Most pleasing, he seemed to dislike the Yankees-but then again, he seemed, from a distance, to dislike most things. He was a big man-almost a cartoonish vision of the burly ballplayer-who perched daintily on his tiptoes at the plate, holding the bat loosely with fidgety hands, like a kind of conjurer. He had a funny last name, one that, in shortened form, lent itself to the kind of one-syllable vowel-based chants that fans enjoy, all the more fun because, to the outsider’s ear, it sounds incongruously like booing.
Get enough of those guys on your team and you win games, as the Sox did, winning the World Series in 2004, when Youkilis was a rookie and used in just one game in the playoffs, and again in 2007, when he had become a key part of a murderously effective lineup of patient and powerful hitters. In his best years in Boston, he avoided making outs more than forty per cent of the time. But Lewis meant that condemnation as a form of hyperbolic praise, setting those limitations against what made Youk an asset, and one of the faces of the “Moneyball” era: even as a young player, he was superbly selective at the plate, rarely swinging at bad pitches, and getting on base at an exceptional rate. What of Youkilis, then? How much heartache can we spare for a guy who was, after all, introduced to the wider world by Michael Lewis, in “Moneyball,” as “a fat third baseman who couldn’t run, throw, or field”? That summation turned out to be only partly correct: Youkilis was a solid fielder, able at third base and for a few seasons actually quite good at first base. Yet essential to this particular story line, which of course goes back to the sale of Babe Ruth to New York, in 1919, is that the membrane between the two teams has never allowed for movement in both directions, meaning that it’s hard to think of examples of former Yankees doing much for the Red Sox. There have been other, less cutting examples: we may have noticed Derek Lowe pitching for the Yanks last fall, but the less-bitter among us at least thought, Good for him, and for all late-thirties journeymen who can still find ways to get paid for playing baseball.
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