Johnny Damon Needs to Follow A-Rod's Lead

As a veteran observer of all things Yankee, I don’t believe reports that the team’s divorce from Johnny Damon is final.

General manager Brian Cashman says the Yankees won’t resign the 36-year-old outfielder because the club needs to get younger and more athletic and keep the 2010 payroll under $200 million.

I’m not buying it.

When has payroll mattered to the New York Yankees?

The Yanks have never cared about paying a luxury tax (not even this season’s $25 million tax) for exceeding baseball’s salary threshold as long as they’re getting maximum bang for their bucks.

And a 27th World Series championship certainly qualifies as money well-spent.

During the Steinbrenner Era, the Yankees have always tried to field the best team money can buy.

The Yankees can achieve that again in 2010 if Damon takes the initiative and follows a strategy already executed by Alex Rodriguez.

No, that doesn’t mean Damon should divorce his wife and date free-agent starlet Kate Hudson.

Instead, Damon should tell agent Scott Boras exactly what A-Rod told him after negotiations with the Yankees had been severed following the ’07 season:

Butt out.

If Damon himself tells Cashman and the Steinbrenner boys, Hank and Hal, that he wants to stay, then they’ll make a deal.

Boras, in typically nauseating fashion, alienated the Yankees by saying publicly the club should give Damon the kind of multi-year deal it gave catcher Jorge Posada at age 36 and relief ace Mariano Rivera at age 39 and will give shortstop Derek Jeter who turns 36 in June.

That is not going to happen. Nor should it happen.

Jeter, Rivera and Posada have become Yankee icons. Along with southpaw Andy Pettitte, they’re the only on-field links to the dynastic Yankee teams of the late 1990s-early 2000s.

Those players have earned special treatment.

Boras also used the media to tell the Yankees not to make an offer to Damon unless it’s a three-year deal.

The Yankees essentially told Boras to take a flying leap.

The Yankees then traded for former Tigers All-Star Curtis Granderson—at 29, a superior athlete and outfielder to Damon—and signed free agent Nick Johnson, an ex-Yankee whose on-base percentage is one of baseball’s best.

Damon should remind Boras that he works for the player, not the other way around.

The Yankees would offer Damon a two-year, $16-million deal if he wants it. I’ve followed this club long enough to know that.

A-Rod is a Yankee today—with a world championship on his resume, finally—because he personally told the club he wanted to stay and he muzzled Boras.

There may be more upfront money elsewhere for Damon, or even a three-year deal, but he wouldn’t be a Yankee. He wouldn’t be playing for the reigning world champions, the most celebrated franchise in professional sports, in the media capital of the world.

It can’t make more sense to Damon to finish his career with the White Sox, Orioles or Royals.

Would the Red Sox offer him a return to Beantown?

Maybe. But only to try to tweak the Yankees, the team that tweaked them when Damon signed his four-year, $52 million deal after the ’05 season.

But that move wouldn’t make sense for the Sox, who need to get younger and more athletic just like the Yankee team they’re now chasing.

Damon should want to be part of the 2010 Yankees, part of what would be one of baseball’s most potent lineups ever:

SS Derek Jeter

LF Johnny Damon

1B Mark Teixeira

3B Alex Rodriguez

C Jorge Posada

CF Curtis Granderson

2B Robinson Cano

RF Nick Swisher

DH Nick Johnson

You could quibble with the batting order. You could even bat Granderson ninth (if he’s not insulted), but this lineup coupled with the Yankees’ pitching staff would be favored to win another world championship.

Damon should want a piece of that action.

But first he needs to follow A-Rod’s lead and check his agent at the door.

Putting the Ire in Ireland

American sports fans almost got to know Thierry Henry because of a Gillette commercial in which he appeared in 2007 with Tiger Woods and Roger Federer.

Almost, but not quite.

Henry was replaced in the Gillette spot last year by New York Yankees captain Derek Jeter.

Why?

American audiences did not recognize Henry, a black French soccer star.

