The Mayor at the Mayor's Cup

Mayor Koch at Shea, April 1989

I think Ed Koch was my first celebrity sighting. It was 1989 and my father, uncle, cousin and I had driven up to Shea Stadium for the Mayor's Cup game between the Mets and Yankees to end spring training. Our seats were in the upper deck, but we arrived early enough to walk around the loge section. As we made our way along the left-field line, I heard people cheering and then noticed a small cluster of men in suits in the orange seats.

When one turned toward the cheers and raised his hands in acknowledgment, I realized it was the mayor. Though we were from the Jersey Shore, all our network television broadcasts originated in New York City, so the nightly newscasts covered the Big Apple, and Koch was a familiar face to me. I had my Kodak Disc camera with me and managed to press the shutter at the precise moment when he raised his hands to the fans. I suppose it was my first perfectly timed photograph, too.

It looks pleasant enough for an April Sunday morning, but I think it turned blustery that day, the wind whipping around the upper deck and sending us all home with pink, wind-burned faces. I have no idea where the mayor sat or how long he stayed, but his two-handed wave to the fans has stayed with me all these years.

The Jeterian Code

Midtown, 2008

A co-worker sent out an e-mail for an assignment yesterday, but added a twist. Next to each person on the list, attributed a saying, slogan or tall tale praising Derek Jeter, the joke being that Jeter is often adored/celebrated/defended by fans to the point of hagiography. This co-worker is not much for blogs or social media (he may be the last person of my generation I know who doesn't have a Facebook account, a Twitter account OR a blog -- not even a Tumblr or Instagram account), so I asked if I could borrow his list for a post here. All he asked was that I leave his name out of it. What follows is mostly his doing, though I omitted and altered a few that were inside office jokes.

So here then is The Jeterian Code, by a Co-Worker To Be Named Later. This list, of course, could be easily expanded. And neither the co-worker or I are claiming these are original ideas; maybe someone out there has uttered some of these before. But they were new to us.

• Columbus didn't discover America, Jeter did
• Zeus bows down before Jeter
• WWJD stands for "What Would Jeter Do?"
• Derek Jeter is the Keymaster
• A.D. is no longer Anno Domini, it's now After Derek
• Jeter's No. 2 is retired by all Nippon Professional Baseball clubs
• Jeter is ticklish behind his parietal lobe
• Dinosaurs were wiped off the earth by Jeter
• JetBlue is renamed to JeterBlue
• November shall now be known as Jetember
• Santa has a Naughty, Nice and Jeter list
• Jeter's birthday designated a galaxy-wide holidayJeter is the Keymaster
• When you search for Jeter in a lexicon, it says "See 'God'"
• No. 2 on calendars changed to the No. Jeter
• Jeter knows the way to San Jose
• The sun revolves around Jeter
• Jeter was the man standing in front of the tank at Tiananmen Square
• Jeter can read upside down
• Melky Cabrera tested positive for too much Jeter
• When Jeter retires, the Yanks will retire the position of SS
• Jeter is Luke's father
• DJ is a new element on the periodic table

The Gooden billboard!

I knew someone had to have a shot of it. That someone is a guy by the name of Matt Weber, and the photo was posted on a blog called peripherybaseball. Many thanks. This brings back a lot of memories.

Photo fun: That's a red apple!

I've wanted to try this technique for a while now, but the lack of Photoshop and patience kept me from giving it a shot. But I had the hankering to give it a whirl recently, so I picked a simple shape and got decent results. More to come, perhaps.

A ballpark above Grand Central?

Came across an amusing anecdote in a collection of baseball stories (said to be true stories, pulled from various archives and news reports) first published in ... imagine this ... 1949. It seems that a man named Charles White proposed, back in 1912, of building a field on top of Grand Central Terminal in the heart of Manhattan:

A visionary named Charles White came forward with a scheme in 1912 which would solve one of the major problems confronting the owners of baseball clubs. The owners were often complaining in those days about their inability to construct adequate playing fields owing to the high cost of real estate. Mr. White told them to quit worrying.

