Keefe To The City

Jun 21, 2012

How Did I Get Here?

Jerome Preisler doesn’t watch the Yankees with the same emotional attachment he once did, but that hasn’t changed his desire the game or for his team to win.

Well, whaddya know, I’m back.

To those who read my sports writing for any portion of the eight years it appeared on YESNetwork.com, it’s good to be here, and I hope you’ll bear with this introduction.

My first running column for YES, Deep in the Red, kicked off in the winter of 2004 coming off the Yankees’ ALCS playoff loss to the Boston Red Sox, and Boston’s subsequent World Series victory. It was a fan’s column. Back then I was spending half my time in Maine surrounded by gleefully ecstatic members of so-called Rex Sox Nation, and it seemed as if the whole town was waiting to jump me when I drove back up from New York after the Yanks’ ALCS defeat. It was aggravating, funny and, I thought, good fodder for an interesting series of columns. A Yankees fan stuck in Red Sox country suffering the consequences of the team’s historic collapse. Nice angle, I thought, always ready to turn my pain into a buck.

So I pitched the column to YESNetwork.com. It was a fun catharsis to take vengeful jabs at the neighbors – and eventually broadcasters and other personalities associated with baseball. But after four years the thing got stale. I was also increasingly uncomfortable writing about myself. Most importantly stuff had happened in my life. Serious stuff. It changed me.

What I mean is this: In 2005, I was at the Maine place when the Yanks were eliminated from the playoffs in their ugly ALDS Game 5 loss to the Angels marked by the infamous collision between Bubba Crosby and Gary Sheffield. After the game, I recall breaking a few Yankees figurines in my office and then sitting out in a New England downpour awhile with a headless McFarlane Derek Jeter in my fist.

I would not react that way to the team’s subsequent postseason eliminations. Sometime after ’05, I had my own brush with a kind of elimination, and the Yanks hadn’t cared about me. It’s like that bit of dialogue from the movie A Bronx Tale. In a scene set after the Yanks fell to the Pirates in Game 7 of the 1960 World Series, Sonny (a gangster played by Chazz Palminteri) tells “C” (the young son of a hardworking bus driver played by Francis Capra) the gritty realities of life as he sees it.

Sonny: “So you must be pretty upset after the Yankees lost.”

“C”: “Bill Mazeroski … I hate him. He made Mickey Mantle cry. The paper said that The Mick was crying.”

Sonny: “Mickey Mantle, is that what you’re upset about? Mickey Mantle makes a hundred thousand dollars a year. How much does your father make?”

“C”: “I don’t know.”

Sonny: “You don’t know? We’ll see if your father can’t pay the rent, go ask Mickey Mantle and see what he tells you. Mickey Mantle don’t care about you, so why should you care about him?”

I didn’t have anything close to Sonny’s sneering, dead-eyed cynicism toward the game (or life in general) Hopefully, I never will. But my attitude wasn’t much like the kid’s anymore, either. There was a streetwise wisdom in Sonny’s words. I still loved baseball, loved everything about it with a passion – the records, the skill and guts it demanded of players, its open, unclocked pacing, and the odd, contradictory perfection to be found in its essential imperfectness, which for me starts with the varying dimensions and quirky configurations of its parks. I still liked when the Yanks won much better than when they lost, but you wouldn’t catch me getting soaked in the rain over a game or series loss anymore.

The key word for me became game, however. What happened on the field could parallel and illuminate our lives in certain respects, but that didn’t make it the same thing. If a team goes down at the end of a season, it’s pretty much guaranteed another shot come the next one. Not so for people in the real world. We’re playing for mortal stakes.

Thus by the end of 2009 Deep in the Red had run its course. It would have been fraudulent to continue writing a column with a personal and often hyperemotional Yankees fan’s-eye view, given how that view had gone through a major ground-shift. Moreover, I’d been writing in a more objective journalistic fashion throughout that season. The column as originally conceived no longer existed. All that remained was to make it official with a name change.

With YES’s support, Yankees Ink debuted in 2010. It primarily featured opinion, analysis, and human-interest stories about players and people around the ballpark. The stories were my strong suit, the thing that kept me from being a redundancy with a laptop. Most of the people in stadium press boxes, including the beat crews, aren’t narrative writers. They’re news reporters. Being a writer of narrative nonfiction – or what the great Gay Talese has coined “literary journalism” – requires a different mindset and skill set.

While narrative nonfiction must be as well-researched and factually accurate as any news article, it uses many of the same techniques as fiction. It’s about finding and illuminating truth through storytelling, and as a novelist, that’s one of my strong suits.

Yankees Ink allowed me to do what I do best for multiple reasons. First, it was a freelance gig. I filed whenever I wanted and wrote about whatever struck my interest. Unless it was something I’d promised my editorial producer by a particular time, I didn’t have to submit my pieces on the night of a game or even after the conclusion of a series. If I felt I had nothing unique to say about a series, I’d often take a pass on writing about it, or possibly write about something off-topic. One of my favorite columns, for example, was a profile of the 35-year veteran beer vender Rick Goldfarb, known to Yankee fans as Cousin Brewski. How, I wondered, are historic moments at the ballpark viewed by a guy who sells beer there? Has he gotten to know the fans he’s served, watch their kids grow up, get married, maybe have kids of their own? Goldfarb answered that question in poignant, colorful fashion.

In 2010, I became the first person in the Yankee Stadium press box to live-tweet Joe Girardi’s postgame Q&A sessions and clubhouse player quotes. I didn’t consider the idea a mental lightning bolt. News editors demand quotes, but the stories I wrote didn’t always require them, and when they did, I knew I could always crib off a friend or two. Consequently, I didn’t have to record or jot them down. I had been looking for ways to make my use of social media from the Stadium more responsive to fans’ needs, and it seemed that I could best utilize Twitter by sharing the postgame comments in real time. The service would fill an obvious void, since many of my Twitter followers lived out of market and didn’t receive Yankees postgame shows. For me the only question was whether the mobile Twitter app on my cell would hang on me from the clubhouse in the Stadium’s basement. When it worked, I knew I was in business. Live-tweeting from the clubhouse has since become a staple of media coverage. I’ve mostly stopped doing it. As I said, I don’t want to be redundant.

