Jimmy Sez

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...

Talk about your all-time duds. The Yankees opened 2023 with championship aspirations, yet here we are at the end of September and they are a lost franchise with no direction, identity, or clear path back to respectability. Recent history tells us that there's no reason to have faith in Yankee leadership this offseason, so let's instead re-live the glory days. I have an aunt and uncle that live in Maine. If you haven't been, I highly recommend it, any part of the state will do. Anyway, in my younger days my family used to visit them each summer and one of those years we got to talking to their neighbors who discovered that we were a family of Yankee fans. For some reason, they had a collection of framed photos of Yankee legends in their basement. As Red Sox fans, they had no use for them and offered them to us for the bargain price of zero dollars. Who said Red Sox fans aren't sweethearts? Of course, we took the photos home and put them right in our basement where they r...

While we're all waiting around for the World Series to end, I found a new way to create some Yankees content before we can really dig in to off-season topics. Home runs are always fun and have a prominent place in Yankee history. So why not combine those with a cool way to visualize data that's all the rage with the kids these days. It's the Yankees cumulative career home run bar chart race. The bar chart race you didn't know you needed in your life until just now. More thoughts below the race (click the button on the bottom left to pause/play/re-play as you'd like). Nothing but the Ruth It's no secret that Babe Ruth took the baseball world by storm via the home run, but this race does a great job of showing that visually. In 1918, the infamous Wally Pipp was the Yankees career leader with 27 home runs. By 1921 he had doubled that total, but Ruth had amassed 115 home runs in three seasons as a Yankee to dwarf him on the career list. Then it goes from ridiculous...

When Whitey Ford passed away a few weeks ago it left the Yankee Universe asking themselves a question that has had an obvious answer for a very long time. Ford was one of many former Yankees who racked up championship rings at record rates in the 1950's and 60's. Since that time, the team has been lucky enough to celebrate those teams by inviting the men who made them legendary back to Yankee Stadium every year. And of that group, there's always been a clear elder statesman, an old guy with a Hall of Fame resumé who serves as the unofficial patriarch of the extended Yankee family. For nearly 50 years this role was filled by Joe DiMaggio. The man who touted himself as the "Greatest Living Ballplayer" was treated as such whenever returning to the Bronx. There were others in the running of course, none more so than Mickey Mantle, but The Mick tragically died at the way too young age of 63 and DiMaggio held the title until he passed away in the spring of 1999. At tha...

In the late 1980's two of the favorite pastimes of young boys - action figures and sports - combined to create a new obsession for me. Kenner's  Starting Lineups  gave me the ability to play out baseball scenarios at home without having to turn G.I. Joe into some kind of awkward, gun-toting center fielder. By the late 1990's the figures mostly died in popularity, but I never ditched the decent collection I amassed as a kid. Then something magical happened early on during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the midst of getting increasingly stir crazy, my 2-year old son discovered my old Starting Lineup collection - along with a few "new ones" that I've been able to find in recent years on Amazon - and became as obsessed as I was when they were first produced. He endearingly calls them "hatball guys" and we play with them often. I'm also rapidly acquiring more "new" figures to expand our collection. Below is a peek at select few with a focus on Ne...