Outside of the U.S. and Canada, Henry still appears in the Gillette spot.

Anonymity is something Henry (pronounced AHN-ree) might prefer today.

Instead, he is Public Enemy No. 1 in Ireland because of a hand-aided goal in a World Cup qualifying match yesterday that will send France to the world’s biggest sporting event instead of Ireland.

“Yes, the ball touched my hand,” Henry admitted to reporters. “But I’m not the ref.”

Henry is right. The referee should have disallowed the goal.

But Henry’s answer will never sit well with the Irish, or with anyone who wants athletes to be sportsmen.

Henry cheated. The ball didn’t hit his hand by mistake.

That Henry got away with it does not justify the act.

The ball went from Henry’s left hand to his right foot and across the goalmouth to teammate William Gallas who scored to give France a 1-1 tie—and a 2-1 edge in goal differential in the two matches against Ireland.

That is why France, the 2002 World Cup champions, is going to South Africa for the 2010 Cup and Ireland is going home kicking and screaming.

“Outrageous!” “Disgraceful!” “Cheat!”

Those are the some of nicer headlines in the international media because of L’Affaire Henry.

This is, quite simply, the biggest sports story in the world outside of North America.

Here, we call the sport soccer. The rest of civilization calls it football.

Ireland’s justice minister is calling on FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, to replay the match.

To do otherwise, he argues, is to officially sanction cheating.

A replay would be the fairest way to decide matters. Either that, or resume the match with France throwing in the ball in Ireland’s end at roughly the point when the tainted goal occurred.

But don’t expect either to happen.

Germany didn’t get a do-over in the 1986 World Cup final after losing to Argentina on Diego Maradona’s infamous “Hand of God” goal.

That Henry readily admitted touching the ball yesterday doesn’t make him a better sportsman than Maradona.

Henry had little choice. Sports fans around the globe have seen Henry’s sleight-of-hand frame by frame, in super-slow motion, from multiple angles.

Now, FIFA has no choice but to use video replay technology in the World Cup.

But only for goals, as the National Hockey League does.

Not for offside calls. Not to hand out yellow cards or red cards retroactively for infractions missed by the referee.

But there’s no way TV viewers should know more about what’s happening in a World Cup match than the referee on the field.

Can you imagine the international outcry if the World Cup was awarded on a goal that would have been overturned by video replay?

Given the outsized passion of soccer fans, lives could be lost.

At least some good should come out of L’Affaire Henry…albeit not for Ireland. Alas, the luck of the Irish has run out.

Hey, Johnny Damon, Curb Your Agent

For Johnny Damon to return as a New York Yankee in 2010, he will need to take a page from the Alex Rodriguez playbook.

And I don’t mean Damon needs to divorce his wife and then cavort with an aging rocker followed by a comely blonde actress in her early thirties.

What Damon needs to do is tell agent Scott Boras to curb the rhetoric because the Yankees can win in 2010 and beyond without him.

A-Rod nearly played his way out of New York after the 2007 season.

Taking Boras’s advice, he exercised his contractual option and announced, during Game 4 of the Red Sox-Rockies World Series, that he had become a free agent.

Only after A-Rod muzzled Boras and contacted the Yankees himself did he and the club work out the 10-year deal that allowed A-Rod to finally win his first World Series title.

Damon needs to borrow the Boras muzzle from A-Rod before it’s too late.

Clearly, Boras loves to use the media to negotiate contracts for his clients.

But his strategy often succeeds only in making a client a better-paid loser in a new city while alienating the fans in the city that player left behind.

Case in point: Former Seattle Mariner Alex Rodriguez of the Texas Rangers.

Another case in point: Former Los Angeles Dodger Chan-Ho Park of the Texas Rangers.

Yet another: Former Texas Ranger Pudge Rodriguez of the Detroit Tigers.

Damon turned 36 on November 3, the day before the left fielder helped the Yankees win their 27th league championship — a pro sports record.

Actually, November 3 was the day before Damon limped off the Yankee Stadium turf during Game 6 with a hamstring injury so severe he would have had to sit out Game 7, had there been one.

