Daniel Pipes
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
October 11, 2006
A minor issue at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport (MSP) has potentially major implications for the future of Islam in the United States.
Starting about a decade ago, some Muslim taxi drivers serving the airport declared, that they would not transport passengers visibly carrying alcohol, in transparent duty-free shopping bags, for example. This stance stemmed from their understanding of the Koran's ban on alcohol. A driver named Fuad Omar explained: "This is our religion. We could be punished in the afterlife if we agree to [transport alcohol]. This is a Koran issue. This came from heaven." Another driver, Muhamed Mursal, echoed his words: "It is forbidden in Islam to carry alcohol."
The issue emerged publicly in 2000. On one occasion, 16 drivers in a row refused a passenger with bottles of alcohol. This left the passenger - who had done nothing legally wrong - feeling like a criminal. For their part, the 16 cabbies lost income. As Josh L. Dickey of the Associated Press put it, when drivers at MSP refuse a fare for any reason, "they go to the back of the line. Waaaay back. Past the terminal, down a long service road, and into a sprawling parking lot jammed with cabs in Bloomington, where drivers sit idle for hours, waiting to be called again."
To avoid this predicament, Muslim taxi drivers asked the Metropolitan Airports Commission for permission to refuse passengers carrying liquor - or even suspected of carrying liquor - without being banished to the end of the line. MAC rejected this appeal, worried that drivers might offer religion as an excuse to refuse short-distance passengers.
The number of Muslim drivers has by now increased, to the point that they reportedly make up three-quarters of MSP's 900 cabdrivers. By September 2006, Muslims turned down an estimated three fares a day based on their religious objection to alcohol, an airport spokesman, Patrick Hogan, told the Associated Press, adding that this issue has "slowly grown over the years to the point that it's become a significant customer service issue."
"Travelers often feel surprised and insulted," Mr. Hogan told USA Today.
With this in mind, MAC proposed a pragmatic solution: drivers unwilling to carry alcohol could get a special color light on their car roofs, signaling their views on alcohol to taxi starters and customers alike. From the airport's point of view, this scheme offers a sensible and efficient mechanism to resolve a minor irritant, leaving no passenger insulted and no driver losing business. "Airport authorities are not in the business of interpreting sacred texts or dictating anyone's religious choices," Hogan points out. "Our goal is simply to ensure travelers at [the airport] are well served." Awaiting approval only from the airport's taxi advisory committee, the two-light proposal will likely be in operation by the end of 2006.
But on a societal level, the proposed solution has massive and worrisome implications. Namely, the two-light plan intrudes the Shari‘a, or Islamic law, with state sanction, into a mundane commercial transaction in Minnesota. A government authority thus sanctions a signal as to who does or does not follow Islamic law.
What of taxi drivers beyond those at MSP? Other Muslims in Minneapolis-St. Paul and across the country could well demand the same privilege. Bus conductors might follow suit. The whole transport system could be divided between those Islamically observant and those not so.
Why stop with alcohol? Muslim taxi drivers in several countries already balk at allowing seeing-eye dogs in their cars. Future demands could include not transporting women with exposed arms or hair, homosexuals, and unmarried couples. For that matter, they could ban men wearing kippas, as well as Hindus, atheists, bartenders, croupiers, astrologers, bankers, and quarterbacks.
MAC has consulted on the taxi issue with the Minnesota chapter of the Muslim American Society, an organization the Chicago Tribune has established is devoted to turning the United States into a country run be Islamic law. The wife of a former head of the organization, for example, has explained that its goal is "to educate everyone about Islam and to follow the teachings of Islam with the hope of establishing an Islamic state."
It is precisely the innocuous nature of the two-light taxi solution that makes it so insidious - and why the Metropolitan Airports Commission should reconsider its wrong-headed decision. Readers who wish to make their views known to the MAC can write it at publicaffairs@mspmac.org.
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Mr. Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is director of the Middle East Forum and author of Miniatures (Transaction Publishers).
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Murray Chass: Yankees Rotation Needs an Overhaul
On Baseball
Yankees’ Rotation, Old and Ineffective, Needs an Overhaul
By MURRAY CHASS
The New York Times
Published: October 10, 2006
Nothing against Mike Mussina, but he is the symbol of the Yankees’ failure to win the World Series the last six years. If George Steinbrenner is seeking a scapegoat, make it Mussina.
Mussina joined the Yankees as a free agent six years ago. The only other players who have been with the team that long have a bunch of World Series rings: Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Bernie Williams, Jorge Posada.
Mussina is the ringleader of the anti-World Series champions: Jason Giambi, Hideki Matsui, Gary Sheffield, Alex Rodriguez, Jaret Wright, Carl Pavano, Randy Johnson, Johnny Damon, Kyle Farnsworth.
Mussina, like some players on that list, is a pitcher, and the lack of strong pitching has undermined the Yankees’ chances of winning the World Series.
•As good as Jeter, Williams, Posada and others were when the Yankees won three successive World Series and four in five years, pitching was their foundation. Andy Pettitte started games in each of the four World Series the Yankees won. David Cone and Orlando Hernández started in three, and Roger Clemens in the last two. Of the eight pitchers who started games in those World Series, Denny Neagle was probably the weakest.
The pitchers who started against the Detroit Tigers in their American League division series carried the burden of Pettitte, Cone, Clemens and Hernández, but their performances did not live up to those names.
Johnson has become an aging and aching pitcher, not to mention an inconsistent one. As a postseason pitcher, he reached his zenith in 2001 with Arizona. That was a lot of innings ago. In Game 3 last week, he allowed five runs in five and two-thirds innings.
Mussina pitched his division series game against the Tigers just well enough to lose. A genuinely top-notch pitcher finds a way to win. Mussina finds a way to lose. The outcome of the game last week left him with a 7-8 postseason record, indicating he is not the pitcher to come up big when something big is needed.
Chien-Ming Wang, playing his first full season in the major leagues, was the Yankees’ only reliable starter this season, and he came through again in the playoff opener.
Some people thought that when the Yankees faced elimination in Game 4, they should have moved up Wang to pitch. But they had left him home to rest for a possible Game 5. Manager Joe Torre wasn’t going to risk injury to Wang, who spent nearly two months on the disabled list last year with a shoulder problem.
That left Wright as the pitcher to put his finger in the dike. Instead, he punched a hole in it. He didn’t get out of the third inning.
Wright’s poor performance should have come as no surprise to the Yankees. If they were honest with themselves, they expected it and hoped their hitters could outhit the Tigers.
Wright epitomizes the Yankees’ most recent questionable pitching decisions. When they signed him two years ago, the Yankees acted like many other teams, throwing money at a pitcher because he was a free agent.
An argument could also be made that it is Pavano, not Wright, who epitomizes the Yankees’ pitching problems. The Yankees signed Pavano a week before Wright, and he hasn’t pitched for a season and a half. Pavano is the Red Sox’ joke on the Yankees. They pursued him, too, as a free agent, but the Yankees got him.
It was that kind of signing that prompted Larry Lucchino, the Red Sox chief executive, to call the Yankees the Evil Empire. But as it turned out, this was one signing he was happy to let the Yankees have.
The Yankees are now caught up in the status of Torre. The time they spend on that subject can only be a distraction. Better that General Manager Brian Cashman focus on the pitchers on the free-agent list, and those who could be available in trades, than on his attempts to dissuade Steinbrenner, the principal owner, from firing Torre.
In case Steinbrenner can’t see the forest for the trees, the pitchers the Yankees add for next season will have a greater impact on how far they go than will Lou Piniella or any other new manager.
•Among the pitchers who can be free agents in less than three weeks are Barry Zito, Mark Buehrle, Kerry Wood, Vicente Padilla, Ted Lilly, Tony Armas, Randy Wolf, and, if the Giants don’t exercise his option, Jason Schmidt.
Clemens and Pettitte, who became buddies with the Yankees and joined the Astros in 2004, are also on the list. The Yankees’ pitching fortunes changed when they procrastinated about signing Pettitte three years ago, or simply chose not to. Clemens keeps retiring, then keeps coming back — and keeps pitching well.
This is not to say the Yankees should sign Clemens or Pettitte. They can make their own decisions. They, like many other teams, will probably pursue Zito. They may even ask the Florida Marlins if Dontrelle Willis is available. The Yankees can be sure that the Mets will also look at Zito and ask about Willis, as they did during the summer.
Given the Mets’ success with significant acquisitions the last two off-seasons, the Yankees will have to work hard to make sure they aren’t bumped from contention while the Mets are still in it.
Yankees’ Rotation, Old and Ineffective, Needs an Overhaul
By MURRAY CHASS
The New York Times
Published: October 10, 2006
Nothing against Mike Mussina, but he is the symbol of the Yankees’ failure to win the World Series the last six years. If George Steinbrenner is seeking a scapegoat, make it Mussina.
Mussina joined the Yankees as a free agent six years ago. The only other players who have been with the team that long have a bunch of World Series rings: Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Bernie Williams, Jorge Posada.
Mussina is the ringleader of the anti-World Series champions: Jason Giambi, Hideki Matsui, Gary Sheffield, Alex Rodriguez, Jaret Wright, Carl Pavano, Randy Johnson, Johnny Damon, Kyle Farnsworth.
Mussina, like some players on that list, is a pitcher, and the lack of strong pitching has undermined the Yankees’ chances of winning the World Series.
•As good as Jeter, Williams, Posada and others were when the Yankees won three successive World Series and four in five years, pitching was their foundation. Andy Pettitte started games in each of the four World Series the Yankees won. David Cone and Orlando Hernández started in three, and Roger Clemens in the last two. Of the eight pitchers who started games in those World Series, Denny Neagle was probably the weakest.
The pitchers who started against the Detroit Tigers in their American League division series carried the burden of Pettitte, Cone, Clemens and Hernández, but their performances did not live up to those names.
Johnson has become an aging and aching pitcher, not to mention an inconsistent one. As a postseason pitcher, he reached his zenith in 2001 with Arizona. That was a lot of innings ago. In Game 3 last week, he allowed five runs in five and two-thirds innings.
Mussina pitched his division series game against the Tigers just well enough to lose. A genuinely top-notch pitcher finds a way to win. Mussina finds a way to lose. The outcome of the game last week left him with a 7-8 postseason record, indicating he is not the pitcher to come up big when something big is needed.
Chien-Ming Wang, playing his first full season in the major leagues, was the Yankees’ only reliable starter this season, and he came through again in the playoff opener.
Some people thought that when the Yankees faced elimination in Game 4, they should have moved up Wang to pitch. But they had left him home to rest for a possible Game 5. Manager Joe Torre wasn’t going to risk injury to Wang, who spent nearly two months on the disabled list last year with a shoulder problem.
That left Wright as the pitcher to put his finger in the dike. Instead, he punched a hole in it. He didn’t get out of the third inning.
Wright’s poor performance should have come as no surprise to the Yankees. If they were honest with themselves, they expected it and hoped their hitters could outhit the Tigers.
Wright epitomizes the Yankees’ most recent questionable pitching decisions. When they signed him two years ago, the Yankees acted like many other teams, throwing money at a pitcher because he was a free agent.
An argument could also be made that it is Pavano, not Wright, who epitomizes the Yankees’ pitching problems. The Yankees signed Pavano a week before Wright, and he hasn’t pitched for a season and a half. Pavano is the Red Sox’ joke on the Yankees. They pursued him, too, as a free agent, but the Yankees got him.
It was that kind of signing that prompted Larry Lucchino, the Red Sox chief executive, to call the Yankees the Evil Empire. But as it turned out, this was one signing he was happy to let the Yankees have.
The Yankees are now caught up in the status of Torre. The time they spend on that subject can only be a distraction. Better that General Manager Brian Cashman focus on the pitchers on the free-agent list, and those who could be available in trades, than on his attempts to dissuade Steinbrenner, the principal owner, from firing Torre.
In case Steinbrenner can’t see the forest for the trees, the pitchers the Yankees add for next season will have a greater impact on how far they go than will Lou Piniella or any other new manager.
•Among the pitchers who can be free agents in less than three weeks are Barry Zito, Mark Buehrle, Kerry Wood, Vicente Padilla, Ted Lilly, Tony Armas, Randy Wolf, and, if the Giants don’t exercise his option, Jason Schmidt.
Clemens and Pettitte, who became buddies with the Yankees and joined the Astros in 2004, are also on the list. The Yankees’ pitching fortunes changed when they procrastinated about signing Pettitte three years ago, or simply chose not to. Clemens keeps retiring, then keeps coming back — and keeps pitching well.
This is not to say the Yankees should sign Clemens or Pettitte. They can make their own decisions. They, like many other teams, will probably pursue Zito. They may even ask the Florida Marlins if Dontrelle Willis is available. The Yankees can be sure that the Mets will also look at Zito and ask about Willis, as they did during the summer.
Given the Mets’ success with significant acquisitions the last two off-seasons, the Yankees will have to work hard to make sure they aren’t bumped from contention while the Mets are still in it.
Yankees Manager Torre to Return Next Season
By TYLER KEPNER and MARIA NEWMAN
The New York Times
Published: October 10, 2006
A chagrined Joe Torre said today he will return for his 12th season as manager of the New York Yankees, saying that in spite of losing to the Tigers this year, it remains “the best job of my life.”
Torre said the Yankees’ principal owner, George Steinbrenner, called him this morning to tell him he wanted him to come back for the final year of his contract, after keeping the manager and fans in suspense for several days while he mulled over whether to replace Torre in the wake of the Yankees’ failure to make it to the World Series this season.
“He gave me his support,” Torre said at a news conference at Yankee Stadium. “I’m just pleased I’m able to stay on and do this.”
He also said that he expected third baseman Alex Rodriguez to return next season. “Alex is one of the important pieces of this puzzle here,” Torre said.
General manager Brian Cashman said: “I am excited Joe is coming back. We have dreams here and we don’t stop dreaming the dreams and making them a reality.” He added, “This team played hard for Joe Torre.”
The Yankees’ first-round elimination on Saturday by the Detroit Tigers in the American League division series was a disappointment to fans, and especially to the team and its owners, Torre said. He added that he did not assume Steinbrenner would keep him on, although no one had told him he would go.
“I can’t say it doesn’t hurt,” he said about losing to the Tigers. “At the same time, nobody makes you any promises.”
Both he and Steinbrenner, in a statement issued by the spokesman Howard Rubenstein, talked about the high expectations, and therefore the pressure, that comes with being a Yankee.
“When you put the Yankee uniform on you understand that there are requirements and there are no excuses, and we’re just required to perform and to be the best out there, and we didn’t perform like that,” Torre said.
In a statement, Steinbrenner said he told Torre: “You’re back for the year. I expect a great deal from you and the entire team. I have high expectations, and I want to see enthusiasm, a fighting spirit and a team that works together. Responsibility is yours, Joe, and all of the Yankees.”
He added: “Yes, I am deeply disappointed about our loss this year. We have to do better, and I deeply want a championship. It’s about time.”
