Dumbing down America, by Wallace Matthews

You will not read a dumber article this winter.

Keeping Joba in the bullpen as Rivera's setup man is the way the Yankees can re-establish that kind of late-game dominance... That should be the Yankees' objective with Joba, turning him into Mo's understudy with the aim of becoming Mo's replacement. That will win them a lot more games than Ramirez's bat or his flaky personality.

Um, whoa. Wallace believes the Yanks don't need CC, Tex, Manny, or any other free agent. What they need is Joba to pitch 60 innings a season. I don't know what's worse-the fact that he is still harping on this or the fact that Joba was actually better as a starter than a reliever in 2008, and yet his solution is to put him in the pen.

Going off VORP, Manny was worth about 5 wins last season. Mariano, in arguably the best season of his career, was worth about 3.5 wins. So yeah, I'm sure making Joba face less batters over the course of a season will win more games than the bat of Manny or Teixeira.

From people like Matthews who want to dominate late innings, I ask: how are we going to get there? Yes, it's nice that our 8th and 9th inning guys are good pitchers. But what's the point if we are consistently losing? If Wallace was in charge, his rotation as of today is Wang and that's it. But since he doesn't want a free agent or Joba, we can pencil in Wang, Hughes, Aceves, Kennedy, whoever. That sounds like a winning rotation to me!

It's called shortening the game, and the Yankees used to do it better than anyone.

It's called stupidity, and Wallace Matthews does it better than anyone.