My 2011 work was probably my best. I’d gotten a firm handle on how I wanted to write about sports. I’d taken a lead role in YES’ written coverage of HOPE Week – something that became a real passion, and would lead to my current book project about Daniel Trush, one of the 2011 honorees. My live tweeting of the Jorge Posada-removing-himself-from-the-lineup incident provided an exciting day that even prompted an interview request from one Neil Keefe for his Keefe To The City Podcast on WFAN’s site. By the season’s end, I felt I’d really hit my stride and was planning ways to break new ground with the column in 2012.

When YESNetwork.com dropped Yankees Ink as an ongoing feature after almost a decade, it admittedly caught me by surprise. The site had gone to a new operating model that left me only an occasional contributor, leaving me to figure out what to do next as far as writing about baseball. I felt my voice and perspective worthy of sharing with readers, and, although my professional relationship with YES remained solid, I still wanted to do a regular column that was synched to the rhythms of a baseball season. At the same time, my particular brand of writing was not an easy fit for most outlets. It took a while to find a landing spot, or figure out if one even existed. But since you’re reading these words it tells you I have. Thanks for the vote of confidence, Mr. Keefe.

What you’ll get here at Preisler Ink is essentially what you got from me before. My focus will still be Yankees-centric, but, as the tweaked column title indicates, I expect to digress into other teams, and maybe on occasion other sports. In all the years my columns appeared in their blog roll, YES never put constraints on my work and that remains the case to the present. But in concept, I feel I can be a little freer and broader of scope here outside a corporate umbrella. What that means in execution, admittedly, is something I can’t wait to find out – and I hope you’ll stop by and visit often and find out along with me. We’re in this together.

As Cardinal Timothy Dolan once told an overzealous Yankees security guard who tried to stop me from accompanying some team members into St. Patrick’s Cathedral: “All are welcome.”

Blogs • Yankees

Jun 19, 2012

The Unsung Heroes of the Yankees’ Bullpen

The Yankees are getting big outs from unlikely arms, and their success has forced power rankings for the makeshift bullpen.

When I hear “Tuesday’s Gone” I think of Happy Gilmore. When I hear the word “magic” I think of Happy Gilmore shaking his caddy on the ground after clinching the Waterbury Open with Pilot’s “Magic ” playing in the background. With the way the Yankees’ bullpen has been performing, the only explanation is magic and because of it, I want to celebrate by shaking Joe Girardi while screaming, “Oh, ho, ho, it’s magic you knowwww! Never believe it’s not so!”

If you told me on the morning of Opening Day that on June 19 I would be writing about the Yankees bullpen currently featuring Rafael Soriano as the closer, Boone Logan and Cory Wade as setup men and Clay Rapada and Cody Eppley as middle relievers, well let’s just say I would be living in Europe and writing about Euro 2012. Luckily no one told me this was going to happen.

The Yankees are 41-25 and in first place in the AL East with the best record in the AL thanks to a 10-game winning streak, which this group of ragtag relievers (that’s the first and most likely the last time I have and will ever use “ragtag,” and you can thank Jack Edwards for putting that word into my vocabulary) has been a large part of. Sure, it’s easy to win games the way the Yankees did on Monday night when CC Sabathia pitched a complete game against the Braves (Side note: I forgot to start CC and R.A. Dickey, who pitched a one-hitter against the Orioles, on my fantasy team. Devastating.) But it’s not so easy to win games when Cody Eppley and Clay Rapada are being asked to serve as the middle relief bridge.

It’s crazy that right now I have confidence in everyone in the bullpen not named Freddy Garcia, but I don’t trust anyone in the bullpen not named David Robertson. And since David Robertson has become the must trustworthy Yankees reliever not named Mariano Rivera since 2007 Joba Chamberlain, I’m leaving him out of these power rankings that I have created to figure out the my personal bullpen pecking order. I’m also leaving out Rafael Soriano since he is now the closer and because he’s making $11 million this year, so he should be expected to get outs.

I have heard these ragtag (OK, there it is again) relievers called a lot of things over the last couple of weeks. Most of the things I have called them while yelling at games or shouting at my TV have been derogatory, but I have heard different forms of the word “hero” thrown around to describe this relief corps. Dwight Schrutte said, “A hero kills people, people that wish him harm. A hero is part human and part supernatural. A hero is born out of a childhood trauma, or out of a disaster, and must be avenged.” I don’t think that’s the type of hero that these guys are, so let’s go with “unsung” hero. And let’s go through the bullpen to figure out who should get the ball from top to bottom.

Number 48, Boone Logan, Number 48
I want to start this off by saying it’s effing scary that Boone Logan is the No. 1-ranked pitcher on any list I create. Oh yeah, Robertson and Soriano aren’t on this list. OK, I feel a little better.

If I make Boone Logan a mixtape that includes Chicago’s “Hard To Say I’m Sorry” do you think he will forgive me? Actually I don’t want him to forgive me. Because deep down I know that the Boone Logan I watched in 2010 and 2011 in key moments is just waiting for me to let my guard down before he ambushes me. He did it to me on Sept. 14, 2010 when I finally wrote an apology to him only to have him on that same day give up a go-ahead, three-run home run to Willy Aybar in Tampa Bay. So Boone, I’m manning up here to say I’m sorry. You don’t have to accept my apology or the mixtape, or the flowers or the fruit basket I am having sent to the Stadium on Tuesday night. Just go out there and keep putting up zeroes and that will be enough for me.

Number 53, Cory Wade, Number 53
Last Monday (June 11) was the one-year anniversary of the Rays releasing Cory Wade. I know what you’re thinking: Where was the party? Well, there wasn’t a party, but there should have been in either Cashman’s office or Girardi’s.

