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March 06, 2008

Bill James: Yanks & Red Sox Share The Same Problem

Via a Time Magazine Q&A with Bill James -

Your archrivals in the American League East, the New York Yankees, have a new manager, and with George Steinbrenner's sons taking over the day-to-day operations, new owners running the show. What's your gut reaction to what they've done, and where you see them going this year?

Well, the Yankees are kind of moving on to the future. There's something I call Sam's Law — after Sam Rich, an attorney from Pittsburgh who has been a friend of mine for many years. Sam's Law is that young pitchers will break your heart. I think that when teams go into a pennant race depending on young pitching, it very often it takes a year or two for that young pitching to be as good as you thought it would be. The Yankees have that problem, and we have that problem — we're depending on [Jon] Lester and [Clay] Buchholz and some other guys to be useful to us. It's going to be interesting to see how many of those young pitchers live up to those expectations.

Now I have this mental picture of Brian Cashman running through the halls of the Yankees HQ down in Tampa, in a George Costanza type fashion, frantically asking the admin staff "Did Hank's copy of Time come in the mail yet? Did anyone deliver it to his desk yet? Please, somebody, tell me that he hasn't seen it yet!"

Posted by Steve Lombardi at March 6, 2008 05:29 PM

Comments

if there's teams that COULD take such a risk while trying to contend, it's these two team.

Posted by: Yu Hsing Chen [TypeKey Profile Page] at March 7, 2008 01:44 AM