Steve Lombardi at WasWatching passes along Baseball America’s Top 10 prospects for the Yankees, and four of the top eight are catchers.

Maybe the Yankees really heavily scout catchers, or maybe that’s just a weird fluke. There’s only one other position player on the list.

Granted, the top guy is Jesus Montero, who, as Steve points out, likely will not end up behind the plate. But Montero absolutely torched Double-A pitching at 19 last year and will probably move quickly.

Behind Montero on the Yanks’ list of top catching prospects are Austin Romine, a 20-year-old who topped out at High A last year, Gary Sanchez, a 16-year-old who has yet to play professional ball, and J.R. Murphy, an 18-year-old who played Rookie Ball in 2009.

So it’s not like the catchers are exactly banging down the door, but damn. The Yankees are to catchers under 20 what the Mets are to catchers over 35.

As for the Mets’ list of top catching prospects, I suppose it looks like this:

1. Josh Thole
…….
2. Francisco Pena

Here’s a really interesting read from Full Count Pitch, courtesy of the Baseball Think Factory.

Billy Campione, the writer, attended a WFAN-organized question and answer session with Brian Cashman in which Cashman details the process that led him to hire Joe Girardi as manager.

According to Campione, the interview process took eight hours per candidate and included a written test. An excerpt:

One example cited by Cashman presented each applicant with a statistical breakdown of three anonymous players. They were asked who they would prefer to have on their roster and why. Cashman said some managerial hopefuls were obviously ignorant of what some of the advanced statistical measurements even meant. Another query asked the contender to create a lineup to face CC Sabathia on June 1 using the current Yankee roster. They were then asked what lineup they would use against Sabathia in the playoffs. Cashman found fault with the applicants who would sit their lefties in June yet start them in the playoffs. He wanted a consistent approach to do what it takes to win, regardless of hurt feelings among veterans who may face the indignity of sitting against a tough lefty in the postseason.

Cool.

Now I should mention that I have no idea the process by which other teams hire a manager, so maybe this is standard fare. Plus, I know plenty of Yankee fans who would say that whatever method arrived at Joe Girardi was an imperfect one.

The article mentions that Cashman called Cleveland GM Mark Shapiro, among others, for advice, which lends a lot of insight into why the Indians hired Baseball Prospectus reader Manny Acta this offseason.

And it’s reassuring to hear that at least one team goes through a process like this to make important internal decisions.

Doin’ my duty:

SNY cover the Yankees’ parade live tomorrow beginning at 11 a.m.

Jonas Schwartz will host the coverage. Jon Heyman, Mark Feinsand, Marty Appel and friend of TedQuarters Alex Belth from Bronx Banter will be in studio to weigh in.

William Rhoden weighed in on A-Rod in today’s New York Times. He writes:

We began reading and hearing that A-Rod was a changed man. How did that happen?

Some speculated that it was the finality of his divorce, others that it was the tearful February news conference in Tampa with teammates looking on. Still others said the author of Rodriguez’s renaissance was Kate Hudson.

But A-Rod is not the one who has changed. He is the same guy.

There it is. So many columnists and bloggers and fans weighed in on the new, relaxed A-Rod this year that it essentially became fact. The perception even seeped its way into news articles that read like a bad comedian at open-mic night.

“Women are like this; men are like this. Last year’s A-Rod was like this, this year’s A-Rod is like this.”

Nonsense.

Did A-Rod really spend less time worrying about reporters, or did reporters spend less time worrying about A-Rod?

So many have suggested that he cast away the distractions and focused on baseball in 2009. Then in the next breath, they mention how clearly happy he is with his new Hollywood starlet girlfriend.

If A-Rod had failed in the postseason, would Kate Hudson still be the magic charm of relaxation, or would she be another cursed complication?

Of course we see signs that A-Rod is different now and somehow better. You know why? Because we’re looking for them. Because we want to find them. Because now he had a bunch of clutch hits, and we’re looking for an explanation better than randomness.

But there isn’t one. A-Rod is a great hitter who happened to struggle in a few consecutive postseasons. This year, he performed as a great hitter, because that’s what great hitters usually do.

Slumps and streaks are part of baseball. They’re not indicative of some massive psychological overhaul, just baseball.

The good news is that now a three-time MVP and 12-time All-Star, the owner of 583 Major League home runs, can finally lose some labels he never deserved.

He’ll keep others, of course, like “juicer” and “adulterer” and “centaur.” But regardless of how we choose to judge those, they’re ones he earned.

Just A-Rod being A-Rod, really.

Every time a media fallacy is exposed, I think, “Maybe this will be the time they get it!”

I hope it’s a teachable moment, to borrow a phrase from my days as an educator, and that sports journalists will recognize the mistakes of their past and learn not to repeat them.

And every time, I’m disappointed.