In 68 games and 67 2/3 innings with the Yankees, Wade has 60 strikeouts and 14 walks, a 2.39 ERA and a 1.020 WHIP. He has been prone to the home run (like he was on Saturday) with four allowed in 28 innings this year, but he’s gone from the scrap heap to the reliever “B” team to the reliever “A” team in a year. Thanks again, Tampa Bay!

Number 38, Cody Eppley, Number 38
In real life, Cody Eppley would have gotten sent down and David Phelps would have stayed with the Yankees. But this isn’t real life since Eppley is getting huge outs for the Yankees, and also because the Yankees needed Phelps to go back to the minors to get stretched out to be a starter again.

Eppley getting that double play on an 0-2 pitch last Wednesday against the Braves to preserve a 3-2 lead in the eighth inning with runners on first and third and one out is enough to buy him some time in my book in the even that he remembers he’s Cody Eppley and not Jeff Nelson. (Yes, I’m willing to forget that he gave up hits to two of three hitters he faced before the 6-4-3 double play.) How much time that double play will buy him has yet to be determined.

Number 39, Clay Rapada, Number 39
Clay Rapada has become my Pitching Whipping Boy for 2012 (Nick Swisher remains the Overall Whipping Boy) now that A.J. Burnett is pitching in Pittsburgh and Boone Logan has become (or rather been forced into being) a valuable part of the bullpen.

Entering this season, Rapada had appeared in 78 games with the Cubs, Tigers, Rangers and Orioles. He had a career 5.13 ERA in 52 2/3 innings with 32 walks. Everything about Rapada forced me into the lengthy “Nooooooooooooooo!” that Michael Scott used upon Toby’s return. I wanted the Yankees to have nothing to do with Rapada because I wanted to have nothing to do with him interfering with my baseball season and my summer. But because he throws a baseball using his left arm, (if you have watched Clay Rapada and you have a child and aren’t tying their right hand behind their back until they are 16 then you are doing whole parenting thing wrong) you just knew that Brian Cashman and Joe Girardi were going to find a spot for him on the roster.

Rapada has been goo… Rapada has been goo… He’s been… He’s been goo… OK, he’s been good. There, I said it. Are you happy now? He’s been better than I expected and lefties are just 7-for-46 (.152) against him. However, don’t let him fool you. He will blow up at some point in this season. Let’s just hope it isn’t in a big spot because it’s going to happen. I “Mark Messier guarantee” it’s going to happen.

Number 36, Freddy Garcia, Number 36
I hate to break it to the Freddy Garcia fans out there (if there any), but the 35-year-old righty no longer belongs on the Yankees. Sorry, Freddy and sorry to your fans.

Garcia came up huge in the 12th and 13th innings in Washington on Saturday to earn his first win since last September, but he owed that performance to Yankees fans. I still can’t get over the writers who cover the team tweeting about how Garcia is a “gamer” and sarcastically asking their followers if they still want Garcia off the team after his effort in extra innings? I guess they forgot about him giving up 19 earned runs in 13 2/3 innings in his four starts in April? Maybe they forgot that in those four starts he got pulled in the second inning twice (against Boston and Detroit) and the only reason the Yankees went 2-2 in his starts instead of 0-4 is because they came back against the Orioles on April 10 and erased a 9-1 deficit at Fenway Park on April 21? And how much of a “gamer” was Garcia when he lost Game 2 of the ALDS to the Tigers? Isn’t the postseason when a “gamer” shows up? (I understand what the Yankees got out of Garcia and Bartolo Colon last year was a replica of the lightning caught in a bottle with Aaron Small and Shawn Chacon in 2005, but let’s be serious.) So, to answer your question, yes, I still want Garcia off the team.

And I want Garcia gone because he doesn’t serve a purpose. He has become the long reliever/extra innings/mop-up duty man only because Rivera is out and Robertson has been hurt. Those are actually the roles for Eppley and Rapada, but their recent success and those same injuries have moved them into more important roles. The only thing Garcia presents out of the bullpen is a scary option for Joe Girardi to turn to when his other relievers need a rest.

The problem is there’s a good chance that Garcia will survive the season with the Yankees unless Eppley and Rapada keep getting the job done and Joba Chamberlain and David Aardsma can make healthy returns, and he will survive because he’s owed $4 million this year. If you don’t plan on eating a meal anytime soon, then think about this: Garcia will make $4 million this season and R.A. Dickey will only make $4.25 million.

Yankees

Jun 19, 2012

Boston Has Become the Newer New York

Boston and its fans have always hated New York, so isn’t it weird that the city has become everything it’s been against? Mike Miccoli misses the way things used to be.

Here’s something you probably didn’t know about me, even though we may have never met: I’m a Red Sox fan, but I used to root for the New York Yankees.

As a kid growing up in Rhode Island, the Tri-Guido-County areas dictated enemy lines for Yankees and Red Sox fans. Thanks to my lack of geographical direction, I’m not too sure which side I was on, but I knew that I liked rooting for winners, and in the late ‘90s/early 2000s, the Yankees were the biggest winner.

Of course, I was a casual baseball fan back then. By casual, I mean that I watched the team when they were winning, collected Derek Jeter baseball cards and may or may not have bought a red Yankees cap, similar to the one Fred Durst wore. I was, unfortunately, the poster boy for pink hat fan’s as a teenager. But with hockey and football as my sports, I thought it was somewhat acceptable to root for a baseball team who just won all the time. It wasn’t like the Bruins or Patriots were winning anything for me … yet.

So what happened to my pink-hat ways? Thankfully, I grew up and moved to Boston where the city’s culture forced me to become a baseball junkie (as did years of fantasy baseball). The move forced me to turn in my pink, I mean red Yankees hat for a Red Sox hat. I resisted at first – seriously, I did – before succumbing to the pressures of my friends and the city.

The Red Sox were the perennial underdogs; a group of guys who you could get behind, not because they were a team of All-Stars or the highest-paid players, but because they wanted to win, and erase lifetimes of losing in Boston. The team had been consistently deserving of a “Good job, good effort” meme up until 2004, and it was endearing. But in 2004, everything changed, and then, for good measure, everything changed again in 2007.