That is part of the problem: The Yankees need to get younger and more athletic in the outfield, and Boras’s rhetoric could compel the team to look elsewhere for a left fielder.

According to Boras, Damon’s durability is “off the charts.”

Yes, Damon has played in at least 140 games in 14 big-league seasons. But he played hurt more often than he should have to achieve that streak, and he has the weakest throwing arm of any starting outfielder in baseball.

According to Boras, the Yankees should pay Damon “market value” for a player of his age and track record.

Clearly, Boras is suggesting the Yankees offer Damon a multi-year deal commensurate with the four-year, $52 million contract signed by catcher Jorge Posada who was 36 at the time, or the three-year, $45 million contract signed by relief ace Mariano Rivera who was about to turn 38, or the multi-year deal that shortstop Derek Jeter will sign to remain in pinstripes as a 36-year-old.

The Yankees won’t do that. Nor should they.

Damon, however important he was to the Yankees’ championship season, is not remotely as vital to the team as Posada — a switch-hitting catcher with power from both sides and a team leader — or Rivera — the finest relief pitcher in major league history.

The Yankees should offer Damon a two-year contract worth between $20 million-$22 million.

If Boras convinces Damon the offer isn’t good enough…Sayonara.

The Yankees could then pursue Los Angeles Angels free agent Chone Figgins, who is 31 and faster than Damon with a better arm.

The Yankees could also hope World Series Most Valuable Player Hideki Matsui recovers well enough from knee surgery to play 40-50 games in left field in 2010. Figgins, or a rotating group of players, could man the position the rest of the season.

If that happens, it would be, as Yankees legend Yogi Berra would say, “déjà vu all over again” for Damon.

The Boston Red Sox let Damon walk after their 2004 world championship when he rejected their four-year, $40 million offer.

The Yankees came to the rescue with a four-year, $52 million deal.

That won’t happen this time.

Boras seems blissfully unaware of that. It is up to Damon to muzzle his media-loving agent while explaining it.

Why I Love the Yankees

By winning another World Series, the best team money can buy is good enough for other baseball fans to hate again.

I’m old enough to be the father of most players on the 2009 New York Yankees.

But to watch them celebrate their 27th World Series championship on the field at Yankee Stadium gave me as big a thrill as their titles in the '70s when I was a teenager.

My devotion to the Yankees began in the '60s, when I first spotted them on the family’s black-and-white Zenith in my Brooklyn neighborhood.

The Yankees usually lost in those days, and their most popular player, Mickey Mantle, hobbled around the bases, a shell of the legend he had been.

Still, I knew the Yankees had the richest baseball tradition and more World Series titles than any other team.

They also looked classy in their home uniforms: white with blue pinstripes and an overlapping NY on the left breast. Athletic business suits.

The advent of free agency in the ’70s allowed tempestuous owner George Steinbrenner to pay top dollar for talent, and the Yankees became great again.

Watching free agent Reggie Jackson smash three home runs on three pitches against three different pitchers to clinch the ’77 World Series remains the greatest athletic feat I’ve ever seen.

Jackson smiled when I told him that two decades later, when I became a Yankees beat writer for Gannett Newspapers.

Covering the team I rooted for as a boy was a dream job. The thrill was never greater than on October 27, 1996—the night the Yankees beat Atlanta, 3-2, to clinch their first World Series in 18 years.

Fortunately, I listened to veteran sportswriters and didn’t wear good clothes to that game because ballplayers do get a kick out of dousing reporters with champagne.

Those Yankees teams became a dynasty under manager Joe Torre, winning the World Series in 1996, ’98, ’99 and ’00.

Critics grouse that the Yankees “buy” their championships. Nonsense.

Baseball imposes no cap on players’ salaries, like football or basketball. Any baseball team can spend whatever it wants to acquire the best players.

Don’t you think Pittsburgh Pirates fans, whose team has had 17 consecutive losing seasons, wish ownership could target the right players and pay them like the Yankees?

