Jimmy Sez

A few weeks ago the Baseball Hall of Fame announced their candidates to be considered by the 2025 Classic Baseball Era Committee . As has been the case for a few years now, there are eight former players on the ballot, and this batch contains those who made their greatest contributions to baseball prior to 1980. Two of the eight are former Yankees. Just like the BBWAA election that will take place later this year, candidates need 75% of the vote from the 16-member committee in order to gain enshrinement. With each committee member limited to just four votes, this is a tall task. However, more often than not these committees elect at least one new Hall of Fame member each year. Here's hoping that when they announce the results on Dec 8th, a man whose name is attached to the most famous surgery in sports gets his due. Tommy John - Pitcher Nolan Ryan is one of just two pitchers in Major League history to pitch when he was as young as 20 years old and again when he was as old as 46. By...

Until about 9:15pm ET last night, this World Series was no fun. The big, juicy story, of course, was that Aaron Judge's career playoff struggles have reached a nadir during the Yankees' most important games of the last 15 years. There's no arguing that, but the truth is the entire lineup was in a funk, and scoring two or three runs per game just isn't going to cut it against the Dodgers. Any other storyline you could point to during this series would also give a Yankee fan the blues. A questionable decision to bring Nestor Cortes in to face the heart of the Dodger lineup at the end of Game One after he hadn't pitched in over a month. Freddie Freeman's propensity for hitting a game-changing, or at least tone-setting, home run in each game of the series. Yankee base-running mistakes that cost them a chance at more runs. Even an over-eager fan at Yankee Stadium trying to pry the ball out of Mookie Betts' glove. It was one big Yankee bummer. In an instant, every...

In our first two installments of this series we covered the bottom half - in terms of quality - of plaques currently sitting behind the centerfield wall of Yankee Stadium. Now we're ready to dive into the good ones, the ones that start to capture the essence of why these guys matter to the most successful franchise in baseball history. If you ever visit Monument Park with the intention of learning something about the Yankees, I would start with these. In the bottom left corner above, you can see the original three monuments in the field of play at Old Yankee Stadium. Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain As was the case previously,  I won't share a picture of every plaque because they tend to run together and get redundant as you scan through them. For any that I don't have a picture of below, it's relatively easy to find via google . 16. Phil Rizzuto - dedicated on August 5, 1985 Scooter's plaque was made in 1985, so I know this isn't the case, but I could swear th...

In the neighborhood I grew up in there was a dog named Shannon. To this day I'd probably count her as the nicest dog I've ever met. She was a Sheltie who was eager to make friends with everybody she encountered - including kids - and had boundless energy for play, especially if a tennis ball was involved. She was a joy to be around. When I was seven years old what I wanted more than anything in the world was a dog of my own. As luck would have it, Shannon was due to have a litter of puppies around that time and my parents agreed that we could adopt one. In the summer of 1990 we had a new family member named Mickey. He was an interesting looking mutt with the body frame and hair texture of his mother combined with floppy ears and the hair color of a Rottweiler. More importantly, he inherited Shannon's friendless and desire for playtime, albeit with the protective streak of a shepherd as he barked at any living thing that dared come near the house. Life with Mickey was everyt...

Last month we began our review and rankings of the plaques on display at Monument Park. We're back with a new batch of bronze. The eight plaques featured here are a notch above the group we looked at last time, but they're not anything to write home about either. Rest assured that things will be looking pretty good from here on out. Ground-level view of the original Monument Park in Old Yankee Stadium. wallyg/Wikimedia Commons As was the case last time,  I won't share a picture of every plaque because they tend to run together and get redundant as you scan through them. For any that I don't have a picture of below, it's relatively easy to find via google . 24. Lou Gehrig - dedicated on July 4, 1941 A minimilast approach here for Lou, whose plaque was the second one commissioned by the Yankees after Miller Huggins. The first bit reads just like Babe Ruth's plaque, and awkwardly starts with this sentence: "A man." His consecutive games streak is mention...

Recently, Joe Posnanski - the greatest baseball writer of our generation - undertook the task of ranking all of the plaques currently captured in the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. It's an interesting project, and certainly a unique way to dig through baseball history. Naturally, those rankings got me thinking about the Yankees and how we could do a similar exercise with the plaques housed in Monument Park. At the very least, it would be a good way to distract myself from the beatings they took recently from the Red Sox, Orioles, Braves, and Mets. In these rankings I focused only on plaques that cover what I'll call "uniformed" Yankees. That is, players and managers only. The handful of other plaques in Monument Park tend to be quite different in nature. I'm also ignoring the blue plaques beneath the retired numbers in Monument Park. There's a subset of players and managers who have been honored with a bronze plaque that have also had their uniform number...

Just a few weeks ago, Aaron Judge had wrapped up the month of April hitting .207, striking out at an alarming rate, and instilling general panic among the Yankee fanbase. What a difference a few weeks can make. Since the calendar turned to May, Judge has been consistently murdering baseballs and suddenly the Yankees lead the American League in runs scored, home runs, walks, on-base percentage, and OPS. Even with Juan Soto's auspicious start to his Yankee career, Judge now leads the team in home runs, walks, slugging and OPS. This is nothing new, of course. When Aaron Judge is healthy, he's always been among the best hitters in baseball. But the recent heater that he's on has revealed a new dimension to his game that we've never really seen before. It's a dimension that Foreigner - the soon-to-be Rock and Roll Hall of Famers - would be proud of . When it gets through to me, it's always new to me Prior to 2024, it was no secret that Judge's power came mostly ...