He submitted plans for a baseball field of immense proportions, sodded with bright green turf and containing all the other conveniences of an up-to-date ball field. This field, however, would be up in the air -- built over the roof of the new Grand Central Station, extending from Lexington Avenue to Madison Avenue and from Forty-fourth to Fiftieth streets.

First off, that outline is huge. As it stands now, Grand Central is centered on the plot between Lex and Madison and extends from just 42nd to 45th streets. Park Avenue sits between Lex and Madison, then splits (southbound to the west, northbound to the east) around Grand Central, with all the platforms and tracks underground. A ballfield "over the roof" of the terminal wouldn't be like a rooftop garden (the terminal building isn't big enough), but probably more like the proposed West Side stadium that the city hoped to build in the last decade to lure the Olympics and the Jets -- a platform over the underground rail lines. Of course, this was 98 years ago -- who knows what the plans really were.

Not only does White's plan bear a similarity to the proposed West Side stadium, but it have drawn the Yankees down from Harlem (they were tenants of the Giants in the Polo Grounds until 1923)? Even if it had, however, I doubt there's any way the Yankees would still be there. They would've outgrown it by now, probably decades ago, and knowing what the area around the train station looks like now, there would be no room for much in the way of renovations or expansion.

Had they outgrown it in the '50s, might they have moved West and become the San Francisco Yankees? Imagine that: Seven years after Joe DiMaggio's retirement, his one and only team moves to his hometown. Not likely. They'd established such an identity in New York. But if they tried to relocate within New York then, Robert Moses might've forced them to his stadium site in Flushing Meadows that Walter O'Malley had rejected for his Dodgers. Or if the Yankees managed to last in the ballpark atop the terminal until the '70s, when Yankee Stadium was renovated, or '80s, might they then have moved to the West Side or New Jersey? Who knows what course baseball history might've taken had a ballpark been built atop Grand Central.

Red Sox treated better in New York

Liberty at the Sports Museum

Apparently, the Mickey Mouse Red Sox statue in L.A. was vandalized. I find this surprising, considering that in 2008, when MLB put Statues of Liberty around New York, the Red Sox one got away unscathed.

Of course, they put it inside the Sports Museum of America, where nobody ever went anyway, so that may have saved it.

Where Jackie's impact was felt most

I still remember April 15, 1997, when I sat in a lounge in my dorm at Notre Dame and watched as Jackie Robinson's No. 42 was retired throughout baseball by Bud Selig, standing at a podium at Shea Stadium. Behind him stood Jackie's widow, Rachel, and President Bill Clinton. The significance of the occasion, the 50th anniversary of Robinson's debut with the Dodgers, was clearly underscored by the presence of these heavyweights. That night inspired me to write a short story based on Robinson's debut for a class that semester. If I ever dig it up and decide I'm not going to try to have it published, I'll post it here.

But in that rec room at O'Neill Hall, 700 miles from home, no Major League baseball within two hours, I felt a bit of pride at being a Mets fan far away from New York that night. I'm sure the choice of Shea Stadium for the ceremony had more to do with the Dodgers being in town than the Mets being home, but maybe only a little. New York, after all, was the city in which Jackie played all 10 years of his career. He worked in the city, lived in Connecticut, died there and was eulogized and buried in New York. When the Dodgers left for Los Angeles -- a year after Jackie retired ... after being traded to the Giants -- Jackie remained in New York. He may have starred in four sports at UCLA, but once he left L.A. and made his way through Kansas City and Montreal to Brooklyn, New York was where he stayed.

The Dodgers, of course, do a fine job of celebrating their history, even the Brooklyn Era now more than 50 years since they left the borough, and they deserve to have Robinson as a focal point of their legacy. But if there is one place where Jackie's impact should have a permanent footprint, I think it's New York.

