The REAL Five Worst Yankee Moves of 2014

I wasn't gonna spew today, just sit around, drink, and listen to the John Sterling songbook, but then some embryonic baby Gammonite at New Jersey dot com - the folks who prefer slideshows over newspapers - whacked out his "list" of the Yankees worst moves of 2014, and dammit, it pushed a bad tooth.

The slideshow barker lists the Yankees worst moves of 2014 as: 1. Stephen Drew, 2. Brian Roberts, 3. Kelly Johnson, 4. Jeff Francis and 5. Wade Leblanc. If that's the worst, dear God, we should have won a World Series. Those were scrapheap acquisitions. Those were nothing.

(Note: The guy ignores the signings of Beltran, McCann, et al, because they happened before Jan. 1. For starters, this is insanely stupid, because even if they technically took place in 2013, they clearly were part of the 2014 collapse.) 

So here are my Five Worst Yankee moves of 2014.

1. Batting Derek Jeter second all year. It didn't work in April. It didn't work in May. It didn't work in June. It didn't work in July. It didn't work in August. It didn't work in September - wait: I take that back! It worked on one of the last days of September. For a team starved for hitting, management's refusal to acknowledge Jeter's diminished skills were worthy of terminal alcoholism. Considering how close we came to making the vaunted one game wild card, it's infuriating to think of all the rallies that died because Luxury Box Hal - with an heiress' instinct for finding comfort - preferred to honor a Yankee great... rather than win. So that's what we did. And Jeter sat out October.

2. Brian Roberts. Yeah, the baby slideshow barker got this one right. Hell, Dick Cheney could have gotten this one right. Not only did we spend the entire first half of the season congratulating ourselves for signing the great and beloved "Mr. Oriole," but then we screwed the guy by waiving him within a few at bats of a huge salary bonus. What cheapskates we were. What jerks we were. What a debacle.

3. Pushing Masahiro Tanaka every fifth day. By early June, there were discussions about whether the Yankees should ease up on the guy, who had never faced this kind of workload in Japan. But the grand "ol baseball men," those tobacco spitting veterans of the Crimean War, won the argument. They didn't want to baby the Japanese guy. Nope. So Tanaka threw out his elbow, and who knows if he will ever be the same? And who knows what would have happened if they had simply moved slower by indoctrinating him into the U.S. game?

4. Not having Carlos Beltran undergo surgery. Halfway through the season, word came down that Beltran needed surgery to throw, and thus play RF... but it would mean missing six weeks. Instead of sending him to the cutting board, the Yankees let him DH and play through the pain. Thus, they got neither a RF or a DH. Beltran hit nothing, Worse, he hit nothing from the heart of our batting order. It was a classic "lose-lose!"

5. No plan for Mark Teixeira. Simply stated, the guy sucked. But considering the Yankee backup plans, you would have thought Lou Gehrig was our 1B. Kelly Johnson was amazingly inept. Francisco Cervelli was - as usual - hurt. Beltran hadn't played 1B since high school. McCann? Where did that idea come from? We watched Teixeira turn into the Second Coming of the Grandyman - swinging for the fences and trying to blast the ball through the defensive over-shifts that clearly had turned him into a mediocrity. He refused to adjust his swing, saying the Yankees weren't paying him to hit singles. Now, the Yankees expect a bounce back year. Their claim? In 2014, Tex was still recovering from a bad wrist. In other words, they figured he would suck, but they sent him out there anyway? Wow. This is so bad on so many levels. Screw the slideshow. What bothers me is the sideshow.