As Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa sink slowly in tandem toward steroids oblivion, reprising their relationship in their electrifying home run derby of 1998 but in a different direction, Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens run slowly in place, doomed to their personal Groundhog Day in baseball cleats. Mike Piazza, meanwhile, is very likely headed, undeserved as it may be, to having the last laugh on his nemesis Clemens.

That, in brief, sums up my view of the results of this year’s voting for the Hall of Fame, in which Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, John Smoltz and Craig Biggio were elected in what some of the supposedly neutral voters viewed, in a celebratory salute, as a bonanza for baseball.

McGwire and Sosa, who duped fans, reporters and the commissioner alike with their combined 136 home runs in 1998, continued losing support in this year’s election and have become …

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Long before he was a three-term governor of New York State and a prominent politician in the Democratic Party and the country, Mario Cuomo was a minor league baseball player. When he was completing his third term as governor, Cuomo thought he might be finishing where he started, not in the minor leagues but in baseball. He thought he might become commissioner of Major League Baseball.

Just like some other prominent people, Cuomo was conned by Bud Selig’s shell game of denial. After being a leader in the successful move to oust Fay Vincent as commissioner in 1992, Selig repeatedly – almost on a daily basis – denied that he wanted to be commissioner.

At the time, he was the acting, or interim, commissioner, though he denied that, too, and constantly proclaimed he didn’t want the job. Cuomo was apparently among those who believed Selig, that is, fell for his verbal mirage. We learn this from a story related by Vincent the day after Cuomo died last week.

Vincent wasn’t suggesting anything evil about Selig, but he told the story because he thought I might find it interesting:

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It is now 2015. The Yankees, winners of 27 World Series titles, have gone 27 months without winning a single playoff game. New York has not even led a postseason contest since Derek Jeter broke his ankle in the first game of the 2012 ALCS.

The signs of a collapse were there, as plain as the X-rays showing Jeter’s broken ankle, but it has taken two additional years – and two playoff misses, the first such streak in two decades – for Yankees management to respond with a change in thinking. But unlike when I wrote about New York’s impending struggles two years ago, in a piece entitled “Pinstriped Pessimism,” the team’s moves this offseason see me approaching the coming year with guarded optimism as to the Yankees’ new direction.

Some critics, including this site’s proprietor just last week, have pointed to the team’s uncertainty at several key positions as an indictment of management’s poor planning in recent years. While this claim holds true to an extent, it is an oversimplification to cast all blame on general manager Brian Cashman et al. without considering the broader factors that have contributed to New York’s lack of readiness for a post-Jeter world.

The Yankees of the last decade routinely …

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