Torre, 66, has managed the Yankees to four World Series, and never missed the playoffs in 11 years with the Yankees. But the team has not won a championship since 2000.
Now with the longest uninterrupted term for a Yankees manager since Casey Stengel held the job for 12 years from 1949-60, Torre said it is just understood that the Yankees will play for nothing less than the championship. It was as if he was trying to psyche himself up for next season.
“When we go to spring training every year we talk about getting to the World Series,” he said. “We don’t talk about having a good year, let’s have a good record and all that stuff.
“We know what the requirements are. With the danger of failing is the elation of winning. You can’t get elated unless there’s a danger.”
Late in the season and during the playoffs, Torre made several controversial decisions, especially when he dropped Rodriguez to eighth in the batting order for the fourth and final game of the series against Detroit. Rodriguez, who finished the series 1 for 14, had not batted that far down in a lineup in more than 10 years.
Others in the organization, still reeling from the team’s loss to the Tigers, had doubts about whether Torre should stay.
Steinbrenner has long been enamored with Lou Piniella, a former player, general manager and manager for the Yankees. But on Monday, Steinbrenner was still seeking answers from his executives about what went wrong in the playoffs.
That has been a pastime for Steinbrenner the last six seasons after a postseason loss. But Torre’s position had never been more vulnerable, and rarely had such obvious possible successors been available.
Various players and coaches have supported Torre.
“To deal with a lot of superstars is hard,” said the reserve infielder Miguel Cairo, who packed his belongings at Yankee Stadium on Monday. “For him, it’s easy. It’s a plus when you have a manager like that, who knows how to do it.”
Starter Jaret Wright said he would have been sad to see Torre leave, and reliever Ron Villone called Torre a class act and a great manager. When Steinbrenner considers changes to the team, Villone said, he should not start with Torre.
“You can look at the bullpen, you can look at the lineup, you can look at the bench,” Villone said. “I’d rather look there first than look at who’s sitting on the bench.”
The Yankees have won nine consecutive A.L. East division titles under Torre, but he is 3-10 in his past 13 playoff games.
Michael S. Schmidt contributed reporting.
The New York Times
Published: October 10, 2006
A chagrined Joe Torre said today he will return for his 12th season as manager of the New York Yankees, saying that in spite of losing to the Tigers this year, it remains “the best job of my life.”
Torre said the Yankees’ principal owner, George Steinbrenner, called him this morning to tell him he wanted him to come back for the final year of his contract, after keeping the manager and fans in suspense for several days while he mulled over whether to replace Torre in the wake of the Yankees’ failure to make it to the World Series this season.
“He gave me his support,” Torre said at a news conference at Yankee Stadium. “I’m just pleased I’m able to stay on and do this.”
He also said that he expected third baseman Alex Rodriguez to return next season. “Alex is one of the important pieces of this puzzle here,” Torre said.
General manager Brian Cashman said: “I am excited Joe is coming back. We have dreams here and we don’t stop dreaming the dreams and making them a reality.” He added, “This team played hard for Joe Torre.”
The Yankees’ first-round elimination on Saturday by the Detroit Tigers in the American League division series was a disappointment to fans, and especially to the team and its owners, Torre said. He added that he did not assume Steinbrenner would keep him on, although no one had told him he would go.
“I can’t say it doesn’t hurt,” he said about losing to the Tigers. “At the same time, nobody makes you any promises.”
Both he and Steinbrenner, in a statement issued by the spokesman Howard Rubenstein, talked about the high expectations, and therefore the pressure, that comes with being a Yankee.
“When you put the Yankee uniform on you understand that there are requirements and there are no excuses, and we’re just required to perform and to be the best out there, and we didn’t perform like that,” Torre said.
In a statement, Steinbrenner said he told Torre: “You’re back for the year. I expect a great deal from you and the entire team. I have high expectations, and I want to see enthusiasm, a fighting spirit and a team that works together. Responsibility is yours, Joe, and all of the Yankees.”
He added: “Yes, I am deeply disappointed about our loss this year. We have to do better, and I deeply want a championship. It’s about time.”
Torre, 66, has managed the Yankees to four World Series, and never missed the playoffs in 11 years with the Yankees. But the team has not won a championship since 2000.
Now with the longest uninterrupted term for a Yankees manager since Casey Stengel held the job for 12 years from 1949-60, Torre said it is just understood that the Yankees will play for nothing less than the championship. It was as if he was trying to psyche himself up for next season.
“When we go to spring training every year we talk about getting to the World Series,” he said. “We don’t talk about having a good year, let’s have a good record and all that stuff.
“We know what the requirements are. With the danger of failing is the elation of winning. You can’t get elated unless there’s a danger.”
Late in the season and during the playoffs, Torre made several controversial decisions, especially when he dropped Rodriguez to eighth in the batting order for the fourth and final game of the series against Detroit. Rodriguez, who finished the series 1 for 14, had not batted that far down in a lineup in more than 10 years.
Others in the organization, still reeling from the team’s loss to the Tigers, had doubts about whether Torre should stay.
Steinbrenner has long been enamored with Lou Piniella, a former player, general manager and manager for the Yankees. But on Monday, Steinbrenner was still seeking answers from his executives about what went wrong in the playoffs.
That has been a pastime for Steinbrenner the last six seasons after a postseason loss. But Torre’s position had never been more vulnerable, and rarely had such obvious possible successors been available.
Various players and coaches have supported Torre.
“To deal with a lot of superstars is hard,” said the reserve infielder Miguel Cairo, who packed his belongings at Yankee Stadium on Monday. “For him, it’s easy. It’s a plus when you have a manager like that, who knows how to do it.”
Starter Jaret Wright said he would have been sad to see Torre leave, and reliever Ron Villone called Torre a class act and a great manager. When Steinbrenner considers changes to the team, Villone said, he should not start with Torre.
“You can look at the bullpen, you can look at the lineup, you can look at the bench,” Villone said. “I’d rather look there first than look at who’s sitting on the bench.”
The Yankees have won nine consecutive A.L. East division titles under Torre, but he is 3-10 in his past 13 playoff games.
Michael S. Schmidt contributed reporting.
Bob Klapisch: Joe should leave the Yankees on his terms
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
BERGEN COUNTY RECORD
NEW YORK -- So the Joe Torre deathwatch continued for another day, with everyone trying to interpret the meaning of the stay of execution granted by George Steinbrenner. Deciphering The Boss' moves is not unlike monitoring the CIA, where decisions are made covertly and factions wrestle each other for power.
Only, this time it's Steinbrenner alone who's mulling Torre's future. After a day of teleconferencing with his general manager, vice presidents and other high-level advisers, the Yankee owner flew back to Tampa, Fla., where, according to one insider, "he'll be making this decision all by himself." That means no one -- not even general manager Brian Cashman, Torre's greatest advocate -- can protect the manager now.
The injustice here is that Torre is being forced to wait, like some misbehaving school kid sitting outside the principal's office. He deserves better. He deserves more. If Steinbrenner intends to fire Torre, he should've had enough respect to do it quickly and cleanly on Monday and moved forward on a much-needed overhauling of the organization.
Instead, Torre was a prisoner in his Westchester County home, forced to stay indoors to avoid the army of reporters on his front lawn. Imagine the indignity, after 11 successful seasons in the Bronx, to have to feel like Martha Stewart. All that was missing was the electronic bracelet around his ankle.
Of course, Torre didn't manage a particularly crisp AL Division Series, marked by his decision to start Bernie Williams over Gary Sheffield in Game 3. And who can understand why Chien-Ming Wang wasn't brought back on short rest? The Yankees themselves will forever be remembered for the way they were outplayed by the younger, hungrier Tigers. But nothing justifies the silent treatment from The Boss, even for one day.
That's why Torre should tell The Boss goodbye. He should negotiate a fair buyout of the final year of his $7 million contract, and let Lou Piniella inherit the coming storms. Torre certainly has to know Steinbrenner has no real love for him, never has. The Boss has been waiting for years for the upper hand, and now he's got it.
Put it this way: If Steinbrenner doesn't fire Torre today or Wednesday, he will surely do it after the first losing streak in April.
Torre would then walk out of Yankee Stadium as humiliated as Yogi Berra was in 1985, canned after 14 games. That started a two-decade cold war with the kindest man in baseball. Torre and Steinbrenner are risking the same ugly end. Torre is on his way to the Hall of Fame, but his legacy will be soiled by the drumbeat of dark whispers that preceded Yogi's firing, too.
But Torre can beat George to the punch by saying it's time to move on, that he wants to spend more time with his family. Joe Cool should say exactly that, even though what he really means is that he no longer wants to be sabotaged by the Yankee hierarchy, or his own listless players. Talk about injustice: If the Yankees really loved Torre as much as they claim, why didn't even one of the club's stars show up at the Stadium on Monday to support him?
If ever there was a forum to save Torre, it was during the five-hour locker-cleaning session in the clubhouse. Reporters waited all day, and all they got were a handful of quotes from Ron Villone, Jaret Wright and Miguel Cairo. That's it.
There was no Jason Giambi, no Randy Johnson, no Mariano Rivera or Bernie Williams, Torre's strongest ally in the clubhouse. Derek Jeter issued a statement through his agent that Torre wasn't at fault for the collapse to the Tigers, but didn't make the 25-minute journey from his East Side apartment to the Stadium, where he knew his words would have a more powerful impact.
The captain could've made Steinbrenner aware that the manager still has the support of his clubhouse, and don't think The Boss would've ignored that sentiment. This is all about public relations; Steinbrenner has spared Torre until now because he didn't think he could get away with a dismissal. But the players' silence confirms The Boss' hunch that Torre is vulnerable.
And he is. Eleven years is too long for a coach or manager in professional sports. It's a near-certainty that Torre's reign would've ended after 2007, anyway, no matter how successful the Yankees are. It's simply time for a change in chemistry. The Mets recognized that in hiring the charismatic Willie Randolph to replace the soulless Art Howe, and look at the result.
Thing is, Torre has been the right man for the Yankees all along: calm, mature, able to shield his players from New York's excesses, not to mention The Boss'. Torre turned the Yankees into a respectable organization after years of anarchy. In return, Steinbrenner gave Torre enough talent to win four world championships and six American League pennants. Both men have profited from this marriage.
But Steinbrenner's genetically coded anger is back, and this time there's nothing (and no one) to save Torre. For once, The Boss feels he has the public on his side. After the Yankees went 20 scoreless innings against the Tigers, Steinbrenner is betting that fans won't really mind if Torre is replaced by Piniella.
Torre is no dummy. He knows which way the wind is blowing in the Bronx. He doesn't need to wait another minute for the principal to summon him. Walking away will preserve Torre's legacy forever. It's the ultimate power play against baseball's greatest power broker.
Bob Klapisch: Torre lost touch with his players
October 9, 2006
BERGEN COUNTY RECORD
Forum: Should Joe Torre be fired?
It was late August when Johnny Damon took a long, hard look around the clubhouse and was appalled at what he saw.
"Let's go [bleep-bleepers], wake up," Damon shouted. The center fielder had had enough of the Yankees' listlessness; it was so disturbingly different from the crazy energy he once shared with the Red Sox at Fenway. But instead of rallying the Yankees, Damon was met with silence.
That, and a cold stare across the room from Randy Johnson. Damon was so unnerved by the apathy, he later asked a team official, "Did I do something wrong?"
Sadly, that incident serves as a microcosm of the 2006 Yankees, and is why George Steinbrenner will soon fire Joe Torre. Despite the billion dollars he's spent since the last world championship in 2000, The Boss has only a series of October failures to show for it. The Yankees are rich, but soft. They can hit, but not when it counts. They talk about pinstripe tradition, but the roster is plagued by petty rivalries and jealousies that act as a cancer in the postseason.
Derek Jeter can't stand Alex Rodriguez and refuses to come to his defense. Mike Mussina doesn't like A-Rod, either, although, come to think of it, the Stanford grad hasn't much use for any of his teammates. No one talks to Johnson. Everyone thinks Carl Pavano is a joke. The Yankees' best pitcher, Chien-Ming Wang, is isolated by his limited knowledge of English.
On and on, the list of dysfunctions keeps going. Instead of a dynasty, the Yankees have become a newer version of the Braves -- consistently outplayed by younger, hungrier teams such as the Diamondbacks (2001), the Angels (2002 and 2005), the Marlins (2003) and now the Tigers.
Steinbrenner has only two choices now: He can fire Torre or trade A-Rod. They're the ones who must answer to the Yankees' consistent underachievement.
By all accounts, The Boss already has decided it's Torre who'll go, ready to replace him with Lou Piniella. Brian Cashman will lobby to keep Torre, whom he considers a personal friend, but in this case, the general manager will be outvoted and the end of the Torre regime will come "in the next 24 to 48 hours" according to one person familiar with Steinbrenner's thinking.
Torre spent most of 11 seasons turning the Yankees into a class, mature organization that was once the envy of the industry. But little by little, his magic has dissolved. The Yankees have become addicted to the All-Star-at-every-position philosophy, and the bloating that's followed is found in more than just the payroll. The Yankees' egos are such that they no longer hustle their way to victories. Instead, they've been relying on nuclear superiority.
Most of the time, it worked. That lineup was indeed the best the American League has seen in decades, maybe ever. But there's still no substitute for hard work and old school enthusiasm.
When the Yankees ran into a young team that refused to be intimidated, such as the Tigers, "They just curled up and died" said one major league executive. The Yankees somehow became convinced they could win by simply being the Yankees. They had no Plan B, and that's because Torre was so withdrawn from his troops.
Say this much for Joe Cool. He refused to fake his way through temper tantrums. He's not that kind of manager or person. But the Yankees need new fire now, which is why Piniella is warming up in the bullpen.
There are risks here, of course. Sweet Lou isn't nearly as media savvy as Torre and is certain to let his famous temper betray him sooner or later. The old newspaper wars with The Boss already are peeking over the horizon. But in the short term, he is exactly what the Yankees need.
Piniella also may be Rodriguez's last hope in New York. Finally, there'll be someone to act as A-Rod's advocate since it was never going to be Jeter, and it was obvious that Torre had no use for the third baseman, either. The decision to bat A-Rod in the Nos. 6 and 8 spots in the ALDS was an open declaration by Torre that he'd given up coddling A-Rod. It was Torre's way of telling Steinbrenner: It's him or me.
And that was the ultimatum that likely will cost Torre his job.
Maybe the Yankees will morph into a different team now. Maybe Piniella can get in peoples' faces the way he used to in the '80s. Maybe he can get A-Rod to stop feeling sorry for himself. Maybe Piniella can get Yankee fans off Rodriguez's back, too.
But if Sweet Lou replaces Torre, the first order of business will be to instill the old code of Yankee toughness that was the signature of the Billy Martin era. One scout who's watched the Yankees this year said, "It used to be that teams were afraid of the Yankees, but not anymore."
