holy crap, Larry Fitzgerald is having the game of his life... what a player!
Fitzgerald is a good player for the Yankees.
The rebels are fighting back
Posted by VDesai:
We are apparently interested in Freddie Garcia as per Paul Heyman
Garcia just signed w/the Muts... no big loss
looks like torre took a few swipes at the yanks in his book. oh well, money talks.
and pettitte and the yanks are close on a 1 year $6 mil deal with another $6 mil in incentives...
Posted by djsunyc:
looks like torre took a few swipes at the yanks in his book. oh well, money talks.
and pettitte and the yanks are close on a 1 year $6 mil deal with another $6 mil in incentives...
Saw that.
I really would like to give Pettitte and Hughes the 4th and 5th spots in the rotation and move Joba back to the 8th inning. The best Yankee team includes Joba in the pen as the 8th inning guy.
Posted by nyk4ever:
Posted by djsunyc:
looks like torre took a few swipes at the yanks in his book. oh well, money talks.
and pettitte and the yanks are close on a 1 year $6 mil deal with another $6 mil in incentives...
Saw that.
I really would like to give Pettitte and Hughes the 4th and 5th spots in the rotation and move Joba back to the 8th inning. The best Yankee team includes Joba in the pen as the 8th inning guy.
agreed... i think Joba belongs in the bullpen & groomed to take over for Mo once he retires... that strengthens our team overall & puts our bullpen right up there as the best in baseball.
as for Torre's book, i wish he'd have the balls to just name the players that referred to Arod as A-fraud, otherwise he should just keep his mouth shut... the money the Yankees paid him over the years as the highest paid MGR in baseball just wasn't enough i guess, he's gotta resort to taking cheap shots at the organization now... that's so petty Joe... get over it & enjoy the Cali sun.
[Edited by - TMS on 01-26-2009 2:22 PM]
it's official, Andy re-signed to a 1 year deal as per yankees.com
http://newyork.yankees.mlb.com/news/arti...01/26/09 4:01 PM EST
Pettitte holding onto his pinstripes
Veteran left-hander signs incentive-laden, one-year deal
By Bryan Hoch / MLB.com
NEW YORK -- Andy Pettitte is still a Yankee.
Yankees GM Brian Cashman held a conference call with Pettitte on Monday afternoon to announce that they agreed to a one-year contract, allowing the veteran to help open the Yankees' new stadium as a member of the rotation.
"There was never another team brought up, and in my mind I was going to be going back to the Yankees," Pettitte said. "There were certain points that I was worried about it a little bit. ... I'd be lying if I never said, 'Heck, is this ever going to get done?' I was very impatient, but I just trusted things would get done.
"I'm very excited about it," Pettitte went on. "I think we're going to have an unbelievable staff and hopefully we can all stay healthy."
"Andy always said every step of the way that he wanted to be a Yankee," Cashman said. "It got complicated because of where we were in our payroll. We all wanted Andy to be a part of our rotation and felt we needed him to be here."
Discussions between Pettitte's representatives and Cashman had continued for weeks. The 36-year-old's agents, Randy and Alan Hendricks, advised Pettitte that the Yankees' earlier $10.5 million offer for one year represented too large of a pay cut from the $16 million he earned in each of the last two seasons.
That problem appears to have been solved by the Yankees agreeing to include performance-based incentives. According to the Associated Press, Pettitte has accepted a base salary of $5.5 million, with innings-pitched and days-on-the-roster incentives that could raise the value of the contract to $12 million.
"I think Cash and I just knew that if we didn't get this done now, time would have passed this by," Randy Hendricks said.
Well I'm shocked it took this long for them to reach an agreement but I'm very happy they did
an incentive based deal is a much better investment for the Yankees w/less risks... Cashman has to get props for how he handled that situation.
http://www.nypost.com/seven/01262009/sports/yankees/a_team_blasts_torre_152096.htm
'A'-TEAM BLASTS TORRE
ANTI-ALEX TELL-ALL AN 'ACT OF DESPERATION'
By DAN MANGAN and MARK HALE
Last updated: 12:52 pm
January 26, 2009
Posted: 2:11 am
January 26, 2009
Insiders close to Yankees superstar Alex Rodriguez blasted Joe Torre yesterday, saying a new book by the former Bombers manager that characterizes A-Rod as an emotionally needy prima donna is "unequivocally not true" and "one final act of desperation."
PEYSER: REVOLTIN' JOE'S WHINE TURNS BITTER
VACCARO: YOU'VE MANAGED TO RUIN A LEGACY
"None of it's true, and it's obviously a ploy to sell books," said one insider about allegations in "The Yankee Years," which were first reported in Sunday's Post.
"It's just unequivocally not true."
In his book, Torre says Rodriguez's teammates referred to the third baseman as "A-Fraud" and claims he had developed a "Single White Female"-like obsession with captain Derek Jeter.
