WINTER HAVEN — As the Yankees continue to get hammered in this Grapefruitless League season, the only contest yesterday was not between them and the Indians. It was to see which was longer: (1) George Steinbrenner’s fuse. (2) John Hart’s nose.
“We didn’t sign Chuck Finley thinking about the Yankees in the playoffs,” Hart, the Indians’ GM, said. “Absolutely not.”
World Series champions? Did anyone see any World Series champions playing here? Five games into spring, The Boss is ready to spring a gasket and the GM of their prime AL competitors is considering the Yankees just another playoff team.
“Did we do it thinking we are fortunate enough to get to the postseason, will Chuck help us?” said Hart. “Absolutely. But we didn’t even play the Yankees last [fall]. If that happens again, that would be counterproductive, wouldn’t it?”
Well, probably not as counterproductive as being a Yankee coach or player and annoying Steinbrenner. The Boss walked out on yesterday’s 15-1 loss, which followed Sunday’s 6-2 loss, which followed the previous day’s 12-4 loss.
“It’s too early. But pretty soon it will come to a point where it won’t be early,” Steinbrenner, the Pied Piper of Pique, said as he led a media entourage out of Chain of Lakes Stadium. “But we are not there yet.”
Five games into spring, with the whole team looking like Andy Stankiewicz, he wants the troops fired up, or failing that, someone fired, however briefly.
There is no mania like The Boss’s mania, the only thing coming close being the mania to beat The Boss’s mania. Yesterday, Hart was protesting a little too much.
The Indians spent $27 million on a three-year contract for a 37-year-old pitcher because Finley is the worst thing to happen to The Bronx since blight. “He has a bellyful of guts,” said Joe Torre, quaking in his spikes. Indeed, the sight of Chuck Finley putting on an Indian uniform in their locker room yesterday was a fearsome one.
There he was, priming himself for another season of Yankee killing by spitting on pictures of Lou Gehrig and saying he never saw anything particularly funny about anything Yogi Berra ever said. Charles Edward Finley, recently paroled from the Anaheim Uncorrectable Institution after 13 years and one measly, rookie-season, playoff shot, is a tough nut to crack. He refused to reveal much more than name and 16-9 career serial killer numbers against the Yankees.
“If I could explain that, I would explain my lack of success against the Rangers,” he said. “I don’t know. The Yankees have a lot of good left-handed hitters.”
They have a lot of good left-handed hitters whom Hart envisions being neutralized in a Game 7, although you would have to tie him down and make him watch videos of Chad Ogea until he screamed before admitting there is one team to beat and that he finally has the guy to do it.
“He’ll give us a little different look in our rotation for the postseason,” said the GM. “We have run out [Charles] Nagy, [Dave] Burba, the same kind of guys. Now, we can sandwich a Finley and a [Bartolo] Colon.
Colon spent the offseason eating too many sandwiches. He now weighs 248 pounds. Hart says most of it’s in his young ace’s legs, when most people around the Indians think it’s in his head.
Last year, after Burba blew out his shoulder trying to finish off the Red Sox and Jaret Wright blew sky high in relief, Colon, coming back on three days rest in Game 4, looked about as comfortable as a pitching coach when The Boss tours the bullpen. So did Charles Nagy in Game 5.
The first team in 49 years to score 1,000 runs proved to be on the thinnest of ice, and manager Mike Hargrove went with the floe, sold up the river by his GM’s failure to deepen his rotation at the trading deadline with the acquisition of Finley. The Yankees helped drive up the price in trade talks in July, when he wound up going nowhere.
Finley didn’t pitch yesterday, but aimed his invisible death rays from his locker, thoroughly discombobulating Mike Buddie, who gave up five runs in barely more than an inning. Before the Yankee killer left, however, he said he was a lot happier to be in Winter Haven than was Steinbrenner.
“John Hart never said a word to me about the Yankees while we were negotiating. This was the perfect opportunity for me. John Hart told me I was first on their list.”
It couldn’t have had anything to do with the Yankees being first on everybody’s hit list, which had everything to do with Steinbrenner already compiling a list by March 6. Proving once again, it’s never too early to be The Boss.