Hot Stove Coal: Retreads Are Never the Answer

I'm sorry that my blogging has been so sporadic. I started a new day job and its duties have had me neglecting my blogging duties. And I was going to be okay with that until I heard this clip of Mike Francesca blowing up at a caller and then saw Michael Kay sitting in full Rangers gear at Madison Square Garden last night. If there was ever a signal that I needed to get back into the blogging game it would be seeing the two New York sports talk blowhards back in my life.

Colon shouldn't be more than a stop-gap for the Yanks(LoHud)

I also wanted to talk about the 2011 Yankees--a rag-tag bunch of characters if I ever saw one. Sure there's the Core Three and A-Rod and CC. But as Spring has gone on, I've seen Yankee fans get excited by the likes of Bartolo Colon, Freddy Garcia, and Mark Prior. It's as American as apple pie to root for comeback stories. We love the guy who rises out of the ashes for one more shot at glory. It's why we go to the theaters to see so many Rocky movies. It's why we the best sports stories always seems to be ones of redemption.

The problem is that we try too hard at times to make something out of nothing, especially when it has to do with baseball retreads (AKA has-beens, washed up, and finished). Sure, there's the odd guy who can have a huge rebound and find his way back to his glory days. But with steroid testing in place, those guys seem to be one in a million. I'm not talking about guys who just needed a change of venue to realize their true potential like David Ortiz, Paul O'Neill, Tim Wakefield or Shane Victorino. And I'm not talking about guys who had a down year or an injury and found a way back the next year. I'm talking about guys whose careers were shot only to find success again. It's just not happening as much as people think.

To prove my point, the Yankees have to look no further than Boston where the Red Sox draw optimisim each Spring from their fans on the retreads they try to revive the careers of. Yankee fans bemoan that their General Manager is no Theo Epstein only to find out that there was a reason these guys were available for so cheap. How much did we hear about Jeremy Hermida, Rocco Baldelli, Brad Penny, John Smoltz, Paul Byrd, Eric Gagne and Wade Miller and how much did they produce? Did you remember that the Red Sox had Bartolo Colon in 2008 or that Freddy Garcia was on the Mets Spring roster before being released? David Wells and David Cone both wore the Red Sox jerseys at some point towards the end of their careers.

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