The Yankees never looked as tight as they did in Game 4 against the Tigers, which is exactly how they played Game 7 of the 2004 League Championship Series against the Red Sox, which was a clone of Game 4 against the Angels in last year's ALDS. Coincidence? Not anymore. It's become a pattern of failure.
Each time, Torre took the high road, refusing to blame anyone in the clubhouse. He's a good man who deserved greater effort from his millionaires. But it's also true that a team assumes the personality of its manager; the Yankees took Torre's calm and used it as an excuse to become docile.
The result? Everyone on the block knows the Yankees will crumble if you stand up to them.
And you know what they say about a bully: He's just a coward turned inside out.
E-mail: klapisch@northjersey.com
BERGEN COUNTY RECORD
Forum: Should Joe Torre be fired?
It was late August when Johnny Damon took a long, hard look around the clubhouse and was appalled at what he saw.
"Let's go [bleep-bleepers], wake up," Damon shouted. The center fielder had had enough of the Yankees' listlessness; it was so disturbingly different from the crazy energy he once shared with the Red Sox at Fenway. But instead of rallying the Yankees, Damon was met with silence.
That, and a cold stare across the room from Randy Johnson. Damon was so unnerved by the apathy, he later asked a team official, "Did I do something wrong?"
Sadly, that incident serves as a microcosm of the 2006 Yankees, and is why George Steinbrenner will soon fire Joe Torre. Despite the billion dollars he's spent since the last world championship in 2000, The Boss has only a series of October failures to show for it. The Yankees are rich, but soft. They can hit, but not when it counts. They talk about pinstripe tradition, but the roster is plagued by petty rivalries and jealousies that act as a cancer in the postseason.
Derek Jeter can't stand Alex Rodriguez and refuses to come to his defense. Mike Mussina doesn't like A-Rod, either, although, come to think of it, the Stanford grad hasn't much use for any of his teammates. No one talks to Johnson. Everyone thinks Carl Pavano is a joke. The Yankees' best pitcher, Chien-Ming Wang, is isolated by his limited knowledge of English.
On and on, the list of dysfunctions keeps going. Instead of a dynasty, the Yankees have become a newer version of the Braves -- consistently outplayed by younger, hungrier teams such as the Diamondbacks (2001), the Angels (2002 and 2005), the Marlins (2003) and now the Tigers.
Steinbrenner has only two choices now: He can fire Torre or trade A-Rod. They're the ones who must answer to the Yankees' consistent underachievement.
By all accounts, The Boss already has decided it's Torre who'll go, ready to replace him with Lou Piniella. Brian Cashman will lobby to keep Torre, whom he considers a personal friend, but in this case, the general manager will be outvoted and the end of the Torre regime will come "in the next 24 to 48 hours" according to one person familiar with Steinbrenner's thinking.
Torre spent most of 11 seasons turning the Yankees into a class, mature organization that was once the envy of the industry. But little by little, his magic has dissolved. The Yankees have become addicted to the All-Star-at-every-position philosophy, and the bloating that's followed is found in more than just the payroll. The Yankees' egos are such that they no longer hustle their way to victories. Instead, they've been relying on nuclear superiority.
Most of the time, it worked. That lineup was indeed the best the American League has seen in decades, maybe ever. But there's still no substitute for hard work and old school enthusiasm.
When the Yankees ran into a young team that refused to be intimidated, such as the Tigers, "They just curled up and died" said one major league executive. The Yankees somehow became convinced they could win by simply being the Yankees. They had no Plan B, and that's because Torre was so withdrawn from his troops.
Say this much for Joe Cool. He refused to fake his way through temper tantrums. He's not that kind of manager or person. But the Yankees need new fire now, which is why Piniella is warming up in the bullpen.
There are risks here, of course. Sweet Lou isn't nearly as media savvy as Torre and is certain to let his famous temper betray him sooner or later. The old newspaper wars with The Boss already are peeking over the horizon. But in the short term, he is exactly what the Yankees need.
Piniella also may be Rodriguez's last hope in New York. Finally, there'll be someone to act as A-Rod's advocate since it was never going to be Jeter, and it was obvious that Torre had no use for the third baseman, either. The decision to bat A-Rod in the Nos. 6 and 8 spots in the ALDS was an open declaration by Torre that he'd given up coddling A-Rod. It was Torre's way of telling Steinbrenner: It's him or me.
And that was the ultimatum that likely will cost Torre his job.
Maybe the Yankees will morph into a different team now. Maybe Piniella can get in peoples' faces the way he used to in the '80s. Maybe he can get A-Rod to stop feeling sorry for himself. Maybe Piniella can get Yankee fans off Rodriguez's back, too.
But if Sweet Lou replaces Torre, the first order of business will be to instill the old code of Yankee toughness that was the signature of the Billy Martin era. One scout who's watched the Yankees this year said, "It used to be that teams were afraid of the Yankees, but not anymore."
The Yankees never looked as tight as they did in Game 4 against the Tigers, which is exactly how they played Game 7 of the 2004 League Championship Series against the Red Sox, which was a clone of Game 4 against the Angels in last year's ALDS. Coincidence? Not anymore. It's become a pattern of failure.
Each time, Torre took the high road, refusing to blame anyone in the clubhouse. He's a good man who deserved greater effort from his millionaires. But it's also true that a team assumes the personality of its manager; the Yankees took Torre's calm and used it as an excuse to become docile.
The result? Everyone on the block knows the Yankees will crumble if you stand up to them.
And you know what they say about a bully: He's just a coward turned inside out.
E-mail: klapisch@northjersey.com
Kim Jong-Il's Coming-Out Party
By Frank J Gaffney Jr.http://www.FrontPageMag.com
October 10, 2006
For several years, North Korea has said it had nuclear weapons and the world has generally assumed that it did. With Pyongyang's apparent underground detonation of such a device on Monday, whatever lingering uncertainty there may have been has dissipated. Call it Kim Jong-Il's coming-out party. Now the question of what to do about one of the most dangerous regimes on the planet - a state-sponsor of terror who has expressed a willingness to sell its nuclear technology to those with the cash to buy it - recurs with fresh urgency.
Let's get one thing straight at the outset: The threat North Korea poses today is actually not appreciably different from that the Stalinist regime constituted last week. The difference is that we no longer have the luxury of ignoring it, or dealing with it through feckless "six-party talks," which amounts to the same thing.
Instead, we need to approach the danger posed by a nuclear-armed North Korea as though it constitutes a mortal peril to American strategic interests in Asia and, perhaps, to this country directly, as well. For, indeed, it does. The idea that a regime that has permitted some two million of its own people to starve to death will better treat others - including ours - is untenable and risky in the extreme.
Consequently, we need now to hold accountable those responsible for the North Korean nuclear program. Communist China has been playing a double-game for years. Without Beijing's military technology, to say nothing of its financial support, strategic protection and food and energy life-lines, Kim Jong-Il's regime would have been toast long ago and its people likely reunited with prosperous South Korea. To a lesser degree, the same can be said of the role played by Vladimir Putin's Russia.
Pakistan was the cut-out for much of the nuclear weapons know-how and equipment that flowed from China to Pyongyang. Nukes-r-Us impresario A.Q. Khan appears to have been used in transfers for which the Pakistani regime sought plausible deniability.
More recently, Iran has been an enabler of North Korea's nuclear and missile programs. Call it the oil-for-weapons program. Pyongyang has been trading mass destruction wherewithal and delivery systems to Tehran in exchange for energy supplies and, presumably, cash. The deal has helped lubricate Kim's steady progress towards ever-longer-range missiles and his acquisition of weapons to go on them. It has also greatly shortened the length of time it is taking Iran, the other charter member of the "Axis of Evil," to get up the learning curve in both areas.
Unfortunately, even our nominal ally, South Korea has become increasingly vital to propping up Kim's regime. It is investing substantial sums in the North, creating industrial zones there for which it has been seeking special treatment in trade arrangements with the United States and otherwise demanding that Pyongyang be appeased by the West.
These sorts of activities can no longer be either ignored or tolerated. While the United States is going to have to pick its shots, it must now adopt the sort of strategy Ronald Reagan employed to destroy the Soviet Union: A concerted campaign aimed at cutting off the funding to, neutralizing the threat from and de-legitimating a hostile regime. Elements of such a campaign would include the following:
Joining with Japan, Australia and others who share our view of the danger posed by North Korea to deny Pyongyang the financial life-support it must have to survive. International corporations operating in the North should be given a choice: Do business with Kim or with the Free World. Those who opt for the former should be denied government contracts, subjected to financial sanctions and import controls and made the focus of divestment initiatives like that which ultimately brought down the South African regime twenty years ago.
Greatly ramping up the U.S. effort to deploy the sort of effective anti-missile defenses first sought by Mr. Reagan in 1983. Thanks to President Bush's leadership, the United States now has the latitude to protect its people against ballistic missile attack. To date, unfortunately, the effort to do so has mostly been confined to a limited, land-based missile defense system. In light especially of the North Korean threat, we need to augment that deployment immediately by modifying the Navy's Aegis fleet air-defense ships with the capability to shoot down ballistic missiles of various ranges - whether launched from places like North Korea or from tramp steamers off our coasts.
In addition, now that the North Koreans have joined the Indians and Pakistanis in demonstrating that our restraint in nuclear testing is not preventing others from doing such experimentation, we need to resume the sort of periodic underground tests essential to ensuring that our deterrent remains as safe, reliable and credible as we can make it. President Reagan strenuously argued that such testing is a non-negotiable requirement. We can no longer responsibly persist in the moratorium on nuclear testing we have observed since 1992.
Finally, the United States must stop pretending that Kim Jong-Il's regime is one with which we can live. Rather than legitimating the regime by negotiating with it - even in multilateral settings, to say nothing of bilateral ones, every effort should now be bent towards discrediting this odious dictatorship, making pariahs of those who perpetuate it and encouraging freedom throughout the Korean peninsula.
President Reagan demonstrated that the peoples enslaved by the Soviet superpower need not be consigned to such a state in perpetuity. So in our time we must bend every effort to ending the tyrannical misrule of the nuclear club's newest, and arguably most dangerous, member: Kim Jong-Il.
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Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is the founder, president, and CEO of The Center for Security Policy. During the Reagan administration, Gaffney was the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Forces and Arms Control Policy, and a Professional Staff Member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by Senator John Tower (R-Texas). He is a columnist for The Washington Times, Jewish World Review, and Townhall.com and has also contributed to The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New Republic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Los Angeles Times, and Newsday.
Monday, October 09, 2006
Che Guevara: 39 Years of Idolatry
By Humberto Fontova
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
October 9, 2006
Thirty nine years ago last week, Ernesto "Che" Guevara got a major dose of his own medicine. Without trial he was declared a murderer, stood against a wall and shot. Historically speaking, justice has rarely been better served. If the saying, "what goes around comes around" ever fit, it's here. The number of men Che's "revolutionary tribunals" condemned to death in the identical manner range from 400 to 1,892. The number of defenseless men (and boys) Che personally murdered with his own pistol runs to the dozens. Imagine Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, and Son of Sam t-shirts on such as Johnny Depp and Prince Harry. Granted, these last three didn't match Che's murder tally. "Executions?" Che Guevara exclaimed while addressing the hallowed halls of the UN General Assembly December 9, 1964. "Certainly, we execute! " he declared to the claps and cheers of that August body. "And we will continue executing (emphasis his) as long as it is necessary! This is a war to the DEATH against the Revolution's enemies!"
According to the Black Book of Communism those firing squad executions had reached around 10,000 by that time. Sloboban Milosevic, by the way, went on trial for allegedly ordering 8,000 executions. The charge against him by the same UN that deliriously applauded Che Guevara's proud proclamation was "genocide."
The "revolutions' enemies" being bound, gagged and murdered by Che and his henchmen were among the most enterprising and valiant fighters of the 20th century. These Cuban freedom-fighters ranked alongside the Polish Home Army and the Hungarian Freedom-Fighters. They fought just as valiantly, as desperately-- and ultimately--just as hopelessly. They fought to the last bullet and usually to the death.
Most heartbreaking of all, they fought alone and abandoned. They specialized in ripping off their gags and blindfolds to yell "VIVA CRISTO REY! or " VIVA CUBA LIBRE!" or "ABAJO COMUNISMO!"before the bullets shattered their bodies and the coup de grace from Che's henchman shattered their skulls.
The few survivors live in places like Miami and New Jersey today and qualify as the longest-suffering political prisoners in modern history. But you'll look for their stories on the History Channel, PBS, the New York Times, etc., in vain. They fought the Left's premier pin-up boys, you see. So their heroism doesn't qualify as Politically-Correct drama.
To be ignored would be bad enough. Instead, whenever acknowledged the media parrots the Castroite slander against them of "terrorists" and "mafiosi." It's a tribute to the MSM and academia's incurable obtuseness and imbecility that they still depict Castro/Che as the "plucky underdogs" against an aggressive colossus--when that collosus was in fact protecting Castro's regime, as pledged to Nikita Khrushchev by JFK in October 1962. "I don't need proof to execute a man" snapped Che to a judicial underling in 1959. "I only need proof that it's necessary to execute him!"
Not that you'd surmise any of the above from the mainstream media or academia-- much less Hollywood. From the high priests of the Fourth Estate Che Guevara gets only accolades. Time magazine, for instance, honors Che Guevara among "The 100 Most Important People of the Century."
The man who declared, "a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate," (and set a spirited example,) who boasted that he executed from "revolutionary conviction" rather than from any "archaic bourgeois details" like judicial evidence, and who urged "atomic extermination" as the final solution for those American "hyenas," (and came hearth-thumpingly close with Nuclear missiles in October 1962) is hailed by Time--not just among the "most important" people of the Century--but in the "Heroes and Icons" section, alongside Anne Frank, Andrei Sakharov, and Rosa Parks.
"If the nuclear missiles had remained we would have used them against the very heart of America, including New York City," Che Guevara confided to the London Daily Worker in November of 1962. "We will march the path of victory even if it costs millions of atomic victims...We must keep our hatred alive and fan it to paroxysm." This was Che's prescription for America almost half a century before Osama Bin Laden, Mullah Omar, and Al-Zarqawi appeared on our radar screens.
But for the prudence of Nikita Khrushchev, Che Guevara's fondest wish would have made New York's 9/11 explosions appear like an errant cherry bomb. Yet listed alongside Che Guevara in Time's "Heroes and Icons of the Century," is Mother Theresa. From here the ironies only get richer.
The most popular version of Che t-shirt, for instance, sports the slogan "Fight Oppression" under his famous face. This is the face of a man who co-founded a regime that jailed more of it's subjects than Hitler or Stalin's and declared that "individualism must disappear!" In 1959, with the help of Soviet GRU agents, the man celebrated on that t-shirt helped found, train and indoctrinate Cuba's secret police. "Always interrogate your prisoners at night," Che ordered his goons. "A man's resistance is always lower at night." Today the world's largest Che mural adorns Cuba's Ministry of the Interior, the headquarters for Cuba's KGB and STASI trained secret police. Nothing could be more fitting.