Torre, with co-author Tom Verducci, also describes what he says were fruitless efforts to get Rodriguez emotionally comfortable with being a Yankee.
The book says that although Rodriguez desperately wanted to be accepted by his new teammates after coming to the Yankees New York Yankees from Texas in 2004, he turned them off with his showboating, his insistence on having a clubhouse valet, and his phony nature when dealing with the media.
A Rodriguez insider cracked, "Alex's reaction is he hasn't received a signed copy yet."
Torre did not respond to a request for comment.
Sarcasm aside, the source was scathing about what Rodriguez clearly sees as a bitter act of betrayal by Torre, who left the team in 2007 to become the LA Dodgers' manager.
"It's a last-ditch effort, given [Torre's] diminishing profile," the source said. "It's one final act of desperation. He probably realized that he made the single biggest mistake of his career leaving the team.
"Our general feeling on this thing is, is this really the spirit of collaboration that's really the hallmark of a manager? And the obvious answer is it isn't," the source said. "I wonder how his current team would feel about the possibilities of another Torre exposé."
Torre's decision to go public with his criticisms of Rodriguez and of General Manager Brian Cashman stunned the Yankee family, because Torre had widely been viewed as entrenched in Bomber tradition and leery of airing dirty laundry outside the clubhouse.
"I'm surprised," said Hall of Fame Yankee pitcher Whitey Ford. "Joe's always been nice. He's still nice. He usually had a way of talking around things. But who knows? . . . I just think he wanted to get a few things clear."
Another ex-Yankee hurler, Jim Bouton, whose landmark book, "Ball Four," sparked controversy in 1970 with its disclosure of clubhouse antics, said, "I'd say Joe Torre is the kind of guy you'd have to push pretty far to have him come out and publicly bash you."
Yankee outfielder Johnny Damon said, "Unfortunately, when books come out, no good comes of it . . . I know Joe has a lot of respect for Alex. I haven't talked to Joe, but I know what happens when books come out.
"Alex is a great teammate," Damon said. "We have his back."
In addition to criticizing A-Rod Alex Rodriguez , Torre's book accuses Cashman of betraying him in late 2007 by failing to convey the manager's contract wishes to the Yankees New York Yankees ' principal owners, the Steinbrenner family.
Cashman last night told reporters he was "surprised" when he woke up and saw reports about the book, which The Post purchased off the shelf at a city bookstore.
"My first reaction is to wait and to hear or see what's in the book. I think it was the smart or right move, because Joe Torre called me from Hawaii" later yesterday, Cashman said. Cashman would not discuss what the two men discussed, but said, "I'm glad he gave me a call."
"I'll just say I'm very comfortable with the relationship that I have with Joe Torre and that the Yankees have with Joe Torre.
"He was a fantastic manager. You couldn't ask for any more than what he did for us," Cashman said.
Torre's co-author, Sports Illustrated writer Verducci, gave an interview to his magazine's Web site in response to The Post's story, saying, "Joe Torre does not rip anybody in the book. The book really needs to be read in context.
"Anybody who knows Joe, especially during his time in New York, knows he's a very honest man and he is very honest in the pages of this book."
Torre is expected to kick off a book tour in New York next week.
Posted by Bonn1997:
Well I'm shocked it took this long for them to reach an agreement but I'm very happy they did
Greed got the best of him. He could of had 10 mil. Ha, ha! So he did us a favor and saved us 4.5 mil. Way to go Pettitte. Now stay off the roids dude.
TMS, I'm not even going to give Torre's book a benefit of the doubt. It's just more trash we can do without. Let's just play baseball.
Besides, Joe's right. A-Rod should get his own coffee.
Posted by 4949:
Posted by Bonn1997:
Well I'm shocked it took this long for them to reach an agreement but I'm very happy they did
Greed got the best of him. He could of had 10 mil. Ha, ha! So he did us a favor and saved us 4.5 mil. Way to go Pettitte. Now stay off the roids dude.
He'd have to be retarded to take $5.5 mil with $7.5 mil in performance incentives over $10 mil guaranteed unless the performance requirements are absurdly easy.
Posted by Bonn1997:
Posted by 4949:
Posted by Bonn1997:
Well I'm shocked it took this long for them to reach an agreement but I'm very happy they did
Greed got the best of him. He could of had 10 mil. Ha, ha! So he did us a favor and saved us 4.5 mil. Way to go Pettitte. Now stay off the roids dude.
He'd have to be retarded to take $5.5 mil with $7.5 mil in performance incentives over $10 mil guaranteed unless the performance requirements are absurdly easy.
Absurd like what? Strike two batters out per game and you in?
according to the article it's innings-pitched and days-on-the-roster based incentives, not performance based.