I first started contemplating this argument a year ago, when Mets fans regularly criticized the Jackie Robinson Rotunda at Citi Field. That commotion has died down a bit this year, now that the Mets have made an active -- and admirable -- effort to celebrate their own history (because they're not going to be adding much to it this year, I'm afraid), and I'm glad. I love the Robinson Rotunda. I don't look at it as celebrating the career of a Dodger; I see it more as championing the life of a man who changed not just baseball, but America. Ebbets Field is gone and now, too, so is Yankee Stadium. The only place left in New York to truly get close to Jackie is his gravesite. Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City, where he played his first game for the Montreal Royals, is also long-gone and the city's cool statue stands miles away from the stadium site, near a subway station in the Journal Square business district. Brooklyn has a middle school and a statue where the minor league team plays, but Coney Island is a long way from Sullivan Place. Even Robinson's Hall of Fame plaque is different from the one he knew.

Robinson obviously has a connection to L.A., but it's as a college athlete, even if that's all Los Angeles had in the '30s. He made his name in New York, and it's what he did in New York that he's known for across the country. The Yankees wouldn't set aside a corner for Jackie if they were the only team in New York. I have no problem with Mariano Rivera continuing to wear No. 42 for the duration of his career, but up until a few years ago, they refused to include it among the retired numbers at the ballpark, when the other 29 clubs had long displayed the number on their walls. So to me, Queens, the borough bordering Brooklyn, and the Mets, the National League successor to the Dodgers, are the next best option for a baseball shrine to one of its seminal figures.

I'm not old enough to remember a burning Bronx (I -- or my family -- celebrated my first birthday only that September) let alone three-team summers in New York. A lot of what I know of the Dodgers in Brooklyn comes from Doris Kearns Goodwin's memoir, but after reading that book, I had a strong feeling that if I had grown up in the '40s or '50s, I would've been a Dodgers fan. So maybe that's why I'm proud that it's the Mets' ballpark that is home to a great tribute to a great man who died four years before I was born and whose lasting legacy did little for me, personally, beyond giving me the opportunity to watch guys like Darryl Strawberry, Dwight Gooden, Torii Hunter, CC Sabathia and Jason Heyward play ball.

The rotunda's a great way to enter a ballpark, and for all the unique touches designed for the stadiums built since the early '90s, it may be the most inspired and unique. Petco Park and Oriole Park may have their warehouses, Coors Field the Rocky Mountains in the distance, Busch Stadium the Gateway Arch, PNC the Pittsburgh skyline and AT&T McCovey Cove -- but those were already on-site and the architects just had to work them into their designs. The rotunda, obviously copied from Ebbets Field, was resurrected, and just as a generation of Dodger fans recalled walking through it in Brooklyn, a lot of young Mets fans today will grow up to have what hopefully become fond memories of Citi Field's rotunda.

This year marks just the third time since 1997 that the Mets have not been home on April 15. Only in 2000 and '03 did they wear gray uniforms, and those weren't even official Jackie Robinson Days -- the moniker took hold in 2004. The Mets are 8-4 on April 15 since the ceremony at Shea in '97 and have won six of their last seven on this date. Both road games prior to today's happened to be in Pittsburgh, in 2000 (a loss) and 2003 (a win). The one loss since '04 came in 2006, with the 2007 game getting rained out when a nor'easter hit the East Coast, wiping out several games that Sunday. The Mets honored Robinson at their next home game, the following Friday, and lost to the Braves, but because the game wasn't played on April 15, I'm not including it in the 8-4 record.

Today, they'll honor Jackie in Denver and 14 other cities. But every day, he's honored in New York.

Photo Flashback: 1989 Exhibition Finale

Lineups lined up

I missed Friday and was never married to the "Photo Friday" moniker anyway, so I'm going with "Photo Flashback" for this one.

While thumbing through an old photo album the other day, I came across several shots from various trips to Shea Stadium and Cooperstown. They were all taken with my meager Kodak Disk camera, so they images aren't great. The players look like specs on the film, so you'll pretty much have to take my word that they are indeed from April 1989.