Yet somehow, this same image is considered the height of hipness on everything from shirts, watches and snowboards, to thong underwear and an undisclosed location on Angelina Jolie's epidermis. Ms Jolie, by the way, recently won the UN's "Global Humanitarian Award" for her work with refugees.
Will someone please inform Angelina Jolie that her tattoo idol, with his firing squads and prison-camps, provoked one of the biggest refugee crises in the history of this hemisphere. On top of the 2 million who made it with only the clothes on their back, the Cuban Archives project, meticulously compiled and documented by scholars Maria Werlau and Dr Armando Lago, estimate that close to 80,000 Cubans have died of thirst and exposure, have drowned, or have been ripped apart by sharks attempting to flee the handiwork of the man "Ms Global Humanitarian" honors by having him permanently emblazoned on her skin.
Yet prior to Fidel and Che's glorious reign, Cuba took in more immigrants (primarily from Europe) as a percentage of population than the U.S, and this includes the Ellis Island years. Prior to the glorious Cuban revolution people were as desperate to enter Cuba (especially from neighboring Haiti and Jamaica) as they are now to exit Cuba (at extreme risk to life and limb.) Perhaps Castro acolyte Charlie Rangel can explain this? Perhaps Jesse "Viva Fidel! Viva Che!" Jackson can explain it?
Not that ignorance, willful or otherwise, is exactly rare on the topic of Cuba or Che Guevara. When Carlos Santana and Eric Burdon, (among many other rockers) smugly sport their elegant Che t-shirts they plug a regime that in the mid to late 60's rounded up "roqueros" (Cuban rock & roll fans) and long hairs en masse, and herded them into prison camps for forced labor under a scorching sun. These young prisoners' "counter-revolutionary crimes" often involved nothing more than listening to music by The Animals and Santana.
When Madonna camped it up in her Che outfit for the cover of her American Life CD, she plugged a regime that criminalized homosexuals and anything smacking of gay mannerisms. In the mid 60's the crime of effeminate behavior got thousands of youths yanked off Cuba's streets and parks by secret police and dumped in prison camps with "Work Will Make Men Out of You" in bold letters above the gate (the one at Auschwitz' gate read: "Work Will Set You Free) and with machine gunners posted on the watchtowers. The initials for these camps were UMAP, not GULAG, but the conditions were identical.
"Iron" Mike Tyson used to end fights with his arms upraised in triumph. In 2002, he got a huge Che tattoo on his torso, visited Cuba, and has been consistently and horribly stomped in fight after fight ever since, a process perfectly mimicking the combat record of his tattoo idol. Che was indeed proficient at smiting his enemies, Mike, thousands of them--but only after they were bound, gagged, and blindfolded. Chances are nobody disclosed this to you in Cuba, much less in the mainstream media. But I'm afraid the World Boxing Association won't allow it anyway. When the crowd of A-list hipsters and Beautiful People at the Sundance Film Festival (which included everyone from Tipper and Al Gore to Sharon Stone, Meryl Streep, and Paris Hilton) exploded in a rapturous standing ovation for Robert Redford's The Motorcycle Diaries, they were cheering a film glorifying a man who jailed or exiled most of Cuba's best writers, poets and independent film-makers while converting Cuba's press and cinema--at Czech machine-gun point-- into propaganda agencies for a Stalinist regime.
Executive producer of the movie, Robert Redford (who always kicks off the film festival with a long dirge about the importance of artistic freedom) was forced to screen the film for Che's widow (who heads Cuba's Che Guevara Studies Center) and Fidel Castro for their approval before release. We can only imagine the shrieks of outrage from the Sundance crowd--about "censorship!" and "selling out!"-- had, say, Robert Ackerman required (and acquiesced in) Nancy Reagan's approval to release HBO's The Reagans that same year.
Che groupies are many and varied. Christopher Hitchens, for instance marvels at Che's "untamable defiance" and assures us in the same New York Times article that "Che was no hypocrite."
The noted historian Benicio Del Toro, who will star as his hero in a Hollywood Biopic due next year, says: "Che was just one of those guys who walked the walk and talked the talk. There's just something cool about people like that. The more I get to know Che, the more I respect him."
More than his cruelty, megalomania or even his epic stupidity, what most distinguished Ernesto "Che" Guevara from his peers was his sniveling cowardice. His groupies can run off in a huff, slam their bedroom door, and dive headfirst into their beds sobbing and kicking and punching the pillows all they want-- but Che surrendered to the Bolivan Rangers voluntarily, from a safe distance, and was captured physically sound and with a fully loaded pistol.
One day before his death in Bolivia, Che Guevara--for the first time in his life--finally faced something properly describable as combat. So he ordered his guerrilla charges to give no quarter, to fight to their last breaths, and to their last bullet. A few hours later his "untamable defiance," lack of hypocrisy and "walking of the walk " all manifested themselves. With his men doing just what he ordered ( fighting and dying to the last bullet) a slightly wounded Che snuck away from the firefight and surrendered with a full clip in his pistol while whimpering to his captors: "Don't Shoot! I'm Che I'm worth more to you alive than dead!"
His Bolivian captors begged to differ.
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Film Review: "The Departed"
Hoodfellas: Scorsese returns to mean streets with a hit in 'The Departed'
By Ty Burr
Boston Globe
Published: 10/06/2006
Martin Scorsese won't be winning any Oscars for "The Departed." The movie's too hard, too pulpy -- too good. A relentlessly violent, breathtakingly assured piece of mean-streets filmmaking, the film shows the legendary director dropping the bids for industry respectability that have preoccupied him over the past decade and doing what he does best: burrow to the agonized heart of criminality and let the blood and guilt splatter where they may.
Adapted from the 2002 Hong Kong action film "Infernal Affairs" by the Dorchester-born screenwriter William Monahan , "The Departed" is also the closest we've come yet to The Great Boston Movie, a beast that requires more honesty than filmmakers (and audiences) have been willing to grant. The film's only serious flaw is that it establishes a venal and local moral wasteland, crisscrossed by scummy realities of class and race, that it never follows up. What begins as a blood-soaked tragicomedy about our fair town's tribal warfare turns into merely a brilliant B movie. Don't let that keep you away.
"I don't want to be a product of my environment -- I want my environment to be a product of me." So says Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson), the satanic South Boston mobster who could be Whitey Bulger's even more evil twin. Narrating the film's opening passages against a backdrop of news footage of the 1974 anti-busing violence, Costello lays out his version of ethnic realpolitik: "That's what the black chappies never realized. No one gives it to you. You have to take it."
Frank does, however, give a leg up to a starstruck neighborhood kid named Colin Sullivan, whom he grooms for a long-term project: grow up straight, join the police, be my in-house mole. By the time Colin is played by Matt Damon, he's a canny customer on track to department success -- a rising star with the State Police's special investigative unit headed by the glib, hard-driving Ellerby (Alec Baldwin). Their mission: Bring down the Irish mafia in general and Costello in particular. Colin's mission: keep "dad" apprised of any incoming busts.
A separate undercover unit run by Oliver Queenan (Martin Sheen) and his hotheaded deputy Dignam (Mark Wahlberg) recruit their own L Street Brownie: Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio), a police academy misfit with a crooked family he wants to live down. In short order, Billy is jailed on a cooked-up assault, sent back on the streets, and works his way into Costello's mob as an informer.
That's the snappy mirror gimmick that drove "Infernal Affairs" -- two rats reporting on their compatriots and, increasingly, each other -- and "The Departed" takes the chess match to insanely complex levels. Both groups begin frantically seeking the traitor in their midsts, and when Colin is put in charge of the department search, he grimly realizes that he has to find himself.
At one point Billy stalks his opposite number to a meeting with Costello, and the sequence becomes a sadistic game of now-I-see-me/no-you-don't. Good and bad bleed into each other as these two sons of Southie come to understand they're brothers in battered spirit, and that only the other man can understand what each is going through.
Eventually the plot spins into free fall and the bodies start piling up. You don't mind because Scorsese is so in command of his medium, because the performances are juicy and committed, and because the violence feels viscerally real. When people throw punches in "The Departed," they break their hands; when one character falls several stories to the pavement, the blowback is defiantly unpretty. Costello toys absent - mindedly with an anonymous severed hand before asking an underling to "get rid of this." "The Departed" follows the consequences of bloodshed and betrayal all the way to the ugly end, and you won't feel like celebrating afterward .
Monahan's dialogue is filthy and funny, bristling with tabloid poetry: "Your family's dug into the Southie projects like ticks"; "You're a black guy in Boston -- you don't need my help to be completely [expletive]." The central performances are tremendous, too, and for once the local accents are spot-on (mostly; Sheen's still doing the Kennedys). This is DiCaprio's best work in a long while, and he makes you feel the suicidal craziness of "having to be a different guy every day." Damon's playing a more multi-leveled game, though, and under that mashed pretty-boy face we glimpse a whole spectrum of rat emotion: greed, ambition, cowardice, and a pathetic sort of loyalty.
Wahlberg almost steals the film as a pit bull of a Statie -- every time he shows up you start grinning -- and Nicholson does steal everything that's not nailed down. Frank Costello could be Jack Torrance from "The Shining" given a new lease on life and scraped clean of all human scruple. He's a joyfully vulgar psycho, a creature of pure id. You don't try to understand this guy -- as someone says, quoting Sigmund Freud, the Irish "are the only people impervious to psychoanalysis" -- you just run like hell.
For all the excellence of the performances (which includes Vera Farmiga as a police shrink drawn to both Damon and DiCaprio; her accent's wobbly but the acting's right), this is a director's return to form. When Scorsese misfires here, cueing the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter" on the soundtrack yet again or giving Colin a high-rise apartment with a patently fake view of the State House dome, you're inclined to forgive him. When "The Departed" roars to life, as it does in so many of its scenes, you feel like nobody understands movies -- the delirious highs, the unforgiving moral depths -- as well as this man does. Welcome back, Marty.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.
Bill Madden: Clearing house has a nice ring
The New York Daily News
October 9, 2006
Ain't this rich: A-Rod must go
Are Gary Sheffield, Alex Rodriguez and Jason Giambi part of the problem or the solution for Yankees?
Embarrassed as Joe Torre must be over the ugly events in Detroit, I'm not sure if any manager, be it Lou Piniella, Casey Stengel or John McGraw, could have evoked the necessary passion and grit from this Yankee team as currently constituted.
Since 2001, they have added superstars every year - Mike Mussina, Jason Giambi, Hideki Matsui, Gary Sheffield, Alex Rodriguez, Randy Johnson, Johnny Damon - all of them coming here for huge money, looking to ride the coattails of Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Jorge Posada and Bernie Williams, the holdovers of the championship years, to an easy ring. It hasn't happened and they're the primary reasons it hasn't happened.
This division-series disaster was merely the culmination of this failed hire-a-mercenary policy, which was a product of necessity due to the 12 straight barren drafts by the Yankee player development department. Combined, Mussina ($19M), Giambi ($20.4M), Sheffield ($10.8M), Rodriguez ($21.7M) and Johnson ($15.7M) accounted for $87.6 million of the Yankees' roughly $200 million payroll.
In the aftermath of his 1-for-14 against the Tigers - which was the follow-up to his 2-for-15 against the Angels last year - A-Rod said he had "no one to blame but myself" for his abysmal postseason performance, but then added he believed he was "part of the solution."
No, A-Rod, you're the major part of the problem. And even if A-Rod's guy, Piniella, should be the new manager, the Yankees should not delude themselves into thinking that would be the solution. As much as Piniella may have liked A-Rod in Seattle, he won 116 games the year after A-Rod left.
No, what the Yankees need to do with A-Rod is to get him out of here for his and their own good, use him as their chip to rebuild their pitching staff. They should dial up Angels owner Arte Moreno and see if he's interested in making a variation of the deal he tried to make for Miguel Tejada at this summer's trading deadline, the one that was to include 24-year-old power righthander Ervin Santana.
Or if not the Angels, then the Chicago White Sox, who have a glaring need for a shortstop and all sorts of excess power pitchers plus a prize third-base prospect in Josh Fields.
For the Yankees to have any chance of getting back to the World Series, they must address their starting pitching, which sabotaged Torre as much as his hitters against the Tigers. In that regard, their own Philip Hughes has the stuff to be a dominant starter but has been held back by Yankees minor league pitching coordinator Nardi Contreras, who had him on gradually receding pitch counts all summer, then shut him down at 146innings.
Scouts who saw Hughes at Trenton this summer agreed he's ready for the big leagues now and even Yankee officials on the major league level, Gene Michael for one, were dismayed that Hughes wasn't allowed to finish the season at Triple-A. Now, as one scout told me: "This kid is a stud, but what good is he going to do them if he's been programmed to pitch five innings? They're turning him into Jaret Wright."
Durable front-line starters are what the Yankees need to even get to next year's postseason.
Mussina, 37, and Johnson, 43, each a loser in his start against the Tigers, have run their course here. It was essentially the same for them a year ago when they came up small against the Angels, who bounced the Yankees out of the first round.
These are supposed to be your aces, folks. That's why George Steinbrenner is paying them the big bucks. And that's why whoever is the Yankee manager next year shouldn't have to be burdened with them.
Mussina, a free agent, won't be re-signed, and Johnson, who vowed a couple of months ago he wouldn't pitch the final year of his contract if he wasn't physically capable of meeting his high standards, ought to be taken up on that. The Yankees should encourage him to get that back surgery this winter, collect the insurance and wish him well.
Giambi, despite his 37 homers and 113RBI in the regular season, was a no-show - literally - when Torre needed him most against the Tigers. After going 1-for-8 over the first three games, he asked to get a cortisone shot for his shoulder, rendering him unavailable for the deciding Game 4.
That's why his comment, "I came ready to play and Joe wanted a different look in there," was so unbelievable. The fact is, Giambi is a defensive liability at first base and, as a DH, he is blocking Melky Cabrera from playing since that's where Matsui would be best suited. But good luck trying to move Giambi anywhere.
As for Sheffield, 1-for-12 with one RBI as a failed first baseman against the Tigers after a failed division series against the Angels, he has a $13 million option for '07, which he says he hopes the Yankees will not pick up. One would have to believe they won't be tempted.
In his three years in Tampa Bay, Piniella lamented the ownership's payroll constraints, but as Torre could tell him, big salaries don't necessarily translate into big-time postseason players.
Originally published on October 9, 2006
October 9, 2006
Ain't this rich: A-Rod must go
Are Gary Sheffield, Alex Rodriguez and Jason Giambi part of the problem or the solution for Yankees?
Embarrassed as Joe Torre must be over the ugly events in Detroit, I'm not sure if any manager, be it Lou Piniella, Casey Stengel or John McGraw, could have evoked the necessary passion and grit from this Yankee team as currently constituted.