Along with the Patriots, the Red Sox became the toast of the town, while the Bruins and Celtics wallowed in mediocrity, turning around the city’s sports focus. The change lasted until 2008 when the Celtics won and earned back their respect and the Bruins regained their status after winning in 2011.

In the span of 10 years, Boston sports teams claimed a total of seven championships. Prior to 2002 (when the Patriots won their first Super Bowl) it might have taken the city of Boston 30 years to reach that number, and it would have only been because of the Celtics’ torrid run in the late 70s and 80s, and the Bruins sole Cup in ‘72.

After the seven titles, Boston wasn’t the home of the underdog anymore. The city and its teams became the favorites. Boston was the city with the parades, the highest payrolls and the seemingly sold-out games. Everyone was a fan, too – for better or worse. And by winning, Boston got what they’ve always wanted: to be exactly like New York.

Championships do strange things to teams and in turn, cities. Win a few and you’ll have a target on your back for years to come. The same fans who might have been rooting for the Patriots to upset the Rams, the Red Sox to stun the Yankees right before sweeping the Cardinals, the Celtics to silence the Lakers and the Bruins to shock the Canucks, probably despise those teams now. And can you blame them? Pair those wins with embarrassing moments like Spygate (ugh), White Housegate (ugh) and Bobby Valentine (UGH), and what do you expect to happen?

In becoming New York, the Boston sports scene turned into everything Boston sports fans hated about their rival city. And now, New York’s teams and players have become … umm … well, likeable. Right now I could say something positive about every New York team sans the Jets, because frankly, the Jets are still the worst. But this was never the case before. When the Bruins were knocked out of the playoffs in the first round, who did I root for? The Rangers: a New York team I grew up hating.

While Boston still has plenty of likeable, hard-working athletes there are a hell of a lot of guys who are considered to be flat-out jerks. New York doesn’t have that same stigma anymore. New York has the universally appreciated Henrik Lundqvist, Ryan Callahan, Victor Cruz and Curtis Granderson, and Jeter and Mariano Rivera are on an even higher level. Sure, New York still boasts some jerks, but the bad apples are clearly outnumbered.

It’s become the complete opposite in Boston. Yes, there’s Patrice Bergeron, Paul Pierce and Dustin Pedroia, but take a look around at fans from the sports world fans and look at how many non-Bostonians hate Boston athletes. How many outsiders are cheering for Tom Brady nowadays? Or what about Tim Thomas? Feel-good stories (like the ones Brady and Thomas shared) get tainted once the ultimate goal is reached and not reached repeatedly, and those two former postseason heroes are experiencing that now have postseason failures.

I guess this is all part of the unspoken trade-off for success: win championships and you will be hated. I get it. But if Boston is going to be New York, the only thing I want to know is if we can give some of our bandwagon fans to New York? We never asked for them.

Blogs

Jun 14, 2012

Hiroki Kuroda Is No Longer a Coin Flip and Other Thoughts

Thoughts on Hiroki Kuroda, A-Rod, Nick Swisher, perfect games, no-hitters and Zach Parise.

It’s Thursday, and that means it’s time for Thursday Thoughts, which is my way of putting together things that didn’t end up in columns for the week.

The Coin Flip Kuroda name is officially retired … indefinitely. That doesn’t mean it won’t make a comeback like Andy Pettitte, but it really holds no meaning as of late. I’m not about to start calling Kuroda “Sure Thing,” but I can’t justify his “Coin Flip” status.

Here are Kuroda’s last four starts.

May 27 @ OAK: 8 IP, 4 H, 0 R, 0 ER, 1 BB, 3 K

June 2 @ DET: 7 IP, 7 H, 2 R, 2 ER, 1 BB, 4 K

June 8 vs. NYM: 7 IP, 1 H, 0 R, 0 ER, 1 BB, 7 K

June 13 @ ATL: 6 IP, 9 H, 2 R, 2 ER, 2 BB, 8 K

Total line: 28 IP, 21 H, 4 R, 4 ER, 5 BB, 22 K, 1.29 ERA, 0.929 WHIP

Kuroda has now made 13 starts this season and has allowed three earned runs or less in 10 of them. He has six losses and one no-decision, but in those seven games the offense has scored 16 runs, including being shut out twice and scoring just one run twice. (The offense has scored three runs or less in eight of his starts.)

The real question I ask with Yankees pitchers is: Do I trust him? I don’t think I “trust” Kuroda yet (since I trust CC Sabathia and Andy Pettitte), but I have confidence when he is on the mound. Having trust in a Yankees pitcher is the highest compliment I can give them, and for Kuroda just having confidence in him right now is a big step in the right direction when you consider that 24 days ago he lost to the Royals and 29 days ago he gave up seven earned runs and three home runs in Toronto. (For example, I just now have “confidence” in Boone Logan after two-plus seasons, but I don’t “trust” him. However I’m getting there.) Kuroda hasn’t lost since that May 21 start against the Royals at the Stadium, and since then he has outgrown the “Coin Flip” nickname and given me confidence in him. The next step is gaining that trust and then we’ll start to talk about where he fits into the postseason rotation.

***

Is anyone surprised that A-Rod finished second and Nick Swisher finished third as the most hated players in baseball (A.J. Pierzynski finished first) in the Men’s Journal player’s poll? Actually I’m surprised that Swisher finished third. I can understand why non-New Yorkers hate A-Rod, but Swisher? Is it possible that even non-Yankees fans are seeing what some Yankees fans are in Swisher’s over-the-top and sometimes phony personality? At least one player is.

An unnamed American League veteran said, “Everything about (Swisher) is annoying, from his mannerisms to his always wanting to ‘bro’ it down. Being around him is just exhausting.”