So now A-Rod is not unclutch anymore. He’s a certified playoff stud, a man who richly deserves the centaur painting he has hanging over his bed. It’s appropriate; he’s that much of a beast.

But you know who is unclutch?

Why, it’s Mark Teixeira of course. The inimitable John Harper:

Let’s be honest, Mark Teixeira is floundering at the plate in his first postseason the way A-Rod did in his pinstriped past. And while the Yankees have survived Teixeira’s struggles so far, you have to ask:

Can they really win a championship with their No. 3 hitter seemingly blinded by the bright lights of October/November?

GARSJKHDA$#@!FKJFGSDKJGH!@#!@

Sorry.

Harper adds brilliant baseball-player quotes from Teixeira that include, “Sometimes you get hits, sometimes you don’t” and mentions that Teixeira — shockingly! — wasn’t doing much to divulge his mental state to the press.

I don’t even feel like finishing. Sample size. Sample size. Sample size.

Mark Teixeira is a Major League Baseball player, and a very good one. He’s enduring a slump that happens to be amplified by a set of short playoff series. Last year — LAST YEAR! — in the bright lights of postseason baseball, he hit .467 with a .550 OBP in the Angels’ ALDS loss to the Sox.

He might actually be the “new A-Rod,” as Harper suggests. He’s just not the new A-Rod for any of the reasons Harper thinks.

Wow. According to US Weekly, citing a former lover, A-Rod had paintings of himself as a centaur over his bed.

Wow.

Wow.

I don’t even know what to say. I didn’t think it could get funnier than the Details photoshoot, but I think it just did. A-Rod is the comedy gift that keeps on giving.

A centaur. Half-horse half-man.

You know, I’ve been brainstorming for years trying to come up with some idea for my father to follow his Awesomeist classic, Vin Diesel and Usher Riding Into Battle on a Chariot Pulled by White Tigers. Years. I just couldn’t come up with anything that could match that.

But A-Rod did: A-Rod as a centaur.

What’s most amazing, I guess, is that no one had the cojones to stop him.

Which is more damning about the nature of celebrity: That the guy thought it would be a good idea to commission a painting of himself as a centaur, or that no one tried hard enough to talk the guy out of it?

I absolutely must see it. I have to. The A-Rod as a Centaur masterpiece should be in MoMA. It reflects the human condition. It is massurrealism at its finest.

And in this case, that actually means what it sounds like.

In a column for the Daily News today, Joanna Molloy details Alex Rodriguez’s new habit of dropping in on Little League games and stickball games around Washington Heights and the Bronx.

Molloy wonders if that has something to do with A-Rod’s playoff efforts. I seriously doubt it, and would much prefer to chalk his success up to randomness and the fact that he’s one of the best players in baseball.

But that doesn’t make it any less cool that he’s jumping in on area stickball games.

I love stickball. My friends and I played it all the time in high school, so much so that it made me something of a Luis Castillo-style wrist hitter, since it’s useless to take monstrous cuts with a stickball bat.

Part of what’s cool about stickball is that every single group of stickball players has their own set of rules, usually customized for wherever there are open spaces to play.

I know some people play with a Spaldeen and hit lobbed pitches off a bounce, but we played the variety that features a spray-painted strike zone against a wall, and where different distances are assigned different values.

One of my best friends was a stud pitcher in high school who could throw in the high 80s. Batting against him in stickball can be downright terrifying.

That’s all I’ve got. I just wanted to point out that stickball is really fun. I’ve got some meetings today so there won’t be much here for the next few hours.

Enjoy thoughts of Pedro tonight.

Allow me to briefly indulge a high-school football memory:

It was the fourth quarter of the homecoming game my senior year, and we held a comfortable lead over the cupcake West Hempstead team we scheduled for homecoming every season. Nevermind that it was due to be our first win of the season and only the fourth in the three years I had been playing varsity football; I was having the time of my life.

Our coach swapped in a new defensive end, a pothead who didn’t play much. He was supposed to bring the defensive playcall with him, but that was apparently too much for his memory to bear.

While the huddle gathered, I jogged to greet him.

“What’s the play?” I asked.

“Oh, s@#$,” he said, looking bewildered. “But yo, Wurst is having a party.”

I chuckled and approached the huddle.

“Forty-two, outside, Cover 2, red dog,” I said, improvising. “And guys — there’s a party at Wurst’s house tonight.”

What a leader I was that day! And what a fun-loving gang of hooligans we were! Just laughing and partying and keeping it loose. That was a team with chemistry.

Of course, the next week, while losing by double-digits, I got into a fistfight with our starting runningback on the sidelines. And after the game, instead of partying with my teammates, I went to the movies with my parents. I was ashamed to be seen in public after the stomping we took.

