On July 2, Yankee Dependence Day, the team fell below .500 and spent $12 million on 16-year-old Latino boys

After all the threats to do so,

somebody else has committed suicide for me 

at last.

the nurse stops the wheelchair, 

breaks a rose from a nearby bush,

puts it in my hand.

I don’t even know what it is. 

It might as well be my pecker.

for all the good it does.

Charles Bukowski, "The Last Days of the Suicide Kid"

Whenever the Yankees collapse, I think of Bukowski's long-envisioned finale: A nurse putting him down, while he craps his pants in an old folks' home. With luck (?), that's how we all go out. Certainly, it sums up the 2014 Yankees. You can study this season from many angles, even find ways to foresee the Yankees winning it. But you can't say the Yankees have a good team. Nope. That won't parse. This is a wretched club, one of the worst since the first Bush administration. The only question is whether baseball - in its drive for NFL parity - has simply built an entire league of Kansas Cities. I dunno. And I'm starting not to care.

The World Cup looks more and more entertaining. Those new streaming shows on Netflix? They seem like a valid use of my time. Did you know there is still a New York Times best-seller list for fiction? And Tom Cruise is still making movies! Who knew! July is the month when my local recycling outlet accepts used batteries. Maybe I'll devote the month to putting dead batteries into the right bin. I'll save the earth, while thinking about something other than Yangervis Solarte.

Don't want to fixate on Yangervis. He was one of the more enjoyable diversions of 2014. At the flea market, where these two guys sell bootleg Yankee swag, Solarte T-shirts showed up in mid-April. When I asked about them, the older guy said, "Solarte! He's my man!" And didn't you love how he sprints to first after a walk? Who was the last Yankee to do that? No Neck Williams! But yesterday, Solarte crapped his pants, and I think Nurse Girardi pulled the plug. He blew another play in the field, killing us. Supposedly, the Yankees are bringing up a new Yangervis - Zelous Wheeler.  The Yangervis era may be over.

Yesterday, after the team fell below .500, John Sterling could barely talk. He called it "unthinkable" and dished off the post-game duties to Suzyn and Sweeney Murti, and he probably was stoned drunk by the time the show ended. Suzyn ran her usual lamentations about clutch hitting, then tore into the defense. (By the way, Kelly Johnson cannot play first base.) But it's gotten tiresome. How many times can we yell? What new things can we scream? The Yankees somehow have created a negative atmosphere: Phil Hughes and Joba Chamberlain go elsewhere and improve, while other stars come to collapse. It's all gone wrong. The Yankees are a damn tedious millstone to contemplate, much less follow.

Yesterday, the Yankees did something that will inspire hope among some fans. Not me, though. They spent $12 million on a bunch of 16-year-old Latino boys, flexing their financial might in the only place it still exists. But if you look at the past list of 16-year-old bonus babies, most are obscurities. Worse, the Yankees are creating a wave of millionaire teens. Is that a good idea? What have the Yankees become? And should we care? 

Might as well be my pecker, for all the good they do.