Th-th-th-that's all, folks!

First off, let me just say, if the future of baseball is the Tampa Bay Rays with their random pitching rotation, which there is every reason to think it will be, then I will start following golf.  Or soccer.  Go NYCFCJCBCDC!

Actually, tonight was tremendously clarifying, in terms of what the Yanks should want to do on trade week.

What they should do?

Become a seller, not a buyer.

This team is far, far, far from one player or one pitcher away.  In the course of three days, we have now lost our best starter—a guy who looked like he could be the best starter we had developed in 40 years—and our best reliever.

In addition, we saw tonight that:

—Gary Sanchez is a train wreck.

—Aaron Judge is likely the beneficiary of stolen signs at home, we can now say with authority as he approaches the Mendoza Line on the road.

—Aaron Hicks, alas, is an irretrievable mediocrity.

—Neil Walker should no longer be playing major-league ball.

—Didi is fast slipping back toward mediocrity, with Greg Bird in hot pursuit.

—Something is wrong with Chad Green.

—Our management team is insane.

The last is the only unsolvable problem here.  Re-starts go awry all the time, and with El Matador and El Conquistador still on the team and still young, we have plenty of time to start again.

Unfortunately, our GM and his puppet manager are so committed to doing something the exact same way and expecting different results that all we are likely to get is some savagely bad trade now, for a ragged remnant of a starter.

The sort of daring trades we need would be something along the lines of, say, Judge for Realmuto, Sanchez for a gaggle of Class-A pitchers, Hicks for lottery tix (I can see the tabloid headlines now:  "HIX FOR TIX!"), CC to some contender or another, Gray to a small, low-pressure market, Sevvy and Chappie to whatever rehab they need instead of another 2-3 weeks of pretending they're not hurt, and so on.

THIS is the moment to dynamite this team and begin again.  Right now.  When it will get peak returns.  Not after putting us through five or six years of failure and pretense, while these guys steadily lose all remaining value.

It's not a big deal.  We thought we really had something here, me above all.  We seemed to have so much depth, it couldn't go wrong.

Hey, stuff happens.  One of my favorite movie quotes of all time is from A History of Violence, when William Hurt has Viggo Mortensen's character dead to rights, seated and covered by two of his gunsels.

Next thing you know, boom, the gunsels are dead or dying, Mortensen's out the door, and Hurt just looks incredulous.

"How do you fuck that up?" he says, half to himself.  "How do you fuck that up?"

Well, you do.  Better luck with the next bunch.