In the coming days, lots and lots of people are going to talk about A.J. Burnett and his whipped-cream pies and how the Yankees succeeded because they were able to stay loose in the clubhouse.

But that’s not really it.

When teams play well, the players have fun. Almost always. Baseball players become professional baseball players in part because they really, really enjoy playing baseball (even Carlos Beltran!). And to win consistently at the Major League level must be an unimaginable thrill.

So of course the Yankees nailed each other in the face with pies after games. And of course they appeared to be enjoying it. They were enjoying it, and they deserved to. They were that good.

But they were enjoying it because they were good, they were not good because they were enjoying it. Does that make sense?

The Yankees had a team full of All-Stars that were lucky enough to stay healthy. They replaced Jason Giambi with Mark Teixeira and revamped their rotation. That’s why they won, and so that’s why they had so much fun.

No one gets pied after losses.

Look: I’m not dismissing the element of team chemistry altogether. I’ve worked in groups, and obviously I recognize that it’s a much more pleasant experience while everyone’s getting along.

But is there a way to construct a group to ensure that everyone gets along? I doubt it. In fact, I’d bet the best way to secure the best possible clubhouse would be to put together the best possible team.

That’s what the Mets need to do this offseason. They must put together the best possible team for 2010 that does not prevent them from winning in 2011 and beyond.

And that’s all. There’s no need to go out and acquire good clubhouse guys or team leaders or pie-throwers. If the team wins games, there’ll always be someone to throw pies.

Bury your head deep in the sand.
Anonymity is a virtue in this day and age.

I made my opinions on a potential Yankees-Phillies matchup pretty clear last week.

You would think that Mets fans would know enough to blindly agree with what I say, but there’s still a shocking amount of Internet debate surrounding the existential dilemma we’re currently facing.

Paul at Section Five Twenty-Eight and James at Amazin’ Avenue, two gentlemen known to frequent these parts, made compelling cases for why we should root against the Phillies. I’m with them.

In fact, the main arguments against rooting against the Phillies boil down to these:

1) The Yankees buy their championships

First of all, Mets fans: Just because your glass house is falling apart doesn’t give you the right to throw stones. The Mets had the second-biggest payroll in baseball this year, and even if they didn’t spend like the Yanks did, they still tried pretty hard to buy a championship. They just did a poor job of it.

Second, there’s still nothing illegal about trying to buy a championship. The Yanks bring in a lot of cash, so they spend it on players. Would you prefer the Steinbrenners pocketed the loot? Would that be, in some way, more honorable?

The disparity in payrolls is Major League Baseball’s problem, not the Yankees. The Yankees are doing the best that they can do win. It is the league’s responsibility to regulate their spending. And if you believe that the league should do more to regulate that spending, then you should be rooting for the Yankees, because if the Yankees keep not winning World Series with the league’s highest payroll then there’s no evidence that they can actually “buy” a championship.

2) My friends are Yankee fans, and they’ll rub it in my face

Will they? Then I have a solid suggestion for you: Get some new friends.

I recognize that there’s an obnoxious sense of entitlement among some Yankee fans, but I’ve actually found it remarkably easy to filter those people out of my life. It turns out, people who are obnoxious and entitled about anything are just not too pleasant to be around. Nowadays, the Yankee fans I do interact with are mostly kind and reasonable people who recognize how lucky they are to root for a team with a $200 million payroll.

Beyond that, Mets fans: Are Yankee fans really rubbing it in your faces, or are they merely celebrating their team’s victory? Because I always sense a whole lot of Met-fan paranoia when they say, “oh, they’re taunting us,” or whatever. I often get the feeling Yankee fans couldn’t really care less about the Mets, and Mets fans simply harbor a good deal of Freudian envy toward their luckier neighbors.

3) I can’t root for A-Rod because he’s a (cheater/[expletive])

First of all: Let’s stop castigating specific people for the steroids thing. A-Rod failed a test on the condition of anonymity, then fessed up about it when the results were illegally leaked. That doesn’t make him right, but there were 103 other people on that list, and for all we know several of them are current Phillies. Lots and lots of baseball players did steroids, and so rooting against any team just because they have a player who we know for certain did steroids represents a woefully ignorant approach.

Second: Yankee fans barely even like A-Rod. If you’re a Yankee-fan-hating Mets fan, you should praise A-Rod just to tick them off. I guarantee those same entitled and obnoxious fans that threaten your sanity here in New York are the ones that have long scorned A-Rod’s unclutchiness and cancerous clubhouse presence.

Think of how he’s making them eat their words this year! And think of all the sportswriters who have been forced to question everything they thought they knew because of A-Rod’s postseason performance! That alone makes me root for the guy.

So yeah, I’m rooting for A-Rod and Yankees. Or, as Catsmeat suggested the last time I weighed in on this, some unprecedented tectonic event. Either is acceptable. Rooting for the Phillies is not.