I started this dynasty a long, long time ago with the intention of distracting myself, and I did that in the way I had always known to distract myself -- take something ****ed up and fix it. If you're looking for my psychological motive behind it all, call it a metaphor for how I always felt about myself and my life. Point is, I'm no White Sox fan, I can't regale you with tales of how the players on this team compare to vague images from my childhood of Ozzie Guillen dancing across a staticky television. I did have one of those staticky TV's when I was growing up, but I'm a Yankees fan from New Jersey whose favorite player growing up was
The Pride of Evansville.
I'd still call myself a baseball nut today, even though my attention's strayed to other things the past few years, but I can't figure out whether I love or hate the Yankees nowadays. I cheer when they score and curse when Alex Cintron beats them in the 11th, but I look at their placement in the standings with a bit of satisfaction. It's like it's the birthright of all Yankee fans for the team to finish first, or at least win 90 and the wild card.
BORING! There's your first bolding in a while.
It's a lot more fun as a fan to see a team go worst to first, or make a run to the Series after fifteen losing seasons or something like that. A run like that offers us as fans a chance at redemption, a chance at hope. Those things are simply a symbol of the things we hope for and pray for for ourselves. I'm someone who has found himself hoping for those things when they seemed completely impossible, so for me a chance at redemption and hope has always been a bit personal, because I NEEDED those things for myself.
I suppose that was really the motivation behind what was presumably the turning point of this franchise, and you can find the particulars of that under the link "THE trade" in my signature at the bottom of this post.
The short form (ha ha) backstory to that point is this: when looking to find some way to entertain myself four years ago using this game, I took someone's MLB roster set and simulated until I found the most dire franchise I could imagine. That turned out to be the White Sox, who were suitably horrible enough that they lovingly and fittingly became referred to as the
Pale Hose. The first year of my managing the team was 2005 in the game, the team was awful at the big league level to the tune of finishing in last place of a poor division, and really had no good young players to boot. I did my best in the amateur draft, tried to patch things up with trades and the occasional free agent here and there, but none of these guys were anyone you'd have the fond, hazy memory from childhood about. Actually I regarded most of them as players who'd fit well on the
'97 Twins, one of the most nondescript teams of recent memory.
We started this 2006 season with a four-game sweep by the Boston club, who's the kind of ballclub you'd expect just from hearing the name. After nine more games we were a comical 3 and 13. And here's what might have been the real turning point of the season...
We had a day to regroup ourselves before Cleveland came to town, the same club that had pummeled us in two out of three games a week and a half later, and the same club that had been crowned world champion the season before, in a surprising run. Their ace pitcher Josh Beckett locked us down for six innings, but after just 58 pitches was lifted for a pinch hitter when he was due to bat with one out and one on in the top of the seventh, even though Cleveland was up 3-0 at the point and
the dude had only thrown 58 pitches in six innings. The baseball gods rewarded us with four runs off one of their nondescript relievers, but since we were terrible Cleveland came right back with a bunch of hits and tied it in the next half inning. But one of the few guys who could dial it above 88 mph, a right-hander named
Kiko Calero, came in and got out of the mess. He'd go another inning, our ace reliever from the previous season named
Joe Roa would go two scoreless, and crafty Japanese League veteran
Akinori Otsuka would go two more. In the bottom of the 13th, our backup catcher named
Miguel Olivo would step to the plate against their seventh pitcher, hard thrower Armando Benitez, who would miss out over the plate with one of his bullets, and
Olivo would capitalize and get a nice, long trot around the bases for his efforts, ultimately chucking his helmet away and getting swallowed up in a swarm at home plate, a celebration that always makes me laugh because it's truly an image of like the best moment of your life when you're 7 years old.
Coincidentally or not our cleanup hitter was 3 for 6 in that game. His name is
Frank Catalanotto and he'd been acquired scarcely a week earlier from a Los Angeles club that couldn't find a position for him. Says something about our state of affairs that a guy discarded by another team jumped right and became our cleanup hitter...although, if the guy can hit, does it
really say anything, or at least anything above a whisper? And (not to jump ahead) this guy could
hit.
We'd win 8 of our next 9 to close out April with a decent 12-14 mark. Instead of fading like so many early season surprises, a pitching staff materialized, apropos of absolutely nothing, not past history or some spectacular defense or even dumb luck. Just a bunch of guys pitching vintage Bob Gibson style. The offense still wasn't much, but it didn't need to be. We rode arms attached to guys like
Buehrle,
Garland,
Loaiza, and a 34 year old guy coming off an arm injury named
Ryan Franklin, and those arms and a favorable schedule led to an eight-game win streak at the end of May, again pushing us back around .500, within a game of it at 27-28.
June's results were 17 wins in 28 games, mostly by scores of 2-1, 4-2, and 5-3. 8 wins in 10 tries against the dregs of the AL east before the All Star break and suddenly you're not looking up at .500, you're looking down at it,
way down. What the hell do you do when you won 69 and 62 games the last two years and you're sitting at
52 and 41 at the All Star break?
If your team's actually good, you sit back and enjoy it. But if you're not supposed to be there, if you're riding 34 and 35 year old arms plus a guy who went 4 and 15 two years before, you do something.
The first something was an All Star centerfielder,
Vernon Wells, an above average hitter for both average and power who fell in our laps because his contract was expiring. The second happened a few weeks later, and it was the trade described in the link above. We didn't just get an All Star, we got the league's leader in average who was also a demon on the basepaths, not to mention another reliable and slightly younger arm who was discarded simply because of his salary.
Scott Podsednik and
Wade Miller would later share the spotlight with the seemingly unimportant third wheel in the trade, veteran utilityman
Wil Cordero, but that's one of those fluke things.
All that swag came at a hefty price, though, our top pitching prospect who had shot through the minor leagues less than a year after being drafted, as well as the only young player we had that was even worth a damn. In the end I bit.
We'll talk more about that trade more once we get to the present, which in my OOTP file is game seven of the ALCS. How you get from 3-13 in April to game seven in Yankee Stadium, the same stadium of my staticky youth, is nothing I could explain, not in the last one thousand four hundreds and forty six words and not in the next block if I had the length to tap away for that long.
This club matched its early season brilliance with a similarly styled late season tailspin, losing the close ones (three consecutive extra-inning losses in early September for example), losing just a few more than we won in August (12-16) and the same from September 1st on (12-17). I guess it would be fairer to say that Cleveland, the club that had won the World Series the year before but had crashed to .500 with seven straight losses before the All Star break, starting winning the games we had, winning with some of those dominant pitching outings but mostly with an offense that just started beating the **** out of every opposing pitching staff. With a 47-21 record after the All Star break, Cleveland was basically a speeding train that we were trying to stop with...well, a speeding outfielder, and that worked out about as well as you'd imagine. How
do you stop a speeding train, anyway?
We did sneak into the playoffs as a wild card, where we faced a team that finished all of one game worse than Cleveland. Why you'd bet on a team that had burned out brightly three months before is anyone's guess. You'd have to be crazy to do something like that.
Crazy...crazy like a fox.