You bet they do.

And because baseball has revenue sharing and imposes a luxury tax on teams that spend above the threshold on players’ salaries, the Yankees indirectly financed the Florida Marlins who beat them in the ’03 World Series and the Tampa Bay Rays who reached the ’08 World Series.

I love that the Yankees spend aggressively to put the best product on the field every year.

The Yankees don’t always win — this year’s title was their first since 2000 — but they always try.

Money from such revenue streams as the new $1.5 billion Yankee Stadium that opened in 2009 and the eight-year-old Yankees Entertainment and Sports Network helps the Yankees keep their core players under contract.

A quartet of young stars from the ’96 team I covered — shortstop Derek Jeter, catcher Jorge Posada, starting pitcher Andy Pettitte and relief pitcher Mariano Rivera — won their fifth World Series rings in 2009.

I’m proud of them. I’ve watched them grow up. And I look forward to the day Jeter and Rivera are enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Money helped the Yankees surround their veteran corps with stars like third baseman Alex Rodriguez, pitchers CC Sabathia and A.J. Burnett and first baseman Mark Teixeira.

And money helped the Yankees sign Japanese slugger Hideki Matsui in 2003.

Yet even loyal Yankees fans understand baseball is a business.

Matsui is 35 now, with knees so creaky he can’t play the outfield anymore.

The Yankees will likely replace him, even though he earned World Series Most Valuable Player honors for driving in six runs with three hits in his final game.

Matsui will always have 2009, and the thrill of experiencing a championship with the team he loves.

So will I.

The Angels' Best Hope: Joe Girardi

Although the odds may be against the Angels overcoming a 3-1 deficit and snatching the American League pennant from the New York Yankees, Los Angeles can take solace in three things:

• Just two years ago, the Boston Red Sox rallied from being down 1-3 to defeat the Cleveland Indians in the AL Championship Series in seven games;

• In 2004, the Yankees became the first team in baseball history to choke away a 3-0 lead in a best-of-seven series when they lost to the Red Sox. Five key members of the 2009 Yankees (Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, Jorge Posada, Hideki Matsui and Mariano Rivera) played on the infamous ’04 club; and

• Joe Girardi will manage the rest of the series for the Yankees.

Girardi (a.k.a. Captain Hook) could lose this series for the Yankees by himself. It is only because he has so much talent to work with — the best team money can buy — that a harsher light has not been shone upon his anal, wrongheaded managerial style.

In Game 3 of the ALCS, Girardi blew through relief pitchers the way a chain-smoker goes through a pack of cigarettes, allowing the Angels to win 5-4 in 11 innings.

Should the Yankees lose this series, Girardi will be remembered, if not vilified by Yankees fans, for removing David Robertson with two out and nobody on in the bottom of the 11th in Game 3 only to have Alfredo Aceves allow a single and game-winning double to the next two batters.

Never before in postseason history, which dates back to 1917, had a team lost a game in extra innings after a manager replaced a pitcher with two out and nobody on base in an inning.

As Casey Stengel, a truly great Yankees manager, used to say, "You could look it up."

Girardi made the needless decision to put Freddy Guzman on the ALCS roster instead of Eric Hinske (who played in the last two World Series with the Red Sox and Rays, respectively).

Then, as if to justify that personnel decision, Girardi took A-Rod, the most dominant player in the postseason, out of Game 5 for pinch-runner Guzman with the Yankees trailing 7-6 in the top of the ninth.

What, A-Rod, who has run the bases swiftly and superbly the entire postseason, even stealing bases against the Twins and Angels, had suddenly forgotten how to run?

Only Captain Hook would inject himself into a postseason game in this way.

If the George Steinbrenner of old were still in charge, Girardi would have been called onto the owner's carpet a long time ago.

Sons Hank and Hal Steinbrenner don't know baseball well enough to see how ridiculously bizarre many of Girardi's moves have been.