Posted by 4949:
Posted by Bonn1997:
Posted by 4949:
Posted by Bonn1997:
Well I'm shocked it took this long for them to reach an agreement but I'm very happy they did
Greed got the best of him. He could of had 10 mil. Ha, ha! So he did us a favor and saved us 4.5 mil. Way to go Pettitte. Now stay off the roids dude.
He'd have to be retarded to take $5.5 mil with $7.5 mil in performance incentives over $10 mil guaranteed unless the performance requirements are absurdly easy.
Absurd like what? Strike two batters out per game and you in?
yeah
Torre cannot hide behind author
Buster Olney
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Some of the Yankees who found themselves on the receiving end of Joe Torre's seething scowl called it The Stare -- his face tight, his mouth frozen into a horizontal line, his dark eyes seemingly blackened by a slight inward tilt of his eyebrows. The Stare was reserved for only capital offenses, for missing signs, for awful decisions.
Reporters sometimes got The Stare as well, most often when they asked a question that Torre deemed to be driven by a quest for sensationalism, and the manager would chastise them bluntly, the way a fourth-grade teacher speaks to a wayward pupil. When I covered the team for The New York Times, he expressed particular distaste for ESPN, especially after Roger Clemens' beaning of Mike Piazza and the subsequent bat-throwing incident, because he felt that the network replayed the ugliness over and over only to sell its programming. In an honest moment today, Torre would aim The Scowl again -- into a mirror. Because this time, Torre is guilty of fostering and feeding on sensationalism, at the expense of former colleagues. It is Tom Verducci who wrote the actual words of the book, and over the past two days, Verducci has worked to underscore this point, and to note that the small fragments about Alex Rodriguez, Brian Cashman and the Steinbrenners are just tiny pieces of a book of almost 500 pages. The voice is in the third person, and not in Torre's voice, as it was the first time that Torre and Verducci collaborated. A lot of the words are based on Verducci's reporting. But here's the problem with that: It's Joe Torre's book. His name is on it. He got paid for it. He had a chance to read every word, every sentence, every paragraph. He had to approve every passage.
"We talked to him about a lot of things today. I just sensed he was bothered by it. Not by what we said, but by how it came out. How much of it is actually what he said and how much isn't exactly what he said, I don't know. ... But there's no question: it has his name on it, and he has to be accountable for it."
--Joe Torre, in 2003 about a book ghostwritten by David Wells
He had the choice, for example, whether to include this, from page 245:
Back in 2004, at first [Alex] Rodriguez did his best to try and fit into the Yankee culture -- his cloying, B Grade actor best. He slathered on the polish. People in the clubhouse, including teammates and support personnel were calling him 'A-Fraud' behind his back.
And it was Torre's choice, ultimately, to include this, from page 252:
In his own way, Rodriguez was fascinated with [Derek] Jeter, as if trying to figure out what it was about Jeter that could have bought him so much goodwill. The inside joke in the clubhouse was that Rodriguez' pre-occupation with Jeter recalled the 1992 film, 'Single White Female,' in which a woman becomes obsessed with her roommate to the point of dressing like her.
And it was Torre who approved the words in the excerpt released Monday -- after Torre had assured Cashman on the phone Sunday that they were friends and always would be friends.
Only much later did Torre start to put the picture together of what had happened to his working relationship with Cashman. The personal falling-out they had in 2006 spring training over philosophical issues, Cashman's decision not to bring back longtime center fielder Bernie Williams when his contract expired in 2006, his submission of odd lineup suggestions based on stats, his lack of regard for Ron Guidry as a pitching coach, his detachment from the "they" who were making an offer to Torre, his failure to offer any comment or support in the meeting that decided Torre's future, his failure to personally relay Torre's proposal to find a way to reach an agreement to the Steinbrenners … "I thought Cash was an ally, I really did," Torre says.
Those passages are based on Verducci's reporting. They are written by Verducci. But it's Torre's book. And within the pages of a book with Torre's name on it, some former colleagues are demeaned, and that was his choice. Verducci said in a radio interview on WFAN Monday that all of this is not really new, that everybody has known for years that Rodriguez has had difficulty assimilating with the Yankees' veterans. Here's what's new about it: the stories are in a book authored by Joe Torre. This is hardly a new concept. The fact that former First Lady Nancy Reagan could be difficult was hardly a new concept, but when Ronald Reagan's former Chief of Staff, Don Regan, published a book detailing that, well, it became a very big deal. The suggestion that the run-up to the Iraq War included misinformation was something posed by many reporters -- but it became something very different when posited in a book by former White House spokesman Scott McClellan. The book is in Torre's name. Says right there on the cover. By Joe Torre and Tom Verducci.
In the four seasons that Torre managed Rodriguez, he would never have come out in the dugout for his daily session with reporters and revealed to reporters that teammates called Rodriguez "A-Fraud," and if any reporter had asked him if it was true that teammates compared A-Rod to the protagonist in the movie Single White Female, they would have gotten The Stare. But he has gone beyond his own code of conduct in his book.