Maybe it’s just going to take me more time to come around on Swisher than others (though we are in the fourth season of this and there might not be a fifth season), but I just don’t see it happening. Between Swisher’s lack of hitting in the postseason, his low Baseball IQ, his shaky defense, his arguing of obvious called third strikes and the way he goes about things (like climbing the wall for a rob attempt when the ball is 30-plus rows back) there’s just something about him that I can’t stand. I guess that “something” is the “broing it down.”

***

Of course the one night I decide to go to sleep early there’s a perfect game on the West Coast. I felt like I had been disconnected from the world when I was scrolling through Twitter on my phone on Thursday morning and finding out in reverse order that Matt Cain had thrown a perfect game. It’s always strange when you a big story from a game, and use Twitter to watch it unfold backwards even though you already know the outcome.

No-hitters and perfect games are always entertaining even if some old, grumpy, miserable sportswriters have nothing to say or write so they go with the angles that the feats are too common now or that they have lost their importance. This season we have seen Cain and Philip Humber throw perfect games and no-hitters from Jered Weaver, Johan Santana and the Mariners staff and all of them have been enjoyable. (Yes, I experienced joy while reading tweets about Cain’s after missing it.) And on top of those, Cy Young favorite (and one of my personal favorites) R.A. Dickey nearly added the Mets second no-hitter in 12 days on Wednesday night after the franchise suffered through 50-plus years without one.

There’s a good chance Justin Verlander could no-hit the Cubs on Thursday afternoon, and no one would be surprised. And if he does I will enjoy it the same way I have for the rest of the non-Yankees perfect games and no-hitters because they never get old unlike sportswriters.

***

“No. No way.” That’s what Zach Parise said and repeated over and over when asked if he would go to the Rangers as a free agent this offseason. Does anyone believe him?

Parise just finished his seventh season with the Devils and it would have been his eighth if there wasn’t a lockout in 2004-05. He started playing for the Devils when he was 20, and they are the only team he has known as a professional. When asked the question, he had just finished losing the Stanley Cup Final after playing in all 106 of the Devils’ games this year. So it makes sense why he would say “no” several times when asked about leaving the only team he has ever known to join their rival in the middle of the Devils locker room after a season that lasted as long and ended as devastatingly as it did.

Does that mean Parise will say no to the Rangers when they officially pursue him? Of course not. He would have to really hate money to close the door on the Rangers before they even talk to him or make him an offer, as it would destroy any leverage he has of getting more out of the Devils, and would take away from what the Red Wings might offer.

For some reason I believe Parise when he says that he wouldn’t play for the Rangers. He seems like the loyal type that you can rarely find in 2012, and as the captain of the team, I think he understands what he means to his organization. But then you start weighing his options of playing at The Rock rather than Madison Square Garden or Hockeytown and for a fan base that doesn’t come close to what the Rangers and Red Wings have, and you would have to think that Parise would have to be more than just someone who hates money to stay with the Devils. He would have to be insane.

The Devils are still Martin Brodeur’s team even if he hasn’t been Martin Brodeur for a while now, and once he retires it will be Ilya Kovalchuk’s team. And while Parise would join a roster with Henrik Lundqvist, Ryan Callahan, Marian Gaborik, Brad Richards and Marc Staal, if he signed with the Rangers, he would get paid and have the ability to contend for the Cup in his prime as the youth of the Rangers enters theirs. I don’t think you can say the same for the Devils. But maybe Brodeur’s line after the Devils’ Game 6 loss that “These guys will be celebrating a championship in the near future” is a step toward convincing Parise to stay a Devil the way Brodeur has for so long.

If Parise decides he would rather play his home games in Newark rather than Manhattan, and if he would rather try to win the Cup with the Devils and have a parade in a parking lot rather than up the Canyon of Heroes then I can’t help him.

Blogs • Email Exchanges • NHL

Jun 13, 2012

The NHL Season That Was

With the NHL season in the books it only seemed right to look back at what was learned over the last eight-plus months in an email exchange with Mike Hurley.

The 2011-12 NHL season lasted 249 days starting with the Bruins-Flyers game on Oct. 6 and ending with the Kings’ Game 6 win over the Devils on June 11. With the season in the books it only seemed right to look back at what was learned over the last eight-plus months in an email exchange with good friend and also enemy Mike Hurley.

Keefe: The NHL Season started on Oct. 6. How do I know that? Well it was the night before the Yankees lost to the Tigers in Game 5 of the ALDS at the Stadium. Do you know long ago that was?!?! Forever ago. The NHL goes on and on and on and then when it ends, it starts up again just a couple months later, and I guess that’s why I love it so much. From the time the Bruins won the Cup a year ago until now, it’s felt like one long season. And when you consider that your Bruins were eliminated from the playoffs 59 days ago and the playoffs just ended on Monday it’s pretty insane.

We thought (along with just about everyone else) that the Rangers and Bruins would meet in the Eastern Conference Finals, but that idea didn’t exactly go according to plan. In the end it was the eighth-seeded Kings beating the sixth-seeded Devils in the Stanley Cup Final, which makes me asks whether or not the current NHL playoff format is the best possible format? I’m not saying this because the Rangers didn’t get by the Devils, but because it seems like there should be more incentive to win the conference. In 2012 with cookie-cutter rinks and luxurious travel for teams, home-ice advantage has become nonexistent.

Two years ago I proposed the idea that 10 teams in each conference make the playoffs with the bottom four teams (seeds 7, 8, 9 and 10) playing a three-game series (7 vs. 10 and 8 vs. 9) on consecutive days during the off days between the regular season and the start of the playoffs. All three games would be at the higher seed’s arena, and the two winners would become the seventh and eighth seeds in the playoffs.

I know it might be a little much and closer to the baseball postseason format, which we both hate, but I don’t think you can have byes in the NHL, and this is the closest thing to giving the top two seeds an advantage, while making the rest of the teams play to stay out of the three-game series.

Hurley: As someone who gets nauseous any time someone mentions the new baseball postseason format, I’m not sure I can fully endorse your plan. I do agree though that the NHL season and postseason shake out isn’t entirely fair and doesn’t make too much sense.