Since 2001, they have added superstars every year - Mike Mussina, Jason Giambi, Hideki Matsui, Gary Sheffield, Alex Rodriguez, Randy Johnson, Johnny Damon - all of them coming here for huge money, looking to ride the coattails of Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Jorge Posada and Bernie Williams, the holdovers of the championship years, to an easy ring. It hasn't happened and they're the primary reasons it hasn't happened.
This division-series disaster was merely the culmination of this failed hire-a-mercenary policy, which was a product of necessity due to the 12 straight barren drafts by the Yankee player development department. Combined, Mussina ($19M), Giambi ($20.4M), Sheffield ($10.8M), Rodriguez ($21.7M) and Johnson ($15.7M) accounted for $87.6 million of the Yankees' roughly $200 million payroll.
In the aftermath of his 1-for-14 against the Tigers - which was the follow-up to his 2-for-15 against the Angels last year - A-Rod said he had "no one to blame but myself" for his abysmal postseason performance, but then added he believed he was "part of the solution."
No, A-Rod, you're the major part of the problem. And even if A-Rod's guy, Piniella, should be the new manager, the Yankees should not delude themselves into thinking that would be the solution. As much as Piniella may have liked A-Rod in Seattle, he won 116 games the year after A-Rod left.
No, what the Yankees need to do with A-Rod is to get him out of here for his and their own good, use him as their chip to rebuild their pitching staff. They should dial up Angels owner Arte Moreno and see if he's interested in making a variation of the deal he tried to make for Miguel Tejada at this summer's trading deadline, the one that was to include 24-year-old power righthander Ervin Santana.
Or if not the Angels, then the Chicago White Sox, who have a glaring need for a shortstop and all sorts of excess power pitchers plus a prize third-base prospect in Josh Fields.
For the Yankees to have any chance of getting back to the World Series, they must address their starting pitching, which sabotaged Torre as much as his hitters against the Tigers. In that regard, their own Philip Hughes has the stuff to be a dominant starter but has been held back by Yankees minor league pitching coordinator Nardi Contreras, who had him on gradually receding pitch counts all summer, then shut him down at 146innings.
Scouts who saw Hughes at Trenton this summer agreed he's ready for the big leagues now and even Yankee officials on the major league level, Gene Michael for one, were dismayed that Hughes wasn't allowed to finish the season at Triple-A. Now, as one scout told me: "This kid is a stud, but what good is he going to do them if he's been programmed to pitch five innings? They're turning him into Jaret Wright."
Durable front-line starters are what the Yankees need to even get to next year's postseason.
Mussina, 37, and Johnson, 43, each a loser in his start against the Tigers, have run their course here. It was essentially the same for them a year ago when they came up small against the Angels, who bounced the Yankees out of the first round.
These are supposed to be your aces, folks. That's why George Steinbrenner is paying them the big bucks. And that's why whoever is the Yankee manager next year shouldn't have to be burdened with them.
Mussina, a free agent, won't be re-signed, and Johnson, who vowed a couple of months ago he wouldn't pitch the final year of his contract if he wasn't physically capable of meeting his high standards, ought to be taken up on that. The Yankees should encourage him to get that back surgery this winter, collect the insurance and wish him well.
Giambi, despite his 37 homers and 113RBI in the regular season, was a no-show - literally - when Torre needed him most against the Tigers. After going 1-for-8 over the first three games, he asked to get a cortisone shot for his shoulder, rendering him unavailable for the deciding Game 4.
That's why his comment, "I came ready to play and Joe wanted a different look in there," was so unbelievable. The fact is, Giambi is a defensive liability at first base and, as a DH, he is blocking Melky Cabrera from playing since that's where Matsui would be best suited. But good luck trying to move Giambi anywhere.
As for Sheffield, 1-for-12 with one RBI as a failed first baseman against the Tigers after a failed division series against the Angels, he has a $13 million option for '07, which he says he hopes the Yankees will not pick up. One would have to believe they won't be tempted.
In his three years in Tampa Bay, Piniella lamented the ownership's payroll constraints, but as Torre could tell him, big salaries don't necessarily translate into big-time postseason players.
Originally published on October 9, 2006
Sunday, October 08, 2006
Book Review: 'The Man Watching'
Concluding his remarks before a game against Villanova during the 2003 season, he said, "My thrill during our games is the understanding that every team that leaves the field against us knows they were beaten by a greater force. No, not a better team. They ran into a force. They found the center of our chest and it was hard and they couldn't knock us down. So when you're tackling out there today, I want you to throw your body at the girl with such a clattering of bones and gristle that she'll be worried about having a scar from her kneecap to her ankle. I want her wondering, 'If I finish this game, will I ever be able to wear a skirt again?'"
-From "The Man Watching" by Tim Crothers
The man who watches 'The Man Watching'
Tim Crothers produces 'the' book on Anson Dorrance
By Nicki Jhabvala, Correspondent
The Chapel Hill News
October 7, 2006
It was 1991. Tim Crothers was on assignment for Sports Illustrated to cover some 15-year-old golf prodigy trying to make it on the PGA tour.
"Standing in the parched fairway on the par-5, 18th hole at Los Serranos Country Club in Chino, Calif., last month," Crothers wrote, "Tiger Woods needed a birdie. So, of course, he wanted an eagle. That's Tiger."
Since Crothers, a UNC alumnus and former senior writer at Sports Illustrated, first noticed Woods, media everywhere have clamored for any chance to get at Tiger. Not only was Crothers to make Tiger's story national, but he did it in such detail that few have yet to match.
It was off-beat to cover a teen golf phenom, but that's Crothers' style. After Tiger, Crothers continued his string of new and even unusual stories, such as features on then-still-up-and-coming stars like Tim Duncan, and curiosities like Louis "Red" Klotz, the losingest coach in basketball.
But in 2001, Crothers started the biggest off-beat piece of his career.
Only this time, he sought out an already established, legitimate legend. One who had earned a dominant reputation far before most outside of his sport had ever heard his name. One who would allow Crothers to follow him around for five years to get the most in-depth story possible.
Crothers' book "The Man Watching" is University of North Carolina women's soccer coach Anson Dorrance, captured in his entirety in 352 pages.
"I met Anson when I went to school here in the early '80s," Crothers said. "He has such an interesting personality that he just kind of sticks with you. ... It was enough to put it in the back of my mind that someday it would be fun to find out what makes this guy tick."
The interest in seeking out Dorrance seems logical. Anyone who can produce a list of national, international, conference and individual records that is long enough for six straight pages of a media guide (a list printed in a point size so small it's barely visible to the naked eye) should be applauded. Coaching a team to 18 national titles, 16 ACC Conference Tournament Championships and a winning percentage of .944 is simply unheard of.
But Crothers' book is unlike any other documentary, in print or film, made about Dorrance and his dynastic program. And there have been more than a few.
See, Crothers didn't just "cover" Dorrance and the UNC soccer team. Nope. He practically followed their every movement and welcomed himself into their daily lives like the human stain.
Crothers got to go behind the scenes for more than just the standard 10 minutes allotted to post-game interviews. He got to know Dorrance and his players as people -- their likes, their dislikes, their mannerisms, their quirks.
Everything.
"Once I started working on it, it was like pulling a thread," Crothers said. "Once you started to pull, it was endless and you could always interview another player. Every time I talked to a player, she would say, 'Oh, well you should talk to so-and-so because she'll have some great stories for you.'"
Before Crothers knew it, he had interviewed 127 players. And those were just the Tar Heels. The number quickly escalated once he added players and coaches at other schools as well as Dorrance's family. The sources for the book total about 200.
"But, honestly, the real reason it took five years (to write) was because it was so freakin' fun," Crothers admitted. "When you've covered pro football, baseball and basketball as much as I did, you start to get jaded about sports and how everyone's just in it for the buck. What I found so refreshing about this, from day one, is that these women just love playing, and maybe more so, they just love hanging out with each other."
For his first six months on the project, Crothers could be found wandering Finley Field watching the team practice every afternoon. Since Dorrance has no qualms about showing off his players' skill or his unbeatable strategy on the field, anyone can watch, and Crothers was just another random face on the sidelines.
Crothers purposely waited until he felt he knew the players and coaches well enough before he hit them with the real, hard-core interviews. After closely observing the team to get a feel for the styles and personalities on the team, Crothers came out of hiding.
"He was just like a part of the team," said former UNC defender Kendall Fletcher. "We kind of accepted him. He was there and he just fit right in."
The games -- he sat on the bench.
The practices -- he was on the sidelines.
The pre-game meetings -- he sat in.
The bus trips to and from nearby games -- he sat in the front seat.
The team huddles -- he listened.
And every spare moment that he wasn't with Dorrance and the Tar Heels, he talked to former UNC players, other soccer coaches around the nation and Dorrance's family.
Fletcher went through her four years at UNC with Crothers along every step of the way. She and her teammates were aware of his presence, but they never made an issue of it. Nothing changed.
"For us, a lot of the stuff is just sheer comedy, and I think he captured a lot of that," Dorrance said. "Anytime someone associated with program reads it, they usually end up screaming in laughter because it reminds us of the stuff that goes on in around here."
But the comedy behind the scenes is only part of it.
Dorrance is a complex man. Crothers, although he was taken aback at times while with the Tar Heels, wanted to give the complete picture of Dorrance and his team -- the good and the bad.
An entire chapter is dedicated to Dorrance's "critics" and allegations against him. Life has not been a "never-ending ascension." The story is not sugar-coated. Dorrance's language is not censored.
The content is balanced; it's raw. But it's stocked to the brim with anecdotes.
Like the time current players Heather O'Reilly and Elizabeth Guess came to Dorrance for advice during their first Halloween in Chapel Hill. Or the time Mia Hamm came into Dorrance's office, a nervous wreck in anticipation of her initial goal-setting meeting with her coach, and he provided the motivation that has stuck with her since.
"Anson is one of the most candid people I have ever talked to, and so was everyone else I interviewed," Crothers said. "I'm not very good at cutting my work, and I'll be the first one to admit that this book could be a good 40 pages shorter. But I just couldn't bring myself to take any more out. I probably have two books this size of more anecdotes sitting on the cutting-room floor."
The details are abundant: Dorrance's posture on the sidelines; he has his players run sprints in a "Big V" as a reference to victory; he pronounces "victory" like VIC-tree; he uses trophies as doorstoppers; the way his leather office chair embodies his "Godfather" qualities.
The book hit stores this week and Crothers is scheduled to do a signing at the Bull's Head Bookshop on Oct. 24. Sports Illustrated columnist and author Rick Reilly has raved about it. Southern California football coach Pete Carroll loves it. But above all, Crothers' biggest critic couldn't be more pleased.
"It shares everything," Dorrance said. "Tim spent a lot of time with us. No one has ever studied us in this much depth. He's the only one who has done this."
Contact Nicki Jhabvala at 932-8743 or chnsports@nando.com.
Mike Lupica: No more excuses for Torre
[I don't know if I'm necessarily in favor of firing Mr. Torre...I have the utmost respect for him as a manager and a man. However, Mr. Lupica does present an impressive case for pulling the trigger. - jtf]
October 8, 2006
The New York Daily News
DETROIT - This is just as bad for the Yankees, losing these last three to the Tigers this way, not even competing in the last two, as losing four in a row to the Red Sox two years ago. These Yankees have now become the biggest postseason flops in the history of the team, maybe any team. This year George Steinbrenner went for a payroll of $213 million and gave Brian Cashman and Joe Torre the run of the place. Here is what that kind of money and that kind of restraint bought Steinbrenner: the most expensive glass jaw of all time, a team that gets knocked out cold in the first round again.
It is why the owner, 76 years old now, desperate to win at least one more World Series, has a perfect right to try it with some new people next season, starting with a new manager. They can't only be Torre's Yankees when they win.
This is now three times in five years, with a payroll three times the size of most playoff teams, that Joe Torre can't make it to the second round. Tell me another manager, no matter how well-respected, no matter how classy, who survives that? Steinbrenner can go hire Lou Piniella tomorrow if he wants to.
And George Steinbrenner ought to do everything he can to try and move Alex Rodriguez, who came here three seasons ago for easy World Series rings and hasn't even played a World Series. He was 2-for-15 against the Angels last season. He was 1-for-14 against the Tigers this time. If somebody will take him and give the Yankees young arms like the Tigers have in return, he goes. You know why Torre batted him eighth yesterday? Because he wasn't allowed to bat him 10th.
When Brian Cashman, the Yankee general manager, was asked yesterday if Torre and A-Rod will be back, outside a Yankee clubhouse as quiet as Yankee Stadium will be today and all through the baseball winter, quiet as an empty locker, he said, "Why wouldn't they?"
Cashman has a lot of power now. He won't make the call on who will manage the Yankees next season. The owner will. If the owner has seen enough since the Yankees beat the Mets to win the 2000 Series, no one can fault him. It has been a long time, more than a decade, since he fired a manager. If he isn't allowed to do it now, then when?
Oh, you bet he has the right to make a change. He has paid through the nose for that right.
Torre has been the best and classiest manager the Yankees have ever had. He has four World Series rings and is going to the Hall of Fame. He has also had more money spent on him, been given more Hall of Fame players and All-Stars, than any manager ever. When he does make it out of the first round now, his team loses four straight to the Red Sox after leading 3-0. Three years ago, his Yankees couldn't beat the Marlins, a team with a payroll of $50 million - tipping money at Yankee Stadium - in the World Series.
For a long time, Torre has been given everything and produced nothing in October, where Yankee managers are measured the same as players like A-Rod are.
"I think I'm part of the solution here," Rodriguez said in the visitors' clubhouse as Randy Johnson walked past him, pulling his carry-on bag. Two years now for Johnson with the Yankees. No postseason victories. They paid $57 million to get Johnson. They picked up A-Rod's contract even if they didn't have to pick up all of it. How has that worked out for everybody so far?
A-Rod thinks he's part of the solution? He's the only one in town right now. A Met town.
It was not just A-Rod. It was all of the Steinbrenner's All-Stars, the Greatest (Regular Season) Show on Earth. Mike Mussina, who thinks he merits another huge contract, could not hold the 3-1 lead in Game 2 the way he could not hold a big lead against the Angels four years ago, in another first-round collapse. From there, the Yankees were outscored 17-1 by the Detroit Tigers before Jorge Posada, who is a truly great Yankee still, hit a meaningless 2-run homer with two out in the 9th yesterday.
The final - so final - was 8-3 for the Tigers. It was 10-3 for the Red Sox in Game 7 of the American League Championship Series of '04. For all these years, when the Yankees go down in the postseason, go down hard, they stay down. It happened yesterday in Comerica Park. Three years running now, this is the most expensive flop in baseball history and sports history. Maybe this is the time to try it without All-Stars at every position on the field.
"For the first time under Joe," one Yankee said yesterday, "I felt like we didn't compete [in Game 3]."
You can talk about the way the Tigers pitched and talk about the way they jumped on the Yankees in both of the last two games. The Yankees, praised far and wide for their patience, finally looked like a bunch of scared, lunging minor-leaguers. If some of this doesn't land at the desk of the manager, when does it?