It was a Sunday, the final day of the exhibition season. The Mets and Yankees had agreed to resume playing Spring Training games against one other in '89, culminating with two in New York during the final weekend. On Saturday, April 1, 1989, they played in the Bronx. On Sunday the 2nd, they were at Shea. And so was I, along with my father, his brother and my cousin, the only Yankee fan in the bunch.

The Yankees won, 4-0, their fourth win in six exhibition games against the Mets. But it was the Amazin's who would have the better season, finishing 87-75, though six games behind the NL East-winning Cubs. The Yankees went 74-87, trailing the champion Blue Jays by 14 1/2.

What follows are the photos I found worthy of scanning from that day (you can see them individually on my Flickr account). In the second one, you may notice two hands in the air, reaching just above the foul line in the center of the photo. That's Mayor Ed Koch, who was on hand for the game. Oh, and those pregame shots with players in the infield? Not batting practice -- infield practice. When's the last time you saw that at a big-league ballpark?

What a destructive day!

March 26 is a big day in sports stadia demolition. Ten years ago today, the Kingdome was imploded; this is the demoversary.

In New York today, another stadium from the '70s saw the last section of its upper deck pulled down.

On Aug. 21, 1983, I saw my first baseball game. It was Angels-Yankees, and we sat in the upper deck. I remember wanting to keep going higher; at that age (I was a few weeks from turning 7), you don't get many bird's-eye views. These days, I do prefer the closer angles, as much for taking pictures as anything else, but I go to enough games that I like to mix it up.

Wonder what will turn out to be the last piece to fall.

When Gooden was larger than life

Yesterday's news about Dwight Gooden has brought out a lot of old photographs of Doctor K, but this one is the one I like the best. Two young stars, their potential seemingly limitless -- 1985 All-Star! -- clowning around after a game in some wood-paneled office at Shea Stadium that still had NFL helmets on display years after the Jets had moved to New Jersey.

That shirt on Doc brings back a memory for me. His endorsement with Nike was the first time I ever associated an athlete with a company, but it wasn't from this photo. It was from one like this one to the right, only hundreds of times bigger and hanging off the side of a building in Midtown Manhattan. New Jersey Mets fans may remember it well: A giant image of Gooden, arm cocked, foot driving, the Nike logo and swoosh in a corner, affixed to the western side of a building and visible to pretty much anyone gazing out the windows as they emerged from the Lincoln Tunnel. People winding up the ramp into the Port Authority Bus Terminal parking deck got a closer look, but that wasn't necessary to notice the thing. It was huge. Billboards are made to be larger than life, but putting Gooden on that one made him into the city's Paul Bunyan. A true giant.

Unfortunately, the only images I have of it are in my head. I never really had a chance to get a picture of it, because my first camera -- the cheap and perfect-for-kids Kodak Disc (I was probably influenced by the commercial) -- wouldn't have been able to handle shooting from behind the window of a moving car, and it wasn't until the past four years that I found myself any further west in Manhattan than that exit to the tunnel, and with all the changes in New York, that building itself may not even be standing, let alone any monster billboards of the city's biggest sports star that may be occupying the space. Gooden, it seems, came down shortly after his drug suspension in 1994, though if I took note of its disappearance at the time, I didn't keep the memory for long.

A photo of that billboard -- not a reproduction of the particular image, but an actual photo of that billboard on that building -- may be the holy grail from my first years as a Mets fan. I recently came across one discovery when I uncovered the two ticket stubs to my first Mets games. I always knew that my family went to two one summer, one of which was on a brutally hot and muggy New York night, and the opponents were the Reds (I remember Pete Rose) and the Cubs (the blue jerseys). However, I was under the impression that both games were in 1985. Upon finding the stubs, I learned that they were from that dominating year, 1986.

That was truly a year in which everything came together, stars and planets included. The talent was undeniable and it should've carried over into another division title in 1987, if not another World Series win before the '80s were out. It just wasn't in the cards.

