The Buhner.com Blog

I’m a big fan of the guys at firejoemorgan.com , especially since I’ve been known to disect articles like they do while reading them. So I took a shot at taking apart one of the New York-based newsrags (sadly, probably the best of the three tabloids) articles focusing on one of my new Yankee man-crushes, Shelley Duncan . It may not be up to the standards of FJM, but it came surprisingly easy, I guess with such an easy target.

Don’t hop on bandwagon yet

Because as you know, New York fans are quite fickle with their bandwagons. Sorry, I know it’s just the title.

Believe it or not,

I’m assuming not.

even after as decisive a win as you could get,

21-4 is very decisive. 22-4 is probably more decisive. 912-0 would probably be much more decisive.

there still are questions. For instance: How good, really, are the Yankees?

51-46, 7.5 games back of first place Boston; therefore the 2nd best team in the American League. They also have the 10th best record in baseball, so I’ll say “one of the top ten teams in baseball.”

And is Shelley Duncan truly a major-league power hitter?

He is after four games. I’d be willing to bet he doesn’t keep up this pace, and by his minor league statistics I’d say that he’d have trouble hitting .250 in the majors, meaning he might be a major league regular for some team - if that team were in Mexico.

We will get a better answer to the latter when he faces a major-league team.

OOOOOOOH DISSIN’ THE D-RAYS.

But maybe the most difficult and pertinent question at the moment is this: Who got hit harder this weekend, Tampa Bay pitching or the Yankees teammates Duncan kept high-fiving?

Main Entry: dif-fi-cult
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle English, back-formation from difficulty
1 : hard to do, make, or carry out : ARDUOUS <a difficult climb>
2 a : hard to deal with, manage, or overcome <a difficult child> b : hard to understand : PUZZLING <difficult reading>

Main Entry: per-ti-nent
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French, from Latin pertinent-, pertinens, present participle of pertinEre
: having a clear decisive relevance to the matter in hand

Just checking. Oh, and I know it’s a difficult question and all, but since Shelley’s high-fives didn’t knock eight of his teammates out of Yankee Stadium, I’ll lean towards the Tampa pitching answer.

Can he ever do this again?

Hit three home runs in four games? I don’t think it’s out of the qu…

Who knows?

Oh. That was one of those rhetorical questions.

But one thing nobody can question is why people at Yankee Stadium sang “Shel-lee Dun-can” and gave him a standing ovation when he grounded to first in the seventh.

Really? I think if you were going to your first baseball game and saw this Shelley Duncan, playing for the home team, ground out to first and the crowd stood and cheered him, you might be a bit confused. Especially if you knew New York fans.

It isn’t because of what he did this weekend but because of how hard he climbed to get here.

I can pretty much guarantee that 90% of that Yankee crowd didn’t know who the hell Shelley Duncan was before Friday. Of that remaining 10%, I’m pretty sure you can take a fraction of that who know Shelley Duncan’s level of determination when it comes to his play.

David Shelley Duncan is no kid.

There are very few children playing major league baseball.

He is about two months shy of his 28th birthday.

Which makes him the 6th youngest player on the Yankees current 25-man roster. In context, I guess you could say he is a “kid”.

Despite having grown up in a big-league family - dad Dave, a former catcher, is the pitching coach for the world champion Cardinals and brother Chris plays leftfield for the Cardinals - Shelley played through college and 6� years in the minors without a sniff of the majors until Friday. He had come up empty an awful lot before he came up so big.

Yet no one weeps for Ozzie Canseco.

“You learn how to play the game right. You also deal with a lot of failures,” said Duncan, who never hit higher than .267 before this season. “I believe there is no failure unless you don’t learn from it. So I try to learn any time I screw up or go through a hard time.”

Good message. Kids, write that down.

In other words, he spent the time and took the tough lessons that nobody has taught most of the Devil Rays, who ought to be in the minor leagues.

Oh lord. Kids, if you still have that pencil in hand, also write down “suck badly in the minors for several years, so that you can learn tough lessons.”

Not to take anything away from the Yankees’ laugher or Duncan’s day, but it’s hard to tell how seriously to take those events because Tampa Bay is one of the great embarrassments in baseball.

Who as recently as two months ago had the same record as the New York Yankees, just with a payroll of $165 million less. While the Devil Rays are by no means a good team, they were three games behind the Yanks on June 24th, with a record of 33-40. They’ve gone 5-20 since. coolstandings.com has them on pace for a 61-101 record this season, which isn’t good, but isn’t the 1899 Cleveland Spiders or anything.

Not only can’t the Devil Rays pitch a lick,

Admittedly their worst feature as a team. Outside of their top two starting pitchers and their closer, they’ve got one player on their roster with an ERA under 5.

they don’t play smart and they don’t play pretty.

“Style points” are the new OPS. I may have stolen Bill James’ thunder on that one, so if I disappear suddenly, you know the Saberassassins have gotten me.

Their signature isn’t just James Shields giving up 10 runs in 3 1/3 innings

Shields, prior to that game, was 8-5 with a 3.91 ERA in 20 starts, striking out 120 in 142.2 innings and walking only 21. In the context of the D-Rays’ pitching staff, it’d be like pointing out how bad the ‘88 Orioles sucked by noting Cal Ripken’s 0-5 game. It’d also lead the Yankees in strikeouts and be the third lowest ERA in the Yankees starting rotation, better than Andy Pettitte or Mike Mussina.

or Casey Fossum getting torched for hit after hit or Tampa Bay throwing 216 pitches in eight innings. It’s Jonny Gomes looking at a called third strike with two runners on and one out, and having a fly ball clank off his glove.