"I still think we're the best team," Johnny Damon said. "Sometimes the best team doesn't win."
You can say the Red Sox loss in '04 was worse, because the Yankees lost four straight, because no baseball team had ever done that, because it was the Red Sox. This one was just as bad.
Tiger relief pitchers ruined them, Kenny Rogers ruined them, Jeremy Bonderman looked like he might no-hit them yesterday. The best batting order since the '27 Yankees had nothing. They were supposed to make history. Instead they turn New York over to the Mets, and maybe get their manager fired. They can't only be Torre's Yankees when they win.
October 8, 2006
The New York Daily News
DETROIT - This is just as bad for the Yankees, losing these last three to the Tigers this way, not even competing in the last two, as losing four in a row to the Red Sox two years ago. These Yankees have now become the biggest postseason flops in the history of the team, maybe any team. This year George Steinbrenner went for a payroll of $213 million and gave Brian Cashman and Joe Torre the run of the place. Here is what that kind of money and that kind of restraint bought Steinbrenner: the most expensive glass jaw of all time, a team that gets knocked out cold in the first round again.
It is why the owner, 76 years old now, desperate to win at least one more World Series, has a perfect right to try it with some new people next season, starting with a new manager. They can't only be Torre's Yankees when they win.
This is now three times in five years, with a payroll three times the size of most playoff teams, that Joe Torre can't make it to the second round. Tell me another manager, no matter how well-respected, no matter how classy, who survives that? Steinbrenner can go hire Lou Piniella tomorrow if he wants to.
And George Steinbrenner ought to do everything he can to try and move Alex Rodriguez, who came here three seasons ago for easy World Series rings and hasn't even played a World Series. He was 2-for-15 against the Angels last season. He was 1-for-14 against the Tigers this time. If somebody will take him and give the Yankees young arms like the Tigers have in return, he goes. You know why Torre batted him eighth yesterday? Because he wasn't allowed to bat him 10th.
When Brian Cashman, the Yankee general manager, was asked yesterday if Torre and A-Rod will be back, outside a Yankee clubhouse as quiet as Yankee Stadium will be today and all through the baseball winter, quiet as an empty locker, he said, "Why wouldn't they?"
Cashman has a lot of power now. He won't make the call on who will manage the Yankees next season. The owner will. If the owner has seen enough since the Yankees beat the Mets to win the 2000 Series, no one can fault him. It has been a long time, more than a decade, since he fired a manager. If he isn't allowed to do it now, then when?
Oh, you bet he has the right to make a change. He has paid through the nose for that right.
Torre has been the best and classiest manager the Yankees have ever had. He has four World Series rings and is going to the Hall of Fame. He has also had more money spent on him, been given more Hall of Fame players and All-Stars, than any manager ever. When he does make it out of the first round now, his team loses four straight to the Red Sox after leading 3-0. Three years ago, his Yankees couldn't beat the Marlins, a team with a payroll of $50 million - tipping money at Yankee Stadium - in the World Series.
For a long time, Torre has been given everything and produced nothing in October, where Yankee managers are measured the same as players like A-Rod are.
"I think I'm part of the solution here," Rodriguez said in the visitors' clubhouse as Randy Johnson walked past him, pulling his carry-on bag. Two years now for Johnson with the Yankees. No postseason victories. They paid $57 million to get Johnson. They picked up A-Rod's contract even if they didn't have to pick up all of it. How has that worked out for everybody so far?
A-Rod thinks he's part of the solution? He's the only one in town right now. A Met town.
It was not just A-Rod. It was all of the Steinbrenner's All-Stars, the Greatest (Regular Season) Show on Earth. Mike Mussina, who thinks he merits another huge contract, could not hold the 3-1 lead in Game 2 the way he could not hold a big lead against the Angels four years ago, in another first-round collapse. From there, the Yankees were outscored 17-1 by the Detroit Tigers before Jorge Posada, who is a truly great Yankee still, hit a meaningless 2-run homer with two out in the 9th yesterday.
The final - so final - was 8-3 for the Tigers. It was 10-3 for the Red Sox in Game 7 of the American League Championship Series of '04. For all these years, when the Yankees go down in the postseason, go down hard, they stay down. It happened yesterday in Comerica Park. Three years running now, this is the most expensive flop in baseball history and sports history. Maybe this is the time to try it without All-Stars at every position on the field.
"For the first time under Joe," one Yankee said yesterday, "I felt like we didn't compete [in Game 3]."
You can talk about the way the Tigers pitched and talk about the way they jumped on the Yankees in both of the last two games. The Yankees, praised far and wide for their patience, finally looked like a bunch of scared, lunging minor-leaguers. If some of this doesn't land at the desk of the manager, when does it?
"I still think we're the best team," Johnny Damon said. "Sometimes the best team doesn't win."
You can say the Red Sox loss in '04 was worse, because the Yankees lost four straight, because no baseball team had ever done that, because it was the Red Sox. This one was just as bad.
Tiger relief pitchers ruined them, Kenny Rogers ruined them, Jeremy Bonderman looked like he might no-hit them yesterday. The best batting order since the '27 Yankees had nothing. They were supposed to make history. Instead they turn New York over to the Mets, and maybe get their manager fired. They can't only be Torre's Yankees when they win.
Adrian Wojnarowski: Time has come to run A-Rod out of town
In the words of Tony Soprano, "Whatever happened to Gary Cooper?"...The quintessential western hero, Cooper's marshal displayed a laconic stoicism in "High Noon" that has lingered in the consciousness of the American male for decades. Will Kane was a tight-lipped, grim-faced warrior who only privately considered the odds against him when preparing for his end-of-film showdown with Frank Miller and his gang.
Derek Jeter is the baseball equivalent of Kane...Alex Rodriguez is the baseball equivalent of Oprah Winfrey. I feel for A-Rod but I'm sick of hearing his bogus stiff-upper-lip equivocations...and comparing himself to the over-rated John Elway just happens to be the last nail in the coffin for me. The Yankees pitching staff is not at all representative of a team with a payroll of $200 million...in fact, it's a joke...but A-Rod's act has become tiresome and his departure would be welcome. Gary Cooper is alive and well and playing shortstop for the Yankees...he needs some teammates with similar grit and determination. - jtf]
October 8, 2006
BERGEN COUNTY RECORD
DETROIT -- Where am I going to do this, were the words Alex Rodriguez mumbled to himself as he walked into the middle of the visiting clubhouse, searching for an open space to give his State of A-Rod Address. In his meticulous, polished way, he had clearly been preparing his concession speech standing out at third base, the loneliest Yankee knowing that the summer and autumn of his unrest threaten to turn into the winter of his New York demise.
The Yankees' collapse was colossal, complete, but Rodriguez knew where the blame goes now, where getting dropped to sixth in the order, and then eighth, and hitting .071 for the American League Division Series gets him: On a rail, getting run out of town. Twenty innings across three games without a run for a lineup that people were calling the best ever, punctuated with a humiliating 8-3 loss to the Tigers on Saturday, didn't sit solitarily on A-Rod's shoulders, but he was the face of the collapse.
In three out of five years now, the American League East champions didn't get out of the division series. Joe Torre should survive this disaster, but he should return with an ultimatum next season of October success or bust. The bottom line: Torre stays, A-Rod goes.
The sheer fact that he takes up too much of the air, suffocating this franchise, himself, with the grandness of his burden, the monumental nature of his frailties, his insecurities, is enough reason for the Yankees to find a trade for him this winter. Even if A-Rod ever produces again in October, it is no longer worth the soap opera that comes with him getting there. He flattered himself, insisting that he finds "inspiration" in the championship chase of John Elway.
"My commitment is 100 percent unconditional," Rodriguez said. "I want to be a Yankee. I don't want to go anywhere else. I hope they don't want to trade me because I don't want to go anywhere.
"I've never ran from problems."
Well, he did run out of Texas, taking the $252 million and discarding last place. Nevertheless, he would repeat his Yankees devotional over and over, but it was hard to tell where the sincerity started and the strategic spin ended. With A-Rod, you always wonder the agenda, the angle.
After all, if he thinks the Yankees want to trade him -- and you'd better believe that his agent, Scott Boras, would have a pulse on it -- Rodriguez can make the case that he is categorically against it.
This way, no one can ever say that A-Rod wanted out because he believed he couldn't process the pressure in his tortured mind. This way, no one could ever call him a quitter. Still, here's the bottom line: A-Rod has a no-trade clause.
The Yankees can't send him anywhere.
This ends the discussion, right?
"If they're dying to get rid of me," A-Rod said, leaving open the possibility that he would agree to a trade. What he was suggesting was that, well, if they're dying to get rid of me, I guess I wouldn't stay where I'm unwanted. There's his out. A-Rod could've insisted that he would never, ever waive his no-trade, but he didn't.
He didn't need to finish his thought. If they're dying to get rid of me, well, you know the rest. A-Rod will go along with it. This is how A-Rod saves face on going hitless in his last 12 playoff at-bats to the Tigers, going 4-for-41 (.098) without an RBI in his last dozen postseason games. He was so unnerved on Saturday, he would boot a two-out grounder, compounding it with a bad throw to first base, an error that would lead to a 4-0 deficit in the third inning.
A-Rod was endemic of a complete Yankees collapse, but he wasn't alone. If people want to fire Torre and replace him with the best manager out of work, Lou Piniella, consider the consequences: The Yankees would be replacing Derek Jeter's guy with A-Rod's guy and it would isolate the captain, promising to polarize the clubhouse.
And make no mistake: Torre has no use for A-Rod. In a most emasculating move on Saturday, the manager dropped A-Rod to eighth in the order. In some ways, it almost looked like a preemptive way for Torre to shift blame away from himself, and thrust it on the lightning rod.
"I've got no one to blame but myself," Rodriguez said. "You've got to look in the mirror and address that. Obviously, I've got to find the success in the postseason. There's a lot to be learned from guys like [Derek] Jeter, [Jorge] Posada and Bernie [Williams] -- the guys who have done it. It seems like they play so relaxed."
Unlike A-Rod, who is a jittery mess. Torre has had it with that, and knows that A-Rod has the potential to pollute his program. Clearly, Torre has picked his spots to embellish his slights of A-Rod. Before Game 1, the manager dropped him to sixth in the batting order. Before Game 3, Torre suggested that A-Rod's mouth invites the trouble that comes his way. And before Game 4, Torre totally emasculated Rodriguez, dropping him to eighth in the order.
If the Yankees had managed to force a Game 5, A-Rod would've been brewing his boss' green tea.
Rodriguez is exhausting this franchise. And he's exhausting himself. If A-Rod comes back next year, the Yankees are inviting this never-ending soap opera to gather steam to the point where it won't just suffocate A-Rod, but the clubhouse. Rodriguez was busy patting himself on the back for persevering the "toughest season of my career," where he says he had to "endure some unbelievable things."
If Jeter was listening, he would've wanted to punch A-Rod in the mouth. More than he ordinarily does, anyway. The Yankees had lost, been embarrassed, and somehow A-Rod had made it all about A-Rod. He's proud he's still standing? That's the kind of self-congratulatory garbage that makes them loathe Rodriguez.
So, the Yankees' season imploded at Comerica Park, the reputed greatest hitting lineup in history turning out to be a bigger October bust than the $252 million man who nearly dropped out of the bottom of it by the ALDS' end. Alex Rodriguez wants to stay a Yankee, he says. He could've ended the discussion by insisting that he would never, ever waive his no-trade clause.
A-Rod wouldn't do it.
He played his final game as a Yankee on Saturday, and no one -- no one anywhere -- deep down was more relieved than him.
E-mail: wojnarowski@northjersey.com
Derek Jeter is the baseball equivalent of Kane...Alex Rodriguez is the baseball equivalent of Oprah Winfrey. I feel for A-Rod but I'm sick of hearing his bogus stiff-upper-lip equivocations...and comparing himself to the over-rated John Elway just happens to be the last nail in the coffin for me. The Yankees pitching staff is not at all representative of a team with a payroll of $200 million...in fact, it's a joke...but A-Rod's act has become tiresome and his departure would be welcome. Gary Cooper is alive and well and playing shortstop for the Yankees...he needs some teammates with similar grit and determination. - jtf]
October 8, 2006
BERGEN COUNTY RECORD
DETROIT -- Where am I going to do this, were the words Alex Rodriguez mumbled to himself as he walked into the middle of the visiting clubhouse, searching for an open space to give his State of A-Rod Address. In his meticulous, polished way, he had clearly been preparing his concession speech standing out at third base, the loneliest Yankee knowing that the summer and autumn of his unrest threaten to turn into the winter of his New York demise.
The Yankees' collapse was colossal, complete, but Rodriguez knew where the blame goes now, where getting dropped to sixth in the order, and then eighth, and hitting .071 for the American League Division Series gets him: On a rail, getting run out of town. Twenty innings across three games without a run for a lineup that people were calling the best ever, punctuated with a humiliating 8-3 loss to the Tigers on Saturday, didn't sit solitarily on A-Rod's shoulders, but he was the face of the collapse.
In three out of five years now, the American League East champions didn't get out of the division series. Joe Torre should survive this disaster, but he should return with an ultimatum next season of October success or bust. The bottom line: Torre stays, A-Rod goes.
The sheer fact that he takes up too much of the air, suffocating this franchise, himself, with the grandness of his burden, the monumental nature of his frailties, his insecurities, is enough reason for the Yankees to find a trade for him this winter. Even if A-Rod ever produces again in October, it is no longer worth the soap opera that comes with him getting there. He flattered himself, insisting that he finds "inspiration" in the championship chase of John Elway.
"My commitment is 100 percent unconditional," Rodriguez said. "I want to be a Yankee. I don't want to go anywhere else. I hope they don't want to trade me because I don't want to go anywhere.
"I've never ran from problems."
Well, he did run out of Texas, taking the $252 million and discarding last place. Nevertheless, he would repeat his Yankees devotional over and over, but it was hard to tell where the sincerity started and the strategic spin ended. With A-Rod, you always wonder the agenda, the angle.
After all, if he thinks the Yankees want to trade him -- and you'd better believe that his agent, Scott Boras, would have a pulse on it -- Rodriguez can make the case that he is categorically against it.
This way, no one can ever say that A-Rod wanted out because he believed he couldn't process the pressure in his tortured mind. This way, no one could ever call him a quitter. Still, here's the bottom line: A-Rod has a no-trade clause.
The Yankees can't send him anywhere.
This ends the discussion, right?
"If they're dying to get rid of me," A-Rod said, leaving open the possibility that he would agree to a trade. What he was suggesting was that, well, if they're dying to get rid of me, I guess I wouldn't stay where I'm unwanted. There's his out. A-Rod could've insisted that he would never, ever waive his no-trade, but he didn't.
