You may not know this about me, but I, yes, I am a fan of baseball’s New York Yankees.

After weeks of Paying Attention To Baseball, which I haven’t done with any real passion or regularity since Game 3 of the 2004 ALCS, it’s been over for days now, and I’ve gone back to spending free time in the evenings (after the toddler is asleep) puttering around, doing little bits of work, or obsessively playing games on my phone, among other distractions.

But I’m still paying attention… So, here are a few links and notes to commemorate the Yankees season.

Watching Yankees Spending
Published at Subtraction on November 8, 2009.
Khoi Vinh crunches numbers on baseball salaries as a share of a team’s total revenue to defend my beloved Yankees’ free-spending ways.
I’ve always thought, too, that vilifying the Yankees payroll was a perspective that lacked dimension. Yes, it’s a consistently stratospheric number, but isn’t it significant, too, that by making their home in New York the Yankees are at the epicenter of the biggest baseball market on the planet?

Yankees Closer Mariano Rivera’s Postseason Performance
Published at The New York Times on November 5, 2009.
Fantastic New York Times graphic detailing every batter Mariano Rivera has ever faced in the postseason.
He has allowed only 2 home runs, has 39 saves, and has a 0.74 e.r.a. over 88 postseason games. A batter-by-batter look at his playoff career.

The Yankees at the beginning
Published at The Greensboro News & Record on November 5, 2009.
John Robinson pulls a few classic pieces of minor league baseball coverage out of his paper’s archives on the occasion of the Yankees winning their 27th world championship last night.
Jeter’s first mention in our pages came Aug. 26, 1992: Derek Jeter , the Yankees’ No. 1 draft choice and the sixth player selected overall in the June amateur draft, made his Hornets’ debut at shortstop, hitting a home run in his second at-bat. He also committed an error.

Phillies make Mariano Rivera work, rough night for Charlie Manuel
Published at Sports Illustrated on October 30, 2009.
Tom Verducci on Mariano Rivera’s long outing in Game 2 and related topics.
Rivera is so good that it has come to this: he throws two shutout innings and the opponent can find hope in his pitch counts and their swings against him.

Seats of Gold
Published at ESPN Outside the Lines on October 3, 2009.
An ESPN.com reporter takes one for the team, sitting in the most expensive seats in the new Yankee Stadium, sipping champagne and spooning house-made relish on his gourmet sausage… Also, why those seats were mostly empty all season.
And so, ironically, everyone actually lost because everyone won too much. Wall Street folks wanted tickets to close deals. The fans thought they could use Wall Street greed to get something for nothing. The Yankees figured if someone was making all that money off their product, it should be them. These are the things I’m thinking about in the car to the stadium.

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