Basically, this year you had the Kings go 40-27-15, though they entered March at 29-23-12, which gave them a .453 winning percentage. I don’t know how you judge teams, but to me, that’s not very good.

Then you had the Devils, who went 48-28-6. That’s not all that bad, but their season ended with six straight wins.

I don’t bring these records up to take anything away from the Kings or Devils, but I do think it illustrates how meaningless the 82-game regular season is in the NHL.

The problem with your solution is that you’re adding two teams to an already-diluted playoff field. Yes, the eighth-seeded Kings won this year, but would you really have wanted to add Calgary, Dallas, Buffalo and Tampa to this year’s playoff field? And do you want 66 percent of teams making the postseason? That only goes to make the regular season even more useless.

I disagree with you when you say that you can’t have byes in hockey. After that marathon regular season, teams that are beaten and bruised need nothing more than a little rest to get just a little bit stronger for that postseason push, which can last the better part of three months. Just look at the Kings this postseason: They had five days off after winning their first-round series, six days off after sweeping the second round and seven days off after eliminating the Coyotes in five games. Clearly, there was no rust factor at play there, as the team was able to stay healthy and open up 3-0 leads in every single series it played, which is an absurdly ridiculous accomplishment.

Now, would the Kings have been able to do the same if they had to toil through a first-round series before facing a well-rested, top-seeded Canucks team? Maybe, but at least the Canucks would have earned some advantage for winning 51 games from October through April.

One thing that DEFINITELY needs to be changed is the whole “winning your division automatically gets you in the top three spots in the conference” fiasco. That’s absurd. The Bruins were the No. 2 seed in the East this year but should have been fourth. The Panthers were the No. 3 seed but should have been sixth. The divisions in hockey aren’t distinct enough to warrant such a major impact on playoff seeding (though the NHL has its hands full with that atrocious realignment plan, so perhaps this issue can be cleared up when the league makes another attempt this summer).

Keefe: OK, you have talked me out of the more teams and three-game series and into the byes. Maybe you should have been a salesman. I also agree on the ridiculous seeding with division winners, which is just as ridiculous as what baseball is doing with letting division winners with worse records than wild-card teams get into the ALDS without any problem. I forgot that I’m not supposed to mention the new MLB postseason format around you.

We have had our fair share of talks about the Patriots and how what they did between 2001 and 2004 will most likely never be seen again. To win week after week in the postseason and essentially one-game playoff after one-game playoff along with three Super Bowls in four years is something that is close to impossible in sports. Look at the Giants. They won two times in four years, which seems unfathomable, and I can think of hundreds of plays and decisions that had even one of them gone the other way they would have never won the Super Bowl, let alone made the Super Bowl, let alone made the playoffs! But I’m sure that’s a topic that makes you more nauseous than the MLB postseason format.

You brought up some good points about the chances of repeating in the NHL in past discussions and how the combination of a lengthy season mixed with a summer of partying as champions and having less of an offseason, plus the fatigue factor and every team wanting to beat the defending champions for 82 straight games takes a toll on a team. The Bruins and Canucks finished last season on June 15, even later than the end of this season, and then both went out in the first round to a 7-seed and an 8-seed respectively. Sure, the Capitals and the Kings might have just been better teams or better during that one series, but then you look at the 2010-11 Blackhawks and they barely made the playoffs before going out in the first round. The 2009-10 Penguins, who many thought would go back to the Cup for a third straight year, were bounced in the second round by the inferior and eighth-seeded Canadiens. I guess the back-to-back years of the Penguins and Red Wings in the Stanley Cup Final in 2007-08 and 2008-09 are the exception to the rule, but still there hasn’t been a repeat for the title since the Red Wings in 96-97 and 97-98, and those teams were stupid. I mean they went 32-10 in the playoffs in those two years, including 8-0 against the Flyers and Capitals for the Cup.

So should we pencil in any team other than the Kings for the Cup in 2012-13? Does this mean the MSG Network won’t have to keep making series and commercials and documentaries about the Summer of ’94?

Hurley: Some day, perhaps we’ll have a discussion where you don’t mention the Giants winning Super Bowls. Alas, that day is not today.

I did like that you told me I’ve brought up some good points. That is probably the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me, so I feel it’s best that I repay you with something nice. So, um, I guess I can say that when I see your face, I don’t want to punch it ALL the time, just most of the time. That’s nice, right?

I really believe that in this salary cap era, it will be nearly impossible for a team to repeat. I know the Penguins and Red Wings both made it back in two straight years, but the variables there were having the two best players in the world on one team and having the deepest, smartest roster on the other. That’s just rare. And the long injury problems that have followed Sidney Crosby since then only go to further my belief.

I probably feel that way after watching the Bruins closely in their post-Cup run. There were the obvious parties and $150,000 bar tabs and the endless sightings of Brad Marchand wearing no shirt and Tyler Seguin wearing his pants far too low, but I don’t think those were the problems that prevented the Bruins from getting back to the top. For one, there was the massive dropoff in intensity from their 25 playoff games to the first month of the regular season, when they went 3-7-0. And it’s really hard to quantify, but you really saw a lot of lesser teams around the league “get up” for their home game against the Bruins. I’m fairly positive that a half-dozen people became deaf in Winnipeg on Feb. 17, when the Jets beat the Bruins 4-2, and I’m equally as sure that there were riots on the streets of St. Paul when the Wild shut out the Bruins two days later.

Once the playoffs rolled around, the Bruins didn’t have Nathan Horton to score the crucial goals they needed, and an above-average Tim Thomas wasn’t nearly as good as the absolutely phenomenal Tim Thomas who showed up the previous spring.

And even with Horton and Thomas, the Bruins still needed a lucky bounce off a diving Canadien to win Game 7 of the opening round last year. If that puck doesn’t go in, and Montreal ends up scoring in that overtime, then I’m not sitting here talking about the Boston Bruins because nobody would care about the team that can’t get out of the first round.