Little Old New York

The still image above is from a British tourism film about New York City in 1963. Along with scenes from Idlewild (pre-JFK) Airport, Chinatown and the downtown skyline is a segment on Yankee Stadium. The footage was taken on July 25, 1963, which was the only home game against the Angels that year started by left-hander Al Downing. The announced attendance was 15,716, but it appears the actual figure was a bit less. There's also a segment near the end about the construction of the World's Fair attractions -- including the Unisphere -- for the 1964-65 exposition. (Thanks to Uniwatch for pointing out this video.)

LITTLE OLD NEW YORK

No run for New York on the offing

The Jets' run may be over, but there is a fabulous George Vecsey column from yesterday that is worth a look. (It was one of those times where I had opened the story in a tab to read it, but then the day got away from me and there it sat, until this morning.) It was written to note how the Jets' 1969 Super Bowl win sparked a run of three championships for New York City in 1969-70, with the Mets and Knicks to follow, plus it has that awesome AP photo above showing Tom Seaver and Dick Schaap on Joe Namath's TV show.

But it's as much about the Mets as it is the Jets and it includes this disheartening passage:

The more I think about it, no miracle could resuscitate the current Mets.

This franchise has exhausted all the good karma from Casey Stengel, Marvelous Marv Throneberry, the sainted Hodges, the mix-and-match tourists of 1969, Mookie’s mad moment in 1986. There is no Seaver among this bunch, and no Payson, either.

And who can argue? There's only one Stengel, but the closest to him might've been Yogi Berra. The late-century/new-century equivalent might be Bobby Valentine.

Throneberry, though not an Original Met (he came to New York from Baltimore in May 1962), is akin to Jeff Conine being Mr. Marlin -- a member of the expansion team who will always be associated with it despite not necessarily putting up impressive numbers.

There are no characters to lighten the mood among the Mets' reserves (Jose Reyes is too good, and a starter).

A Hodges equivalent? Maybe Joe Torre, but he's on his last managerial job, and he's already had his run in Queens.

The Mookie moment? It could've been Endy Chavez's catch in the 2006 NLCS, but the team couldn't capitalize on it.

Johan Santana, as good as he is, can't compare to Seaver. The Mets are still looking for their first homegrown ace since ... Doc Gooden!? (And Mark Sanchez can't match up to Seaver for the Jets, because unlike Seaver, he didn't turn around the fortunes of the franchise. That was more Rex Ryan's touch.)

And no one's ever going to think back upon the Wilpons' tenure as owners with fond memories, now are they?

The one thing the Mets may have is the mix-and-match thing going. Sadly, it's more of the ragtag variety than any semblance of a team. Not unlike the mid-2000s Yankees, the Mets are going out and getting players, but they're not building a team. The Mariners improved by 24 wins in 2009 (from 61 to 85) while the Mets regressed by 19 (89 to 70) because they adopted a new philosophy and stuck to it. Omar Minaya's been preaching a team built on pitching since he got the job, but we've yet to see him stick to that plan with any consistency. He certainly made an effort last winter, but injuries undermined him. This offseason, it's as if that plan has been scrapped.

This one goes out to the one I love

Springtime

R.E.M. was the first music we heard coming from the field, but we were still on the concourse. We'd just come up the escalator through the Jackie Robinson Rotunda and we were ready to work our way around Citi Field.

While I enjoy college baseball games, we weren't there to see St. John's and Georgetown. Most of the 20,000 or so who actually made it out to the ballpark were there for the unveiling, the soft open of Citi Field -- and its food. We were barely halfway down the first-base line on the concourse when I noticed Blue Smoke out behind center field. Our trajectory was set.

They started announcing the lineups and John Franco took the mound to throw out the ceremonial first pitch, but we stood on line at Shake Shack and Blue Smoke and Box Frites. I took off my hat as the national anthem played, but I wasn't anxious to place my order and get my food to get back to my seat (and that felt weird at first). Instead, the smell of the grill -- of the Shackburgers -- weighed more on me, and that's what I found myself anticipating more.

"If I see Danny Meyer, I might just kiss him," I said as we downed our burgers, pork sandwiches, fries and beer on a wall at the top of a stairway out beyond the center-field scoreboard.

