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Monday, January 27, 2014

A daft punk? No, that was Robbie Cano, (doncha know), last night at the Grammys

We can’t escape him. He’s everywhere, like a song on the radio, flashing his Freedom Beard. Surely, he’ll turn up at the Oscars, chillin' with Leonardo and Martin, or with the cast of “12 Years a Shave." He goes everywhere, trotted out with Jay-Z as Exhibit A: The Man Who Made the Money. It's Robbie Cano, the jogger, who could have appeared last night in a duet with Shirley Bassey, nodding as she sings, “He loves only gold… only gold.

Aww, hell. We can’t whine. Robbie earned every penny he’ll ever make, and for the last four months, the Yankee brass sat back and pretended he wasn't going to really leave. We spent $450 million on breakable outfielders, a 30-year-old catcher and a foreign mystery - every one of them far less of a certainty than Robbie. We can coo about the middle of the order – McCann, Beltran and Teixeira – but around the seventh slot, we start calling names like Scott Sizemore and Dean Anna, and if you're scoring at home, that will be a good inning to go score a sandwich. We haven't yet weighed the gains with the loss – and we need to start coming to grips with that loss. Because there he was, last night, at the Grammys. Yeah, the winners ran up to accept their statues faster than Cano sprints out a grounder to first. But the Yankees still don’t know what they’ve done.
Around March 25, Cashman will either make a hail Mary trade - goodbye, Brett, and probably so long to our best prospect, Gary Sanchez - or he'll go dumpster diving, as he did last March. One problem, though: Last year, we scored nothing valuable from the scrap heap. We landed Vernon Wells, Ben Francisco, Brennan Bosch, Travis Hafner and a raft of lost infielders, all of whom played like – well – hubcaps found on a scrap heap. They’re all back on the heap. Are Beltan and Ellsbury worth more than the loss of Robbie? Were the increments worth the excrements?
Oh well, last night, there he was – Robbie - hanging with Lorde and Taylor. Let’s hope he stayed up all night sniffing animal laxatives with some King of Leon. Let’s hope his Freedom Beard turns white. But he’s going to have a great year in Seattle – maybe three. After that, the only songs the Mariners will associate with him will be musical chairs, because they’ll be stuck with him for seven more seasons, at $25 million per. By then, Jay-Z will be bringing Bryce Harper to the Grammys, and we’ll finally be finished with A-Rod.

And by then, maybe we’ll have a second baseman. As of now, we do not.

3 comments:

KD said...

Mr.Cano sure looks like JZ's new poodle. I wonder if he gets to pick out his own clothes?

JM said...

But we've got Brian Roberts!!

OK, just kidding.

Word of advice to Cano: don't hire a fashion consultant who has Stevie Wonder on the resume.

Unknown said...

What I've been fearing, you know down the road like, is that Robby will come back in the last years of this contract on the downward slide. It would fit the pattern.

Let's just hope the Yankees don't then renegotiate the last years of his contract into another ten year boondoggle a la A-Rod.