The point is, it’s so ridiculously difficult to win one Cup in today’s NHL. It’s doubly impossible to do it two years in a row.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go punch a few walls because you mentioned the new MLB playoff format around me.

Keefe: I wasn’t going to talk about it because I feel like it might be a sensitive topic for you, but since you mentioned Tim Thomas, let’s talk about him. Or let’s try to at least answer the question: What is Tim Thomas doing?

It’s June 13. In two days it will be one year since the Bruins won the Stanley Cup. When the Bruins won the Stanley Cup, Tim Thomas was a hero in Boston. I don’t want to say that he would ever sustain being in the class that Tom Brady and David Ortiz are in, but he was right there, and he was at least in that class for a little while. He became so big that my friend Derek from Boston got a tattoo of Thomas holding the Cup on his arm, and no one thought it was weird.

Let’s look at what happened over the last year…

Thomas morphed into the first face of the Bruins since Joe Thornton left town, and he gave the blue-collar fans a blue-collar hero who didn’t become a starting goalie in the league until he was 36. This is the same guy that was stuck on the depth chart behind Andrew Raycroft, John Grahame and Steve Shields at different points in his NHL career. Even after becoming the starter, the Bruins signed Manny Fernandez to be the starter over Thomas in 2007-08.

But then Thomas decided to not go to The White House with his teammates to celebrate their championship with President Obama. It’s not like Thomas was a fourth-liner or someone who was a healthy scratch on and off during the playoff run … he was the sole reason the team was at The White House and he didn’t show up. Then he decided to not talk to the media when he didn’t feel like it, started being a distraction to the team and his teammates because of his Facebook page, his play slipped, and it all came together when he spoke oddly about the team following their Game 7 playoff loss to the Capitals. And then out of nowhere he decided he wasn’t going to play in 2012-13 despite being under contract in an attempt to play for Team USA in the 2014 Winter Olympics even though he was the backup goalie in 2010 and even though Jonathan Quick (the third goalie in 2010) and Ryan Miller (the starter in 2010) will play over him. Did I leave anything out?

After writing all that, it seems crazy that a year ago Thomas could have had opening containers of alcohol in Faneuil Hall while wearing no clothes and urinating on a sausage and peppers cart, and nothing would have happened to him. Now he’s just this weird guy who won the team their first Stanley Cup since 1972.

What the eff happened?

Hurley: We could probably spill a few thousand words on Thomas alone, so I’ll try to be succinct. Essentially, goalies are always the weirdest guys on the team, but in a position full of weirdos, Thomas stands out as one of the weirdest.

But I’m not even sure this is about Thomas being weird. I think it’s about him having leverage. Peter Chiarelli clearly didn’t read the CBA before signing Thomas to that four-year, $20 million contract, otherwise he’d have known that the team would absorb that $5 million cap hit whether Thomas played, quit, or moved to Italy to become a butcher. Thomas’ agent, knowing that the no-trade clause expires on July 1, pulled the only bit of leverage he and his client had — they made Thomas untradeable. Or at least, they made themselves a necessary part of any potential trade talks. Thomas knows the Bruins would be happy to trade him (and his cap hit) and let Tuukka Rask start 60-65 games next season, and by declaring he won’t play next year, it requires that any interested team would have to talk to him before acquiring him. If it’s, say, Columbus and he doesn’t want to play there, he’ll likely just tell the Columbus brass that he doesn’t plan on playing next season. If it’s, say, Colorado, and that idea excites him, then he’ll go for it.

I think that’s the business side of it. Maybe I’m a bad person for not taking Thomas’ “Friends, Family and Faith” thing at face value, but given his aspirations to play for Team USA, and his inclusion of sponsor links in his “heartfelt message” that he posted on Facebook, I think you’re a fool to not be skeptical.

Now, the part about his fall from grace is truly fascinating. The guy never had the personality to be someone like Ortiz, and he lacked the youthful greatness of Brady during the Super Bowl days, but he had unquestionably the most remarkable story of any athlete we’ve ever seen. He was the 217th pick in 1994, picked behind goalies named Henrik Smangs, Vitali Yeremeyev, Luciano Caravaggio and Evgeni Ryabchikov. When he finally made it as a full timer in the NHL more than a decade later, most of us laughed at the thought of him as a starter. He was too erratic, too wild and too out-of-control to last in the best league in the world. And he kept proving us all wrong, kept improving his numbers every single year and ultimately turned in one of the best postseason performances of any goalie ever.

Now? He’s burned more bridges that anyone thought possible, and to just about everybody around the team, he’s as good as gone. And it all happened in less than one calendar year. Truly unbelievable.

Keefe: Tim Thomas wasn’t the only guy associated with the 2011-12 season that became a focal point in every media session. We had one of those in New York in John Tortorella.

Tortorella has had this cocky attitude and swagger about himself since showing up to New York for Tom Renney in the middle of the 2008-09 season, and while the Rangers could have used a coaching change back then, it wasn’t really necessary. After Renney had returned the team to respectability (after Glen Sather spent a decade erasing any and all of that respectability) by returning to the playoffs in 2005-06 and reaching the second round in 2006-07 and 2007-08. Then with some inconsistent play in ’08-09, he was gone. Maybe the team needed a new voice and a shakeup like we saw with the ‘08-09 Penguins and Dan Bylsma or this year’s King with Darryl Sutter, but it seemed like a quick hook. If this season’s Rangers team wasn’t good enough to win the Cup (or even reach it), thinking that the 2008-09 was good enough to do so and needed a coaching change to do so is just crazy.

But Tortorella’s attitude since coming here has been “I won in 2003-04 and no one in New York has won since 1993-94.” He has carried himself this way with the media every chance he could get, and I decided that he had to take this team to the conference finals for him to finally win me over, and for him to stop banking on his success with the Lightning as a way to carry himself. He did just that and now I’m a card-carrying member of the John Tortorella Fan Club whether or not I really want to be.

As an outsider, and a fellow native of Massachusetts like Tortorella, how is he viewed from your perspective? For me, I have no choice, but to like him after he held up his end of the bargain that I created and he never knew about, and because not liking John Tortorella around here is like not liking Nick Swisher.

