detroit in Game 3, right?

Not really.

The Yankees lost two home games to the Atlanta Braves in 1996 and were facing Tom Glavine in Game 3. Glavine is a sure Hall of Famer who won the Cy Young Award two years later. Verlander is well on his way to Cooperstown and won the Cy Young and Most Valuable Player awards last year. Glavine was 15-10 with a 2.98 ERA in 1996 and three wins already in that year’s post-season. Verlander was 17-8 with a 2.64 ERA and two wins in the first round of this year’s post-season. (All these stats come from Baseball-Reference.com.

The Yankees beat Glavine, won the next three games and launched a dynasty with their first world championship under Joe Torre and Derek Jeter.