In the spring of 2003, David Wells and a ghostwriter published a book called, Perfect I'm Not: Boomer on Beer, Brawls, Backaches and Baseball, and Torre was furious, angry that Wells had aired some of the Yankees' dirty laundry in the pages. Wells tried to distance himself from some of the words within the book, saying that they belonged to the writer, but the Yankees' manager would not accept that. After a meeting with the pitcher, Torre said this to reporters: ''We talked to him about a lot of things today. I just sensed he was bothered by it. Not by what we said, but by how it came out. How much of it is actually what he said and how much isn't exactly what he said, I don't know. "But there's no question: it has his name on it, and he has to be accountable for it.'' Torre and Cashman and George Steinbrenner held him accountable: Wells, in the end, was fined $100,000 by the organization.
Now it is Torre's responsibility to be fully accountable for the words in the book that has his name on it, and he must stand behind those words. If he hides behind Verducci and the suggestion that the ugly anecdotes aren't his, that explanation will have echoes of "I didn't knowingly take steroids." If he embraces the words as his own, he should also acknowledge he has been, at the very least, extraordinarily hypocritical. A-Rod tells others he's not bothered by Torre's words, writes John Harper. Torre's revenge hit the wrong targets, writes Wallace Matthews.
http://www.nypost.com/seven/01272009/spo...BOWA: TEAMMATE SHOTS AT ALEX ALL IN FUN
By MARK HALE
PAL JOEY: Joe Torre (left) and Alex Rodriguez are buddy-buddy in spring training in 2007 - though Torre's new book seems to paint a picture of an un popular A-Rod.
PAL JOEY: Joe Torre (left) and Alex Rodriguez are buddy-buddy in spring training in 2007 - though Torre's new book seems to paint a picture of an un popular A-Rod.
Last updated: 9:26 am
January 27, 2009
Posted: 1:44 am
January 27, 2009
Alex Rodriguez may have been referred to as "A-Fraud," but it was in jest, says former Yankee coach Larry Bowa.
In Joe Torre's latest book, "The Yankee Years," it's reported that Yankee players referred to A-Rod as "A-Fraud."
But yesterday, Bowa - Torre's third-base coach with the Dodgers who filled the same role with the Yankees New York Yankees in 2006-07 - told The Post that former Yankee bullpen catcher and batting-practice pitcher Mike Borzello, a good friend of A-Rod, used to joke around with the star player by sometimes referring to him as "A-Fraud."
Bowa, though, was adamant that it was always done as a joke, simply from one of A-Rod's friends. Never, Bowa said, was it done with malice.
"I have never heard players say it," Bowa said.
"When Alex walked in, [Borzello would] go, 'What do you got today?' "
If Rodriguez felt good, he was referred to as A-Rod. If not, it might be A-Fraud, Bowa said.
He added it might even depend on the opponent - that if, say, Toronto's Roy Halladay was on the mound, the joke might have been, "We might have a little A-Fraud today."
"It wasn't a malicious thing," Bowa stressed. "It was when you stretch and guys joke around with each other. It wasn't malicious at all."
On a conference call yesterday, Yankee pitcher Andy Pettitte said he didn't hear players referring to Rodriguez as "A-Fraud," either. In fact, the veteran lefty said, he had "never one time heard of the term 'A-Fraud' until I saw it rolling on the TV" once news broke about Torre's book.
"I have not heard one word and have never heard that term used before, and Alex is a very good friend of mine," Pettitte said.
Added Johnny Damon yesterday, "We never called him that, not us."
Rodriguez's agent, Scott Boras, declined comment.
GM Brian Cashman speculated that perhaps this latest A-Rod situation could help things, rather than hurt them.
"I think we've gone through so much of the Alex stuff that, if anything, maybe this brings people closer together," he said on a conference call.
Cashman also said that when Pettitte, Mariano Rivera and Rodriguez all were free agents two offseasons ago, both Rivera and Pettitte told Cashman, "We need Alex."
"That was not asked for," Cashman said. "It was offered up. There's always going to be some controversy that surrounds this club, and the best thing to deal with it is [to] rally around each other the best you can if there's real feelings there."
Cashman also reiterated what he said on Sunday at the Baseball Writers' Association of America Dinner in Manhattan, after the GM had received a call from Torre on Sunday from Hawaii.
"I don't know what's coming out in this book, and I'm sure there are aspects that I might not necessarily agree with," Cashman said. "But I can just tell you I'm thankful for the time that Joe was here.
"I'm comfortable with my relationship and how we interacted throughout the entire process. And I appreciated his call from Hawaii, where he called me to lead me to believe that our relationship is strong. But I had not seen what is in this book, and I'll just leave it at that."