He didn't need to finish his thought. If they're dying to get rid of me, well, you know the rest. A-Rod will go along with it. This is how A-Rod saves face on going hitless in his last 12 playoff at-bats to the Tigers, going 4-for-41 (.098) without an RBI in his last dozen postseason games. He was so unnerved on Saturday, he would boot a two-out grounder, compounding it with a bad throw to first base, an error that would lead to a 4-0 deficit in the third inning.
A-Rod was endemic of a complete Yankees collapse, but he wasn't alone. If people want to fire Torre and replace him with the best manager out of work, Lou Piniella, consider the consequences: The Yankees would be replacing Derek Jeter's guy with A-Rod's guy and it would isolate the captain, promising to polarize the clubhouse.
And make no mistake: Torre has no use for A-Rod. In a most emasculating move on Saturday, the manager dropped A-Rod to eighth in the order. In some ways, it almost looked like a preemptive way for Torre to shift blame away from himself, and thrust it on the lightning rod.
"I've got no one to blame but myself," Rodriguez said. "You've got to look in the mirror and address that. Obviously, I've got to find the success in the postseason. There's a lot to be learned from guys like [Derek] Jeter, [Jorge] Posada and Bernie [Williams] -- the guys who have done it. It seems like they play so relaxed."
Unlike A-Rod, who is a jittery mess. Torre has had it with that, and knows that A-Rod has the potential to pollute his program. Clearly, Torre has picked his spots to embellish his slights of A-Rod. Before Game 1, the manager dropped him to sixth in the batting order. Before Game 3, Torre suggested that A-Rod's mouth invites the trouble that comes his way. And before Game 4, Torre totally emasculated Rodriguez, dropping him to eighth in the order.
If the Yankees had managed to force a Game 5, A-Rod would've been brewing his boss' green tea.
Rodriguez is exhausting this franchise. And he's exhausting himself. If A-Rod comes back next year, the Yankees are inviting this never-ending soap opera to gather steam to the point where it won't just suffocate A-Rod, but the clubhouse. Rodriguez was busy patting himself on the back for persevering the "toughest season of my career," where he says he had to "endure some unbelievable things."
If Jeter was listening, he would've wanted to punch A-Rod in the mouth. More than he ordinarily does, anyway. The Yankees had lost, been embarrassed, and somehow A-Rod had made it all about A-Rod. He's proud he's still standing? That's the kind of self-congratulatory garbage that makes them loathe Rodriguez.
So, the Yankees' season imploded at Comerica Park, the reputed greatest hitting lineup in history turning out to be a bigger October bust than the $252 million man who nearly dropped out of the bottom of it by the ALDS' end. Alex Rodriguez wants to stay a Yankee, he says. He could've ended the discussion by insisting that he would never, ever waive his no-trade clause.
A-Rod wouldn't do it.
He played his final game as a Yankee on Saturday, and no one -- no one anywhere -- deep down was more relieved than him.
E-mail: wojnarowski@northjersey.com
Bill Madden: It will be deja Lou all over again in the Bronx
[The Yankees pitching was certainly not up to snuff...not the starting rotation...not the bullpen. Wang and Rivera are the only two pitchers who did their job consistently all year. That being said, how in the hell can the 'greatest lineup ever assembled' get outscored 22-7 during the last three games of the series? - jtf]
The New York Daily News
October 8, 2006
DETROIT - You can make the case that they didn't have enough pitching to get back to the World Series and a parade up the Canyon of Heroes, but I can assure you, George Steinbrenner doesn't want to hear it.
He may walk a little slower, talk in shorter sentences and seem somewhat detached from the operation he used to rule with an iron hand from the Stadium's boardroom to the bathrooms. But that does not mean there won't be repercussions from The Boss in the face of yet another humiliating early playoff exit by the $200 million Yankees.
Believe it. This time, faster than you can say "Goodbye, Joe. Welcome back, Lou," there will be. Steinbrenner doesn't want to hear about the pitching because in his mind he gave Joe Torre everything a manager could ask for, then had to watch as this modern-day "Murderer's Row" of superstar hitters visited Kenny Rogers' neighborhood Friday night and put on a performance as tepid as the real Mr. Rogers. They topped that by not even showing up yesterday as they skulked out of the playoffs.
Nowhere in sight was the plucky, energetic, opportunistic team that ran roughshod over the Red Sox those five games in August and took command of the AL East. And don't think that Steinbrenner wasn't hearing it from his Tampa player development kitchen cabinet: "Where the hell is Melky Cabrera?"
If nothing else, Torre's unabated loyalty to his veterans led to his - and his team's - undoing.
Everybody knew moving Gary Sheffield to first base was a gamble and that rushing him back into the lineup based on past performance would tamper with the Yanks' chemistry. Even Torre acknowledged that adding Sheffield and Alex Rodriguez to the mix these past couple of years made the Bombers too home-run conscious, with everyone trying to win the game with one swing of the bat. They fizzled those last four games against the Red Sox in the '04 ALCS and against the Angels in last year's division series, and it was the same story this time around: Twenty consecutive innings without a run.
The lack of passion shown by the Yankees was in stark contrast to that of Jimmy Leyland's scrappy underdog Tigers, and that as much as anything is a reflection on Torre, who was given a pass by Steinbrenner after the historic '04 collapse against the Red Sox and the early exit at the hands of the Angels last year. There will be no such pass after this one: Steinbrenner, who has always been a devotee of fiery managers, will undo his admitted biggest mistake as Yankee owner and bring back Piniella, his Tampa neighbor whom he fired twice in the 1980s.
Steinbrenner was never enamored with Torre's laid-back style. But save for those occasional subtle "it's up to Joe . . . it's Joe's team" swipes, he pledged his allegiance to Torre because of all the championships Torre won for him.
Now, the titles have stopped coming, even though Steinbrennner has pumped more and more money into the team, to the point where the bloated payroll is twice as large as any other team's in baseball. He does this because, at age 76, the Yankees are his lifeblood. So, yes, Steinbrenner is upset. He's upset his players have been underperforming for the money he's paying them. He's upset because outwardly his players don't seem to care nearly as much as he does.
In deference to Torre's four World Series trophies, Steinbrenner obliged Torre when the manager told him in their Tampa summit last November that he had to butt out and stop the jibes. In a series of meetings with the fractured Yankee front office last fall, Steinbrenner extended unprecedented power to both Torre and GM Brian Cashman. Ordinarily when things go badly in Yankeeland, no one escapes Steinbrenner's blame. But other than the $17 million spent on Kyle Farnsworth, Cashman's acquisitions - Bobby Abreu and Cory Lidle from the high-end shelf and Brian Bruney and Aaron Guiel from the bargain-basement counter - were important contributors toward winning the AL East.
Even though Steinbrenner lived up to his pledge of silence and support, it was "on Torre" this year.
Torre wanted no interference, no second-guessing or behind-the-scenes sniping from Steinbrenner or any of his minions, and that's what he got. Total support, but it came with a price - winning it all.
Steinbrenner has stayed away, stayed quiet while giving Torre all the resources to make that happen. At Steinbrenner's age, he doesn't want to hear "you can't win every year," and now that his favorite son, Piniella, is out there, a free agent, his managerial batteries recharged, what's another $7 million in severance for Torre going to matter to him on top of another wasted $200 million?
The New York Daily News
October 8, 2006
DETROIT - You can make the case that they didn't have enough pitching to get back to the World Series and a parade up the Canyon of Heroes, but I can assure you, George Steinbrenner doesn't want to hear it.
He may walk a little slower, talk in shorter sentences and seem somewhat detached from the operation he used to rule with an iron hand from the Stadium's boardroom to the bathrooms. But that does not mean there won't be repercussions from The Boss in the face of yet another humiliating early playoff exit by the $200 million Yankees.
Believe it. This time, faster than you can say "Goodbye, Joe. Welcome back, Lou," there will be. Steinbrenner doesn't want to hear about the pitching because in his mind he gave Joe Torre everything a manager could ask for, then had to watch as this modern-day "Murderer's Row" of superstar hitters visited Kenny Rogers' neighborhood Friday night and put on a performance as tepid as the real Mr. Rogers. They topped that by not even showing up yesterday as they skulked out of the playoffs.
Nowhere in sight was the plucky, energetic, opportunistic team that ran roughshod over the Red Sox those five games in August and took command of the AL East. And don't think that Steinbrenner wasn't hearing it from his Tampa player development kitchen cabinet: "Where the hell is Melky Cabrera?"
If nothing else, Torre's unabated loyalty to his veterans led to his - and his team's - undoing.
Everybody knew moving Gary Sheffield to first base was a gamble and that rushing him back into the lineup based on past performance would tamper with the Yanks' chemistry. Even Torre acknowledged that adding Sheffield and Alex Rodriguez to the mix these past couple of years made the Bombers too home-run conscious, with everyone trying to win the game with one swing of the bat. They fizzled those last four games against the Red Sox in the '04 ALCS and against the Angels in last year's division series, and it was the same story this time around: Twenty consecutive innings without a run.
The lack of passion shown by the Yankees was in stark contrast to that of Jimmy Leyland's scrappy underdog Tigers, and that as much as anything is a reflection on Torre, who was given a pass by Steinbrenner after the historic '04 collapse against the Red Sox and the early exit at the hands of the Angels last year. There will be no such pass after this one: Steinbrenner, who has always been a devotee of fiery managers, will undo his admitted biggest mistake as Yankee owner and bring back Piniella, his Tampa neighbor whom he fired twice in the 1980s.
Steinbrenner was never enamored with Torre's laid-back style. But save for those occasional subtle "it's up to Joe . . . it's Joe's team" swipes, he pledged his allegiance to Torre because of all the championships Torre won for him.
Now, the titles have stopped coming, even though Steinbrennner has pumped more and more money into the team, to the point where the bloated payroll is twice as large as any other team's in baseball. He does this because, at age 76, the Yankees are his lifeblood. So, yes, Steinbrenner is upset. He's upset his players have been underperforming for the money he's paying them. He's upset because outwardly his players don't seem to care nearly as much as he does.
In deference to Torre's four World Series trophies, Steinbrenner obliged Torre when the manager told him in their Tampa summit last November that he had to butt out and stop the jibes. In a series of meetings with the fractured Yankee front office last fall, Steinbrenner extended unprecedented power to both Torre and GM Brian Cashman. Ordinarily when things go badly in Yankeeland, no one escapes Steinbrenner's blame. But other than the $17 million spent on Kyle Farnsworth, Cashman's acquisitions - Bobby Abreu and Cory Lidle from the high-end shelf and Brian Bruney and Aaron Guiel from the bargain-basement counter - were important contributors toward winning the AL East.
Even though Steinbrenner lived up to his pledge of silence and support, it was "on Torre" this year.
Torre wanted no interference, no second-guessing or behind-the-scenes sniping from Steinbrenner or any of his minions, and that's what he got. Total support, but it came with a price - winning it all.
Steinbrenner has stayed away, stayed quiet while giving Torre all the resources to make that happen. At Steinbrenner's age, he doesn't want to hear "you can't win every year," and now that his favorite son, Piniella, is out there, a free agent, his managerial batteries recharged, what's another $7 million in severance for Torre going to matter to him on top of another wasted $200 million?
Jeff Jacoby: Undeserved Forgiveness
Boston Globe
October 8, 2006
"THERE WAS not one desk, not one chair, in the whole schoolroom that was not splattered with either blood or glass. There were bullet holes everywhere -- everywhere."
That description is from Janice Ballenger, a deputy coroner in Lancaster County, Pa. She was among the first to enter the West Nickel Mines Amish School after Charles Roberts murdered five girls and severely wounded five others there last week. One of the bodies she examined was that of Naomi Rose Ebersol , a 7-year-old who had been shot 20 times.
How do civilized human beings react to such an atrocity? With horror? Anger? Hatred?
Not the Amish.
Asked by a reporter if the community was angry about the killings, one Amish grandmother, Lizzie Fisher, was adamant. "Oh, no, no, definitely not," she said. "People don't feel that around here. We just don't."
Roberts planned his attack meticulously, making a list of supplies he would need, then gradually buying them over a six-day period. It makes the skin crawl just to read the inventory: nails, bolts, wrenches, bullets, guns, earplugs, wooden planks, rope. Roberts brought plastic ties to bind his victims' feet, chains and clamps for restraint, and tubes of K-Y Jelly, a sexual lubricant. Apparently he "planned to dig in for the long siege," a Pennsylvania State Police colonel surmised, and "intended to victimize these children in many ways prior to executing them."
Confronted with such premeditated malevolence, what decent person wouldn't seethe with fury and revulsion? What parent or grandparent wouldn't regard such a massacre as not only unspeakable, but well nigh unforgivable?
The Amish wouldn't.
"I don't think there's anybody here that wants to do anything but forgive," one Lancaster County resident was quoted as saying. "We don't need to think about judgment; we need to think about forgiveness and going on." Many townspeople announced their forgiveness of Roberts directly to his wife and children .
On CNN, a local pastor recounted how the grandfather of Marian Fisher, one of the murdered girls, told younger relatives not to hate Roberts for killing her.
"As we were standing next to the body of this 13-year-old girl, the grandfather was tutoring the young boys, he was . . . saying to the family, 'We must not think evil of this man,' " said the Rev. Robert Schenck. "It was one of the most touching things I have seen in 25 years of Christian ministry."
I can't deny that it is deeply affecting to see how seriously the Amish strive to heed Jesus' admonition to return good for evil and turn the other cheek. For many Christians, the Amish determination to forgive their daughters' murder is awe-inspiring. In his Beliefnet blog, the eloquent Rod Dreher marvels at CNN's story of the Amish grandfather. "Could you do that?" he writes. "Could you stand over the body of a dead child and tell the young not to hate her killer? I could not. Please, God, make me into the sort of man who could."
But hatred is not always wrong, and forgiveness is not always deserved. I admire the Amish villagers' resolve to live up to their Christian ideals even amid heartbreak, but how many of us would really want to live in a society in which no one gets angry when children are slaughtered? In which even the most horrific acts of cruelty were always and instantly forgiven? There is a time to love and a time to hate, Ecclesiastes teaches. If anything deserves to be hated, surely it is the pitiless murder of innocents.
To voluntarily forgive those who have hurt you is beautiful and praiseworthy. That is what Jesus did on the cross, what Christians do when they say the Lord's Prayer, what observant Jews do when they recite the bedtime Kriat Sh'ma. But to forgive those who have hurt -- who have murdered -- someone else? I cannot see how the world is made a better place by assuring someone who would do terrible things to others that he will be readily forgiven afterward, even if he shows no remorse.
There are indications that the killer in this case may have been in the grip of depression or delusion . Perhaps it was madness more than evil that drove him to commit this horror, in which case forgiveness might be more understandable.
But the Amish make it clear that their reaction would be the same either way. I wish them well, but I would not want to be like them, reacting to terrible crimes with dispassion and absolution. "Let those who love the Lord hate evil," the Psalmist writes. The murder of the Amish girls was a deeply hateful evil. There is nothing godly about pretending it wasn't.
Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.
© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.
