Derek Jeter & Mark Teixeira snag Gold Gloves

And who said Derek Jeter has no range?

Jeter was honored with the AL Gold Glove for shortstop, and Mark Teixeira took home the Gold Glove for first base, Major League Baseball announced today. 

And no, these aren’t two big-name guys who win it every year. Both didn’t win last year, meaning both made improvements to earn back the honors.

Rob Neyer of ESPN.com had a major problem with the selected Gold Glove winners. I didn’t agree with him, especially after he said Kevin Youkilis deserved the Gold Glove for first base over Tex.

Update on Yankees free agents: Damon, Matsui & Pettitte

Yesterday, my busy newspaper-making Monday, was day 1 of the General Managers Meetings in Chicago. The big name thrown around the Yankees radar was John Lackey – just as Tim Dierkes expected. However, the Yankees have some housekeeping to do first.

The contracts of Johnny Damon, Hideki Matsui and Andy Pettitte are all expired, and it’s time to make some tough decisions. I’ll run through each player and provide links to what we know so far.

First, here are two general nuggets conflicting on all three players. First, via Chad Jennings:

Johnny Damon, Hideki Matsui and Andy Pettitte each played well in the playoffs, but don’t expect that to sway the Yankees decision on whether to bring them back. “What they were when they went into October, that’s what they still are regardless of how well or how poorly they played in October,” Cashman said.

Second, via Joel Sherman

Damon and Pettitte are the priorities. But when asked if that meant Matsui had played his last game in pinstripes, one team executive said, "No, I hope we can figure out a way to have them all back."

…the Yanks want to push for one-year contracts with Pettitte, Damon and Matsui, all of whom the organization believes want to return in 2010.

Now to each player:

Damon
If the Yankees offered him arbitration, he could expect around $15 million, according to Sherman, and the Yankees don’t want to pay him that much. If they try and negotiate a one-year deal on their own, the Yankees probably won’t have the highest offer. Normally, a Scott Boras client will take the highest bid, but who knows with Damon (idiot).

As Jerry Crasnick points out, the signing of Damon and Matsui will depend on whether the Yankees go after big-name FAs Matt Holliday and Jason Bay.

Matsui
Like Damon, Matsui just finished up a four-year, $52 million deal, so he is in line for a huge pay cut. All of these reports are conflicting my thoughts during the year that the Yankees would avoid re-signing Matsui because he clogs the DH spot. I happen to agree with that logic, but the Yankees seem to want him back.

Just think, Matsui may have earned himself a multi-million dollar contract because of three at bats in one World Series game.

Pettitte
Here is a tweet from Jon Heyman pertinent to Pettitte:

nothing definite yet, but andy pettitte apparently told #yankees teammates he'd like to come back for 1 more year.

This is great to hear, as it is the first step to an agreement. Now, it’s a question of the Yankees wanting him back and if they can work out a deal. Via Sherman:

"We would be very receptive," a Yankee official said of working out something with Pettitte.

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Here are two posts (and two blogs) worth reading.

Yankees Type A & B free agents

The  Elias free agent rankings are out, and all Type A and B free agents have been classified. (If you don’t know what that means, read this:)

Free agents are classified as Type A, Type B or not at all. The compensation applies to free agents offered arbitration by their former club by the Dec. 1 deadline or to those who sign before then.

If a team signs a Type A free agent, its first-round pick goes to the former team -- unless that pick is in the top 15, in which case a second-round pick goes to the former team. The former team also gets an extra pick between the first and second rounds.

If a team loses a Type B free agent, it gets an extra "sandwich" pick.

Two Yankees were misplaced, and the other two were placed correctly.

As expected, Johnny Damon is a Type A, and Andy Pettitte is a Type B. (Eric Hinske, Jerry Hairston Jr. and Jose Molina were of course unranked.)

But, instead of calling Hideki Matsui being a Type B and Xavier Nady being unranked, they were flip-flopped!

Photos of homeless adventure at World Series parade (part 2)

Continued…

It's everywhere!
Then we got on CBS.

Matsui on the big screen (he was the first player to come out).

A-Rod.

Burnett.

Kay.

Swisher (guy to the right of the woman in red hair underneath the cloud).

CC and Tex.

Pettitte (guy behind woman's cell phone).

Jeter.

Trophy!

That's all for pics. We didn't get good shots of the guys I didn't include, but I will still remember them through the other pictures.

It was a really awesome experience (even though I am still recovering from the sleep I lost), and I am not mad at my sister for leaving her apartment that night.

Photos of homeless adventure at World Series parade (part 1)

Now that you know what happened on this night, I will show you the visual proof.

One of my roommates on the left, and me on the right. He was prepared with two warm jackets, I brought one thin Yankees fleece.

Apparently, New York really is the city that never sleeps. This is at 2 a.m. on a Thursday night.

This is a wide shot of City Hall at 2:30 a.m., just in case you’ve never seen it. They were setting up all night. From where this picture was taken, there was a group of around 10 die-hard fans who were trying to reserve a spot for the parade. We were told they were going to be kicked out to across the street, so we headed to Broadway.