Gomes is batting .277/.337/.497 since being called back up from the minors and playing himself back into a starting role. He’s apparently doing something right. His fielding does leave a bit to be desired, though.

It’s throwing errors and fielding errors. It’s Akinori Iwamura hitting a weak groundout on the first pitch when Pettitte was struggling.

Struggling with what - control? If he’s struggling in getting people out, then the first pitch is a fine opportunity to jump all over a pitcher before he’s able to correct himself. Oh, upon further examination, Pettitte had walked one and struck out six at this point. Pettitte was giving up hits, not walking runners, and Iwamura was the 7th batter in the inning, meaning that “taking the first few pitches”, which might work in Little League, isn’t the approach a player should have necessarily taken in this case. Pettitte didn’t lose his control, he just didn’t have his best stuff, and when a veteran pitcher doesn’t have his best stuff it’s best to jump on him before he straightens himself out.

And Iwamura’s eight seasons as a Yakult Swallow have apparently been eliminated by his five months as a Devil Ray, infecting him with the disease that makes Devil Ray players poor.

The Devil Rays, and all big- league clubs, need Shelley Duncans who take their lumps and learn how to play.

Iwamura gets ripped for grounding out on the first pitch of his at-bat. He can take a lesson from Duncan, who struck out 140 times in his last full season and already has four strikeouts in 12 at-bats - that’s one every three times up to the plate.

Maybe he isn’t the next Shane Spencer, who made a niche and name for himself with a torrid 1998 homer streak.

By “streak” he means “twice that season he hit home runs in back-to-back games.” Torrid streak would have been good enough there, as Spencer turned in a handful of monster games combined with a small sample size (thanks, Torrebot) to put together a .373/.411/.910 line in 73 plate appearences, hitting 10 home runs over that span. It gave Spencer a seven year major league career, mostly with the Yankees who could afford to platoon him and use him as a 4th outfielder.

The only reason Duncan was called up from Scranton was so slumping DH/outfielder Johnny Damon could get a couple of days off.

No, he was called up because Kevin Thompson, who the Yankees were using as their 5th outfielder, wasn’t playing that well and the team wanted to see what Duncan would do with a few at-bats, since Duncan was Scranton’s best hitter. Those are the types of moves that non-Yankee teams try in order to discover talent or spark the offense and see if that AAAA player is actually capable of playing in the majors. Oakland did it with Jack Cust this season.

The shocking thing was that Torrebot managed to actually play Duncan when he was called up, instead of letting him rot on the bench and putting Miguel Cairo in the slot to give Damon the time off.

Oh, side note. If he’s hurt and needs time off on a semi-regular basis, and he’s hitting .244/.345/.342, PUT THE GUY ON THE DL. Having him play every other day hurt isn’t helping the team.

Sorry, rant over. Back to the article.

“It’s still Johnny’s job,” Joe Torre said yesterday.

It would still be Johnny’s job if Duncan hit home runs in 15 straight games and Johnny Damon was hit by a semi. Torrebot does not compute not having Johnny Damon in the lineup.

I’m not saying that Damon should lose his job - the thought would be silly, especially since Damon’s a center fielder and Duncan is lucky to manage first base. I’m just saying that you could have two copies of Johnny Damon, with one being the current injured one and one being the healthy one we’ve seen the last few seasons. If the healthy one has the name Dohnny Jamon and came from AAA with no major league experience, Jamon wouldn’t have a chance that Damon’s job.

Then again, the manager has been known to ride a hot hand.

14 times. That’s how many times someone other than Cano/Rodriguez/Jeter/Matsui/Cabrera/Damon/Abreu has started at 2B/SS/3B/LF/CF/RF. Add to that Torrebot’s strict platoon of Doug Mientkiewicz and Josh Phelps (despite Phelps hitting much better than Mientkiewicz through most of the season) at first and that Torrebot continued to use Wil Nieves as his primary backup catcher, despite batting .125 in 56 at-bats, and you have the complete opposite of someone who plays the “hot hand”.

And no one was hotter yesterday than the batter who received two curtain calls to Alex Rodriguez’s none.

Whew, that was a close one. I thought we might be able to end an article in a New York based newspaper without an Alex Rodriguez slam. Crisis averted!

“I said to Alex, ‘Sorry, you’re not The Guy anymore,’ ” Torre said, mindful that Duncan trails A-Rod by 495 career homers.

And that Torre won’t remember Duncan’s name in a week.

What Torre, Rodriguez and everybody at the Stadium yesterday knew for sure

Everyone. No doubt in 54,751 peoples’ minds (not including employees, guests, teammates, or opposing team members). Undenyable FACT. Right up there with “sky is blue” and “I am attending a baseball game”.

is that Duncan always is going to try as hard as he can

Because that’s something you can tell from four games.. From the stands. UNDENYABLE FACT.

and that the Yankees are better than the Devil Rays. No question about that.

Which explains why the Devil Rays beat the Yanks 14-4 in the first game of the series. And why the Yankees are currently 7-5 against those same Devil Rays this season.

Undenyable fact, my friends.