October 8, 2006
"THERE WAS not one desk, not one chair, in the whole schoolroom that was not splattered with either blood or glass. There were bullet holes everywhere -- everywhere."
That description is from Janice Ballenger, a deputy coroner in Lancaster County, Pa. She was among the first to enter the West Nickel Mines Amish School after Charles Roberts murdered five girls and severely wounded five others there last week. One of the bodies she examined was that of Naomi Rose Ebersol , a 7-year-old who had been shot 20 times.
How do civilized human beings react to such an atrocity? With horror? Anger? Hatred?
Not the Amish.
Asked by a reporter if the community was angry about the killings, one Amish grandmother, Lizzie Fisher, was adamant. "Oh, no, no, definitely not," she said. "People don't feel that around here. We just don't."
Roberts planned his attack meticulously, making a list of supplies he would need, then gradually buying them over a six-day period. It makes the skin crawl just to read the inventory: nails, bolts, wrenches, bullets, guns, earplugs, wooden planks, rope. Roberts brought plastic ties to bind his victims' feet, chains and clamps for restraint, and tubes of K-Y Jelly, a sexual lubricant. Apparently he "planned to dig in for the long siege," a Pennsylvania State Police colonel surmised, and "intended to victimize these children in many ways prior to executing them."
Confronted with such premeditated malevolence, what decent person wouldn't seethe with fury and revulsion? What parent or grandparent wouldn't regard such a massacre as not only unspeakable, but well nigh unforgivable?
The Amish wouldn't.
"I don't think there's anybody here that wants to do anything but forgive," one Lancaster County resident was quoted as saying. "We don't need to think about judgment; we need to think about forgiveness and going on." Many townspeople announced their forgiveness of Roberts directly to his wife and children .
On CNN, a local pastor recounted how the grandfather of Marian Fisher, one of the murdered girls, told younger relatives not to hate Roberts for killing her.
"As we were standing next to the body of this 13-year-old girl, the grandfather was tutoring the young boys, he was . . . saying to the family, 'We must not think evil of this man,' " said the Rev. Robert Schenck. "It was one of the most touching things I have seen in 25 years of Christian ministry."
I can't deny that it is deeply affecting to see how seriously the Amish strive to heed Jesus' admonition to return good for evil and turn the other cheek. For many Christians, the Amish determination to forgive their daughters' murder is awe-inspiring. In his Beliefnet blog, the eloquent Rod Dreher marvels at CNN's story of the Amish grandfather. "Could you do that?" he writes. "Could you stand over the body of a dead child and tell the young not to hate her killer? I could not. Please, God, make me into the sort of man who could."
But hatred is not always wrong, and forgiveness is not always deserved. I admire the Amish villagers' resolve to live up to their Christian ideals even amid heartbreak, but how many of us would really want to live in a society in which no one gets angry when children are slaughtered? In which even the most horrific acts of cruelty were always and instantly forgiven? There is a time to love and a time to hate, Ecclesiastes teaches. If anything deserves to be hated, surely it is the pitiless murder of innocents.
To voluntarily forgive those who have hurt you is beautiful and praiseworthy. That is what Jesus did on the cross, what Christians do when they say the Lord's Prayer, what observant Jews do when they recite the bedtime Kriat Sh'ma. But to forgive those who have hurt -- who have murdered -- someone else? I cannot see how the world is made a better place by assuring someone who would do terrible things to others that he will be readily forgiven afterward, even if he shows no remorse.
There are indications that the killer in this case may have been in the grip of depression or delusion . Perhaps it was madness more than evil that drove him to commit this horror, in which case forgiveness might be more understandable.
But the Amish make it clear that their reaction would be the same either way. I wish them well, but I would not want to be like them, reacting to terrible crimes with dispassion and absolution. "Let those who love the Lord hate evil," the Psalmist writes. The murder of the Amish girls was a deeply hateful evil. There is nothing godly about pretending it wasn't.
Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.
© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.
Mark Steyn: Page Scandal Makes America Look Silly
October 8, 2006
Chicago Sun-Times
I'm a foreigner, so I might not be up to speed on how things work around here. But, insofar as I understand it after the last week, American politics is divided between: teenage pages; guys who are hot for teenage pages; guys who are enablers for guys who are hot for teenage pages; guys who devote inordinate time and effort to entrapping guys who are hot for teenage pages; guys who are rattled by guys accusing them of having devoted insufficient time and effort to nailing the guys who are hot for teenage pages and get panicked into holding press conferences where they announce the following:
"As the speaker I take responsibility for everything in the building. The buck stops here. ... That is why I directed the clerk of the House to establish a hotline for reporting any information concerning pages or the page program. As of this morning, the clerk of the House has activated the tip-line. . . . The page program tip line is 866-348-0481."
(If the clerk's not there, you can have him paged.)
J. Dennis Hastert actually stood up in public and made that announcement. And, of course, the Democrats immediately denounced the notorious Gay Pedophile Ringleader of the House for the pitiful inadequacy of his page tip-line: Oh, sure, now he wants to set up 1-800-GAY-PAGE and invite anyone with info to use the secure log-in at www.GOPpredators.com, but where was he when the buck stopped here en route to the end-of-legislative-session communal showers?
Speaker Hastert called in the FBI, the CIA, the DEA and announced an emergency bill to rename the BATF the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Pages. He declared Mark Foley's pants a federal disaster area. He voted a $4 billion reconstruction earmark to the congress- ional page program and invited Dubai Page World to run it. And, with every press conference designed to get himself out of the hole he'd dug at the previous press conference, the 50 percent of Americans who pay minimal attention to politics (which, if there's any justice, will be up to 93 percent by now) caught Hastert floundering on the evening news and thought, "So that's the gay pedophile, eh? Disgusting. There oughtta be a law against it."
Well, there is. Many laws, in fact. And it's not clear any of them were broken. It's a good basic rule of thumb that no matter how bad a scandal is, the political class' response will be worse, largely hysterical and lacking any sense of proportion. But, even by those minimal expectations, this last week has been unbecoming for a serious nation. In London, sex scandals come along every other week. You name it, British parliamentarians do it: three-in-a-bed, auto-erotic asphyxiation, gay teen flagellation, getting your toes sucked while wearing the soccer kit of Chelsea Football Club. But at least at Westminster, sex scandals require actual sex. That the governing party of the world's only superpower could be felled by one creepy pervert's masturbatory e-mails and IMs is an event historians will marvel at. Granted that the Roman Empire in its death throes got hung up on gay sex, the American hyperpower seems set to be the first to collapse over gay non-sex.
And no, I'm not a "typical right-wing pedophile apologist" excusing Foley. But, in case you haven't noticed, he's gone. He quit quicker than his instant message. And, true, he's since done the usual contemptible redemption shtick, announcing he's going into alcohol rehab, etc., when the reality is he'd be a better man if he drank more and IMed teens about the size of their wedding tackle less. And yes, he'll get a book deal, just like New Jersey's revolting ex-governor. But no one will buy the book -- and besides, what do you want? When a member of the House of Lords went abroad after a homosexual scandal, King George V is said to have remarked, "Good God, I thought fellows like that shot themselves." It may, indeed, be a less revolting spectacle for a chap to take a tumbler of whiskey and a loaded revolver into his study than to go on "Oprah" and bore on about his personal demons, abusive father, etc., etc. But we live in different times. Foley's history; he's the first footnote in history to a page in history. So the only question now is whether there is any larger issue here worth spending 10 minutes on.
And the answer to that is obvious. This was a honey trap (as they used to say in the Cold War) designed to leverage one peripheral figure's squalid fantasies into political opportunity. It's as predictable as the leaves falling from the trees, except that it only occurs every other autumn. Still, I take my hat off to the media and Democratic Party. Indeed, in the spirit of Bill Clinton, I take my pants off to them. It is a remarkable achievement to have transformed, in little more than a week, the GOP into the Catholic Diocese of Boston with Speaker Hastert as Cardinal Law and the page program as the massed ranks of 7-year-old altar boys. What an awesome force the Dems would be if only the ruthless skill and cunning that went into this operation could be applied to, say, national security.
But I very much doubt, despite the expertise with which the sheep have been rounded up and set baa-ing, that Showtime at the Foley Bergere will pay off in November. There are many legitimate reasons for electors to toss out the Republican Congress, but the notion that they're a hotbed of gay pedophile enablers is not one of them. Had Foley dug in and attempted to cling on, his GOP colleagues would have been all over TV deploring his behavior, calling on him to step down, expressing outrage, etc. After two or three days, a few lefties might even have piped up to assail the Republican theocrat sexual McCarthyites tormenting the poor chap. Had he actually had sex with congressional pages, affronted gay groups would have pointed out this was perfectly legal in the relevant jurisdictions and would have complained ferociously about the stigmatizing of gay relationships and Democrats would have declared there should be places for all at the American table, especially had Foley done a Jim McGreevey and announced that "my truth is I am a gay American." A few quirks of timing and the parties' respective roles might have been entirely reversed. Scandalwise, the Republicans always play the submissive masochists but the Dems are bi-swingers, happy to flay the GOP as either (a) uptight prudes or (b) pedophile enablers, according to what suits. What would have been consistent in both narratives is the assumption by the Democrats, the media and the Gay Page Tip-Line end of the Republican Party is that the electorate is stupid. In the sense that there's any "child abuse" going on here, the American people are being treated like children and abused by the politico-media class.
This last week is unbecoming of a mature democracy. In the wider world, America can survive being the Great Sa- tan, but not the Great Laughingstock.
©Mark Steyn 2006
Chicago Sun-Times
I'm a foreigner, so I might not be up to speed on how things work around here. But, insofar as I understand it after the last week, American politics is divided between: teenage pages; guys who are hot for teenage pages; guys who are enablers for guys who are hot for teenage pages; guys who devote inordinate time and effort to entrapping guys who are hot for teenage pages; guys who are rattled by guys accusing them of having devoted insufficient time and effort to nailing the guys who are hot for teenage pages and get panicked into holding press conferences where they announce the following:
"As the speaker I take responsibility for everything in the building. The buck stops here. ... That is why I directed the clerk of the House to establish a hotline for reporting any information concerning pages or the page program. As of this morning, the clerk of the House has activated the tip-line. . . . The page program tip line is 866-348-0481."
(If the clerk's not there, you can have him paged.)
J. Dennis Hastert actually stood up in public and made that announcement. And, of course, the Democrats immediately denounced the notorious Gay Pedophile Ringleader of the House for the pitiful inadequacy of his page tip-line: Oh, sure, now he wants to set up 1-800-GAY-PAGE and invite anyone with info to use the secure log-in at www.GOPpredators.com, but where was he when the buck stopped here en route to the end-of-legislative-session communal showers?
Speaker Hastert called in the FBI, the CIA, the DEA and announced an emergency bill to rename the BATF the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Pages. He declared Mark Foley's pants a federal disaster area. He voted a $4 billion reconstruction earmark to the congress- ional page program and invited Dubai Page World to run it. And, with every press conference designed to get himself out of the hole he'd dug at the previous press conference, the 50 percent of Americans who pay minimal attention to politics (which, if there's any justice, will be up to 93 percent by now) caught Hastert floundering on the evening news and thought, "So that's the gay pedophile, eh? Disgusting. There oughtta be a law against it."
Well, there is. Many laws, in fact. And it's not clear any of them were broken. It's a good basic rule of thumb that no matter how bad a scandal is, the political class' response will be worse, largely hysterical and lacking any sense of proportion. But, even by those minimal expectations, this last week has been unbecoming for a serious nation. In London, sex scandals come along every other week. You name it, British parliamentarians do it: three-in-a-bed, auto-erotic asphyxiation, gay teen flagellation, getting your toes sucked while wearing the soccer kit of Chelsea Football Club. But at least at Westminster, sex scandals require actual sex. That the governing party of the world's only superpower could be felled by one creepy pervert's masturbatory e-mails and IMs is an event historians will marvel at. Granted that the Roman Empire in its death throes got hung up on gay sex, the American hyperpower seems set to be the first to collapse over gay non-sex.
And no, I'm not a "typical right-wing pedophile apologist" excusing Foley. But, in case you haven't noticed, he's gone. He quit quicker than his instant message. And, true, he's since done the usual contemptible redemption shtick, announcing he's going into alcohol rehab, etc., when the reality is he'd be a better man if he drank more and IMed teens about the size of their wedding tackle less. And yes, he'll get a book deal, just like New Jersey's revolting ex-governor. But no one will buy the book -- and besides, what do you want? When a member of the House of Lords went abroad after a homosexual scandal, King George V is said to have remarked, "Good God, I thought fellows like that shot themselves." It may, indeed, be a less revolting spectacle for a chap to take a tumbler of whiskey and a loaded revolver into his study than to go on "Oprah" and bore on about his personal demons, abusive father, etc., etc. But we live in different times. Foley's history; he's the first footnote in history to a page in history. So the only question now is whether there is any larger issue here worth spending 10 minutes on.
And the answer to that is obvious. This was a honey trap (as they used to say in the Cold War) designed to leverage one peripheral figure's squalid fantasies into political opportunity. It's as predictable as the leaves falling from the trees, except that it only occurs every other autumn. Still, I take my hat off to the media and Democratic Party. Indeed, in the spirit of Bill Clinton, I take my pants off to them. It is a remarkable achievement to have transformed, in little more than a week, the GOP into the Catholic Diocese of Boston with Speaker Hastert as Cardinal Law and the page program as the massed ranks of 7-year-old altar boys. What an awesome force the Dems would be if only the ruthless skill and cunning that went into this operation could be applied to, say, national security.
But I very much doubt, despite the expertise with which the sheep have been rounded up and set baa-ing, that Showtime at the Foley Bergere will pay off in November. There are many legitimate reasons for electors to toss out the Republican Congress, but the notion that they're a hotbed of gay pedophile enablers is not one of them. Had Foley dug in and attempted to cling on, his GOP colleagues would have been all over TV deploring his behavior, calling on him to step down, expressing outrage, etc. After two or three days, a few lefties might even have piped up to assail the Republican theocrat sexual McCarthyites tormenting the poor chap. Had he actually had sex with congressional pages, affronted gay groups would have pointed out this was perfectly legal in the relevant jurisdictions and would have complained ferociously about the stigmatizing of gay relationships and Democrats would have declared there should be places for all at the American table, especially had Foley done a Jim McGreevey and announced that "my truth is I am a gay American." A few quirks of timing and the parties' respective roles might have been entirely reversed. Scandalwise, the Republicans always play the submissive masochists but the Dems are bi-swingers, happy to flay the GOP as either (a) uptight prudes or (b) pedophile enablers, according to what suits. What would have been consistent in both narratives is the assumption by the Democrats, the media and the Gay Page Tip-Line end of the Republican Party is that the electorate is stupid. In the sense that there's any "child abuse" going on here, the American people are being treated like children and abused by the politico-media class.
This last week is unbecoming of a mature democracy. In the wider world, America can survive being the Great Sa- tan, but not the Great Laughingstock.
©Mark Steyn 2006
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