A close-up of the podium… 27! Then we went to Dunkin Donuts…
 
We weren’t with it, I’d say. Trivia began shortly, but then we all got cold because DD wasn’t heated.
   This is the first bank we stayed at.  My roommate is literally drawing a picture of himself, and I’m thinking about god knows what. Also, it kind of stunk that we were wearing the same hat, so I made a change.

Open at 5 a.m. We got there at 4:58.

The right is a thermal hoodie (extremely comfortable and warm), and the left is the official World Series champions hat. After going to Modell’s, we took our places for the parade (five hours before it began).

These two pics were snapped a couple hours before the parade started. Notice the toilet paper flying around in the first one.

It was everywhere.

Yes, a Yankees Snuggie exists

This “Northwest New York Yankees Comfy Throw” (aka Yankees Snuggie) can be found on MLB.com’s shop. It’s truly a miracle.

Also, if you care for the other New York team’s snuggie, check out my friend’s post here.

MLBTR’s offseason outlook

This is one post that every baseball fan should check out. Tim Dierkes of MLB Trade Rumors looked at the top 50 free agents of the offseason and predicted where each would wind up before next spring.

For the Yankees, he foresaw just one big move and a couple of re-signings. The big move is the signing of John Lackey, who Dierkes ranks the second best FA of the winter. The two re-signings are Andy Pettitte (ranked 6th) and Johnny Damon (12th). He left Hideki Matsui for the Mariners.

Oh by the way, Dierkes has the Red Sox signing Jason Bay, Marco Scutaro, Rich Harden, Aroldis Chapman and Tim Wakefield. If he is even half correct, I’m already scared of the Yankees’ rivals.

Please, check out Dierkes’ full post and then let’s debate about who the Yankees should and should not go after.

Hideki Matsui Featured Yankee Card of the Week

I think some honor is due for the World Series MVP, Hideki Matsui. What a series he had. He didn’t do much in the two prior series, but he hit .615 with 3 HRs and 8 RBIs in the World Series. Plus, six of those RBIs came in the clinching game.

All season I talked about how Matsui would not be re-signed by the Yankees because of his lack of versatility. He would hog the DH spot all year, disallowing Joe Girardi to give half-days off to some of his older players.

World Series parade: My homeless adventure of New York City

You may have been wondering why I did not post at all two days  after the Yankees won the World Series. Some of you learned I was at the World Series parade in N.Y.C. through twitter, but others were left in the dark.

Anyway, my two buddies and I arrived at Grand Central at 1:30 in the morning. Rather than staying at my sister’s lovely apartment less than a mile away from City Hall, we pulled an all-nighter. Here’s how it went down.

Getting to my sister’s apartment
After we made our spur-of-the-moment decision to take a train down to New York, I texted and called my sister to make arrangements. However, she never responded and never picked up. I figured she was in a meeting.

By the time we got to her apartment, I had texted her three times and called her eight times. We buzzed in several times in attempt to wake her up, but still, no response. So we began our homeless adventure.

Staying warm
Our first order of business was finding warmth. We had no other place to stay because my other sister and parents were too far away and asleep. So we went into the closest 24/7 convenience store we could find. It was a diamond in the rough. A fully-heated store with a bathroom. We nested there for about a half hour, but later regretted that decision to leave so fast.

We then walked close to a mile to reach City Hall, the culminating site of the parade. It was nice to see a few other die-hard Yankees fans loafing around in the middle of the night. We chatted with a group that stood sat right against the gates of City Hall with the best angle at the podium. We didn’t stay with them because we expected them to be kicked across the street by the police. But they did point us in the direction of a Dunkin Donuts.

Dunkin Donuts

We stayed in DD until around four, drinking hot cocoa, eating stale donuts and playing baseball trivia. “Name the eight states with at least two baseball teams.” (Thanks, Eddie.) We left when we realized it was freezing inside compared to the 24/7 convenience store. We needed a new nest, so we went exploring.

The banks
One of my friends saw a Wachovia, and it was his bank so we went inside the small ATM room to get money. We stayed their for an hour or so reading a free newspaper from DD. At 4:55 in the morning, I thought, “Won’t Modell’s open soon?” I asked my other friend with an iPhone to look it up, and I was right. So we bolted to Modell’s to pick up some Yankees gear. I bought a World Series champions hat and a navy blue thermal “Property of Yankees Baseball.”

We left and detoured past Ground Zero for my friend who had never seen it, and then proceeded to find more shelter and warmth, my other friend’s bank, Bank of America. At around 5:30, we found our standing room, on the corner of Murray St. and Broadway, right across from City Hall. We stood in the same spot for over seven hours, not including my brief trip to Starbucks for a small breakfast.

Post-parade
After the parade, I lost one of my friend’s in the mass of people, and it was nearly impossible to communicate due to everyone’s use of cell phones. Finally, my lost friend’s call got through to me, and soon found him a couple blocks away from where we were.

Instead of meeting up with the rest of my family for a small lunch, we bolted out of the city, finding a subway in Chinatown and then catching a 1:34 train, barely, back to New Haven. We waited a half hour for the shuttle home to Quinnipiac, and then waited 15 minutes for the driver to make an unnecessary cell phone call. The three of us were freezing and tired, and happy to be home when we arrived at school.

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The adventure with photos post is on the way.