In short, I'm hooked.

Shea Stadium had its charm, its character, its history. But it also had its rust, its gunk, its grunge, its smells and its attempt at food. Citi Field tops it all. We spent the afternoon at the ballpark and never even found where our seats, as printed on the tickets, were located. We circled the ballpark on the field-level concourse -- a first in Queens -- and did the same on the promenade (upper deck) level. We ducked into several shops, read multiple menu boards and made our way back to Danny Meyerland for a second lunch of tacos.

In 23 years of attending games at Shea, I saw games from just about every vantage point -- field level behind the dugout, boxes on the loge, mezzanine and upper levels, the top row, the picnic area, the small slivers of seats in fair territory down the lines. After one look at Citi Field, I hope to take in as many different views in must less time.

I appreciate baseball's history as much as anyone. I lament the fact that I never got to Chicago in time to see Comiskey Park and I would probably use a chance at a time machine to see games at the Polo Grounds, Ebbets Field, pre-renovated Yankee Stadium (the true original Stadium) and several other old parks. At times, I'm sure I'll miss Shea, where I saw scores of games and I'll miss Yankee Stadium, where I saw my first game. But those days should be few and far between now that the Mets have a beautiful new ballpark that they both deserve and need.

Citi Field wasn't quite complete for this soft opening -- it was just short of a full dress rehearsal, with the Mets still in Florida, after all -- but it was only a few Jackie Robinson murals and outfield advertisments short of being finished. It didn't feel like Opening Day, but it sure felt like a new era.

Picnic in the (ball)park

Sitting in Shea Stadium's picnic area was all that I'd hoped it would be. While not quite on the level -- even a smaller level -- of Wrigley Field's bleachers, Shea's small section of metal benches and close proximity to the left fielder brings a different feel to the game.

In Flushing, the picnic area leans more toward families, with plenty of small rumps to fill seats on the bleachers and not make it feel too crowded. In Wrigleyville, the bleachers are definitely the adult section behind the curtain at the video store.

Casey and I got there early enough that we had our pick of seating areas in the top half of the bleachers; we were too late to find much open space in the first half-dozen or so rows that lead down closest to the fence. But we had a good view and didn't get too crowded out as the benches filled in.

The Mets didn't disappoint, either. In the first inning, David Wright sent a towering home run into the picnic area, about 30 feet to our left. We could see the ball quickly climb beyond the edge of the top of the stadium, a small white dot against the darkening sky that quickly grew larger as it soared toward us. It came down almost directly to our left, and when they later announced the distance as 410 feet, I had to look over at the landing spot again to see where they got that measurement from. I was certain it was 10-15 feet deeper than the 410 mark in center field, but perhaps it was further left of center than I realized. Later, Carlos Delgado provided the only other run of the game -- on a home run to the left of center that also came our way. It couldn't have gone much better.

Ironically, though, for a section named "the picnic area," the food there is a much more limited selection of the basic crap sold inside Shea Stadium. Don't get me wrong -- I love the Mets and will buy concessions from time to time. But neither New York ballpark is going to top any lists of the best ballpark food in America. Things will change when Citi Field opens next year, but for now, I always bring my own peanuts to push back hunger in case lukewarm pretzels or hit-or-miss pizza or Nathan's fries don't entice me. Having gorged ourselves at lunch earlier in the day, there was no need for us to visit the concession stand, other than the soda I got to quench my thirst. And I did nibble on a few of the peanuts in my bag.

As for the bleachers themselves, as any high school or college football fan knows, extended time sitting on the ridged metal will numb the bum and ache the back, so we took to standing between each inning and, as everyone got up for the seventh-inning stretch, made our way down to Long Ball Alley beneath the stands. There, a small souvenir stand hawks merch and a few round bar tables fill the space and give the fans a standing-room area to watch the game through the chain links in the outfield wall. Josh Willingham stood much closer to us and the crushed red brick of the warning track lay on just the other side.