Hurley: I think he’s an A-hole. Should I go on?

I don’t care if a guy doesn’t say much when he talks to the media. Really, I don’t at all. Athletes/coaches/whoever not talking to the media becomes such an overblown story line these days, and honestly I could care less because they all spit the same clichés and talk for five minutes without saying anything.

What does bother me is his tough guy attitude with the media and his intimidation. You’re not a tough guy. You’re a hockey coach. You wear a suit to work. Stop trying to act like you’re a professional wrestler.

And what’s bothered me is that he’s imposed his style on that team so much in a “my way or the highway” kind of way, and I’ve never been convinced he has enough cachet for that to be justified. Yeah, he won the Stanley Cup, but that was with Marty St. Louis and Vincent Lecavalier in their primes, Brad Richards emerging as a star and the NHL screwing the Flames out of winning the whole damn thing in Game 6 when Marty Gelinas and the Flames were robbed of the Cup-winning goal.

I’m not completely anti-Massachusetts coaches, though. Give me Peter Laviolette any day of the week.

Keefe: We rarely agree on anything, but the one thing we can agree on is the inconsistent job done by Brendan Shanahan throughout the season.

Shanahan started out so strong and promising by throwing the book at everyone who even attempted a borderline illegal hit, elbow or headshot. But as the season went on and owners and general managers had their way, the suspensions and punishments lessened and became more sporadic. Then it all came to a boiling point in the playoffs when Shanahan decided to dust off Colin Campbell’s dartboard and remake his cootie catcher out of some construction paper. Starting in the quarterfinals and going through the conference finals, Shanahan made a series of questionable decisions based on whether or not a player was injured from the incident.

It’s hard to find anyone over the last few seasons that has written more words about illegal and borderline illegal hits in the league than you. For someone who didn’t want Colin Campbell to be the judge for the NHL any longer and was initially excited about the job Shanahan was doing, what is your evaluation of Shanahan after one year?

Hurley: I’ve always felt my calling in life was to work at the league office in Toronto, sit in front of 12 TV screens with a dozen glazed donuts and an extra-large coffee and watch hockey games. When refs had trouble determining whether a puck crossed a line or not, or whether it was kicked in, they’d call me. I’d answer the phone and say, “Hey, Billy. Yah, dat’s a goal.” (I’d talk like a Canadian out of respect for the game.) Other times I’d say, “Ay Jahnny. How’re da wife and kids? Good. Well ahh yah! No goal. See ya, Jahnny.”

(Excuse me while I weep for a moment while realizing I’ll never get that job. … … … OK. I’ve regrouped.)

But now I think maybe my real calling in life is to determine suspensions in the NHL. I was all aboard the Shanahan Express in the preseason, when he was just banishing guys with reckless abandon and created the nickname “Shanahammer” for himself. Some of the punishments were overboard, but I always contested during the Colin Campbell era that it made ZERO sense to err on the side of NOT suspending someone. I’d much rather see an overly harsh punishment than no punishment at all. I look at Matt Cooke ending Marc Savard’s career and getting nothing for it, and I look at Zdeno Chara going out of his way to deliver a late shot on Max Pacioretty, and I don’t understand how neither player received so much as a slap on the wrist. If we were living in the Roman Empire and we enjoyed going to the Coliseum to watch beasts and men alike be slayed before our eyes, then fine, but in modern society, violent actions that break rules need to be punished. So Shanahan was doing a good job.

But as you mentioned, the owners didn’t like their players missing for long periods of time, and the Shanahammer became more like Shanapansy. He was too afraid to suspend players. He did what he was told. He was just more of the same.

In the playoffs, I don’t think any of his suspensions were too awful (I know you hated the Carl Hagelin suspension, but while it was a little lengthy, a suspension was warranted), but he was still too scared to suspend star players (with the exception of Nicklas Backstrom and Claude Giroux).

I was actually thinking of Shanahan the other night when Gary Bettman was on the ice to present the Conn Smythe and the Cup and there weren’t enough L.A. fans who follow hockey closely enough to know that they were supposed to be booing Bettman. He had that patented Bettman smugness painted on his face, and I was thinking about how much he enjoyed Shanahan serving as the punching bag of NHL fans all year long. I feel Shanahan was duped into the job, was told he could truly be the sheriff of the NHL, only to be neutered once the real season began.

Bottom line: Shanahan is a tremendous improvement over Campbell, but until the league actually gets serious about player safety rather than mostly just paying lip service to it, then we’ll always have problems with the decisions made after hits that can easily be wiped out of the game.

(My favorite anecdote about the lack of seriousness regarding player safety is that the Bruins’ team doctor has stated publicly multiple times that it can’t be medically proven that Marc Savard’s concussion suffered on the Cooke hit had anything to do with his concussion the following year that came in a routine collision with Matt Hunwick, who weighs 135 pounds soaking wet. A real life, team-employed doctor told reporters this information as fact, with a straight face. Just a coincidence then, eh, doc?)

Keefe: I thought about ending this conversation with some points about your 2012 Boston Red Sox, but I figured everything has been going pretty well, so why make you cry again? I don’t think there’s anything I can say that will make any Red Sox feel worse about watching their team in 2012 than they already do. We’ll have plenty of time to talk Yankees-Red Sox when the two teams meet at Fenway the first weekend in July. Maybe I will even think about going to a game with you since the tickets should be down to about $2.50 then. (Don’t tell Red Sox Executive Vice President and COO Sam Kennedy I said that.)

Hurley: The Red Sox do not make me cry. They make me laugh. They have a bazillion dollar payroll but they’re making decisions like keeping Scott Podsednik and Daniel Nava over Marlon Byrd. Tickets at $2.50 are actually considered a little pricey now. We could probably get some for $1.25 by July. I’ll go to the game with you, just as long as we sit at least 20 rows apart so I don’t have to look at your stupid face or hear the stupid things that come out of your stupid mouth. Deal.