RIP, Javy Vazquez’s career in pinstripes. After another crappy (is that too kind?) outing, this will hopefully likely be the last we see of Javy in a Yankee uniform. We’ve seen the stats by now and they are flat out horrible. Old school, new school, elementary school, vocational school. I can’t see any reason why Girardi would place him on the playoff roster. None.

No matter what you want to look at, Javy Vazquez has been drinking copiously from the Fountain of Suck.

So first, his Yankees numbers (which don’t include tonite’s %&^*burger sandwich). Suffice it to say, 2004 and 2010 are among his worst two years as a professional. Also the only two years since age 24 where he didn’t reach 200 IP. Looking at just these two years lacks the perspective. I encourage you to check out his entire career to better appreciate how bad he’s been here, relative to elsewhere (read: the NL).

-
Let’s enjoy the simplicity of the graphs coming out of fangraphs.com, taking note of how often the 2010 line jumps from “good” to “poor”:

(click “view full post” for the gruesome Javy graph-love)

Last night, PBS aired the first half of The Tenth Inning, Ken Burns’ follow-up to his famous documentary about baseball. Even though someone at PBS made the unfathomable decision to air this thing on nights where baseball fans are watching, you know, baseball games, I was able to watch it while watching the Yankees clinch a playoff berth (seriously PBS, what were you thinking?) thanks to the wonders of MLB TV.

First, I should probably note that I don’t have particularly strong feelings about the original, which seems to make me a minority. I very much enjoyed the first half of it or so, but thought it got a bit dull and uninteresting once it got around to the mid-1950′s or so. It just seemed like there wasn’t anything particularly interesting that it had to say about more recent baseball history, given the overall direction of the production. So given that nearly all of the events in the new edition took place during parts of my life where I was fully aware of baseball, I really wasn’t expecting it to be that interesting.

What makes The Tenth Inning work, however, is that it seeks to be less informational and more retrospective. It’s a documentary aimed at the casual fan, to be sure, and maybe they’ll learn something new from it, but for the more engaged baseball fan, it’s really just a chance to remember the major events of the past 20 years or so. And especially since I was a kid through all of the material presented thus far, I found this trip down memory lane much more enjoyable than I expected to.