Having seen a game from the press box -- also the same level as the "luxury" boxes -- there remains only one section open to fans from which I haven't watched a game, and probably never will: The StubHub DreamSeats in the left- and right-field corners. Maybe there's a chance I'll get updated at one of these last games -- 25 to go, after tonight's 8-6 win over the Marlins, and at least four I expect to attend -- but if I don't make it, I won't have any regrets. I may not remember much of the changes that have been implemented at Shea in its four decades, but I do know that the DreamSeats are less than a decade old. There's no remorse in missing out on a recent gimmick.

The Big Unit introduces himself to New York

I think we've seen the true Randy Johnson.

He's certainly a great pitcher and a fierce competitor, but he's no class act. He's no Yankee off the field. His incident with the CBS 2 cameraman in New York was a punk act. Does Johnson really think that he can walk down a Manhattan street and not be photographed? From watching the video, it appears that the cameraman is down the sidewalk, awaiting Johnson's approach. Johnson had enough time to move around him, as inconvenient as that may be. But it certainly looks like Johnson got in the cameraman's face, not the other way around.

If the Big Unit expects to be treated the same way in New York as he was in Arizona, he's severely mistaken. It was one thing last year when he snapped at a New York-area reporter who suggested where he might find a house if he came to the Yankees. Johnson replied that he wasn't a Yankee and he wasn't going to talk about it, which was a reasonable answer at the time. But now he is a Yankee, and cameras on the streets of New York are part of that.

The Yankees are clearly the World Series favorite on paper, as a fantasy team. But can they be a team? Can the various personalities from Jason Giambi to Gary Sheffield to Hideki Matsui to Derek Jeter to Alex Rodriguez to Randy Johnson co-exist as a cohesive unit, the kind of collection of athletes that wants to win for their teammates more than they do for themselves? I'm not so sure of that. It's why I don't ever see Barry Bonds winning a World Series, or Jeff Kent. You also have to be careful when you try to buy winning. It doesn't always work out. It certainly didn't last year, when all seemed lost after the Yankees went out to get Alex Rodriguez, Sheffield and Kevin Brown. But good won out in the end.

I think the one thing we can be sure of is that this will be one entertaining season in New York. Randy Johnson and Brown on the same team (if Brown sticks around) should be good enough for at least two scuffles.

But there's one claim I don't quite buy (yet) about Johnson: This perceived feud with Curt Schilling. I've never seen it written about with any comments from either one to that effect, and we know Schilling's not against talking about players on other teams with whom he doesn't think he'd get along. But Kevin Kernan of the New York Post wrote about it in December:

One of the big reasons the Big Unit wants to be a Yankee, according to several sources, is to take on Schilling head to head in the AL East after Schilling was traded away from Arizona last offseason.

[...]

Remember, at the root of every great player is a great competitor and Johnson wants to get back to the World Series and nothing would please him more than beating Schilling, according to insiders, which would make for some classic Yankee-Red Sox battles in 2005. Every year you wonder how the Yankees and Red Sox will turn it up a notch and Johnson taking on Schilling would grow this rivalry again in a big way.

It's one thing if Johnson and Schilling have a friendly, competitive rivalry to see which one can lead his team to a world championship without the other -- oh, wait, Schilling just did that. I can certainly understand Johnson wanting to outdo Schilling, but I don't think it runs as deep as a personal feud.

The most telling thing to me came at last year's All-Star Game. During the workout day, when all the players had their kids on the field with them, Schilling sat along the sideline with his four kids. Next to him was Johnson's son, clearly there to see Schilling's kids, who I imagine were his friends when their fathers were teammates. If there were a feud, I doubt Johnson would want his son hanging out with Schilling. In the event that Johnson put his feelings for Schilling aside so that his son could see his friends who now live in Massachusetts, it still wouldn't explain why he took the time to walk over, get down on one knee and talk with Schilling for 10 minutes while they watched BP.

We all know, though, how the New York media loves controversy and it doesn't take much to get the story into the tabloids. So if the Post and the Daily News want a Schilling-Johnson rivalry, they're going to print one.