Strangely enough, it would have been fitting for the Yankees to lose Game 5 by 8-7 (instead of 7-6) with Guzman scoring the tying run on a bases loaded walk in the 9th (something A-Rod could have done) and the Angels scoring the winning run in extra innings because the Yanks got no offense and inferior defense from A-Rod's replacement at third base, Jerry Hairston.

Only Captain Hook would yank A-Rod for Guzman and Hairston.

Only Captain Hook would yank Johnny Damon from left field and insert Hairston with Angels on first and third and one out in the 10th in Game 3 because Hairston has a slightly better throwing arm.

(And it is only slightly better. Hairston’s throws do not invite comparisons to Jesse Barfield.)

If the Yankees don't win the World Series, or even get there, Girardi will be the reason.

Charlie Manuel may sound like a country bumpkin from West Virginia, which he is, but the Philadelphia Phillies manager is smart enough not to take Ryan Howard out of a game for a pinch-runner.

The Yankees remain the favorites to meet Philadelphia next week in the Fall Classic because Game 6 of the ALCS, and a possible Game 7, will be at Yankee Stadium.

But the Angels still have a prayer, whenever the guy managing the Yankees decides to lay his hands upon the series.

Coming soon to baseball: Mr. November

Los Angeles Angels players looked like they would rather have been anywhere else Friday night except at Yankee Stadium shivering in the Bronx chill during Game 1 of baseball’s American League Championship series.

With temperatures in the mid-30s, the New York Yankees didn’t look too comfortable either, despite their 4-1 victory.

Left fielder Johnny Damon was among the Yankees players wearing ear flaps under his cap, and Dominican-born second baseman Robinson Cano donned a wool mask that covered everything but his eyes.

In weather conditions unfit for furry animals, Major League Baseball is staging its most important games of the year.

Absurd.

But you could see this coming during the past few decades, as television’s money and influence over the erstwhile national pastime grew stronger and baseball’s resistance to it continued to weaken.

The best-of-seven-game Yankees-Angels series began on October 16. When more sensible folks ran big-league baseball, the entire season would have been over by October 16.

Need proof? Don Larsen’s perfect game—the only one in World Series history—gave the Yankees a 2-0 victory over the Brooklyn Dodgers on October 8, 1956.

Larsen’s gem occurred in Game 5, a game played in afternoon sunlight. The Yankees won the Fall Classic three days later.

Weekday afternoon World Series games are a thing of the past. So, unfortunately, will be the Fall Classic.

If the 2009 World Series goes the distance, then Games 5, 6, and 7 will be played in November. The Winter Classic would end on November 4.

The only other time a World Series ended in November was in 2001, when the Arizona Diamondbacks defeated the Yankees in seven games. That year, the terrorist attacks on 9-11 pushed the baseball season back one week.

Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter became the first player to win a World Series game in November, with a home run that decided Game 5.

Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson, another Yankees great, was so well-known for his postseason heroics that he became "Mr. October."

Now, “Mr. November” will be a title bestowed annually upon a player who, aided by long johns, gloves, a ski mask and a hot water bottle, generates enough body heat to deliver a game-winning performance.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way.

Baseball team owners and the players association could negotiate a deal to shave one week off the regular season and go back to a 154-game schedule, which had been the norm until the early 1960s.

Furthermore, players and owners could tweak the schedule to allow more doubleheaders (virtually a thing of the past) to ensure that the regular season ends on the final Sunday in September.

Then, the three playoff rounds could be completed by the week before Halloween, instead of the week after.

Yes, baseball would have to leave some television money on the table—an act that baseball owners obviously consider tantamount to blasphemy—but the sacrifice would ensure that the season’s most important games are not played in the worst weather conditions, as they are now.

A National League Division Series game in Denver last week was postponed because of snow and bitter cold.

I covered the 1997 World Series between the Indians and Florida Marlins in which the three games in Cleveland were played amid snow flurries.

We have seen the future of postseason baseball, and it’s f-f-f-freezin’!

It is a future that will include the annual crowning of a “Mr. November” as well as the distinct possibility that players will be scratched from the biggest games of the year because of frostbite.