Reasons to Be Cheerful

As some of you may have gleaned, I'm not really a "glass half-full" kind of guy.

It runs in the family.

On Armistice Day, when everyone was throwing confetti and drinking moonshine whiskey from a boot, my great-grandfather said, "Ah, we're just going to have to go back to Europe and fight the whole war all over again."

When TV came in, my grandmother said, "Ah, another 60 years or so and the kids'll just be projecting movies on their walls again, mark my words."

When they started the internet, my father told me, "Ah, it'll just become an excuse for lazy no-accounts to get drunk and blubber about their favorite baseball team."

You see what I'm getting at here.  The thing is, it's generally pretty easy to be right by being as pessimistic as possible in this vale of tears.  That's why I was so angry at myself, in an uncharacteristic fit of optimism, to have looked at this stacked Yankees team and its eager new manager in the spring and said, "They're gonna win 112 games!"

"Stuggotz!" my sister said, slapping my head and throwing me out of the house when my family disowned me.  "What, you think Cashman suddenly grew brains?  You think he went anywhere?"

What was I thinking?

BUT, in another, uncharacteristic bout of runaway optimism, I will say this about the game today:  there were signs of life.  Reasons, maybe, even to have hope.  Which is like wishing for reasons to have plague.

But I'm bringing in the shade of Rod Serling now, to submit the following for your approval:

—Under the most trying conditions possible, Chance Adams did not suck. In fact, he was actually quite respectable.

Sure, part of his performance only makes you wonder why he didn't get a shot last season, when Coops was throwing prospects at GMs right and left for the likes of Sonny Gray and Jaime Garcia. And it makes you wonder about our entire, nimrod front office's ability to judge talent.

But...maybe we actually have another young pitcher. Fingers crossed.

—The bullpen looked solid.  First clean outing for Chad Green in a long time. Another decent outing for A.J. Cole, who may yet prove to be one of Cashy's genuine dumpster diving finds.

—A little fire. Sure, it took awhile. Cora mouthing off about our best pitcher, that home plate ump who had a reservation at the No Name Fish Restaurant tonight punching out Walker and Gardner in the ninth on close calls. Kimbrel putting one under Stanton's chin.

BUT...that seemed to finally do it. There were signs of life, of concentration. Of clutchness, even.

All unfulfilled, of course, thanks to yet another big fail from Greg Bird, whose time on this team should also start winding down.

But...

It was something Leo Durocher used to say, according to, I think, Roger Angell: You let sleeping dogs lie. You don't ever rile up sleepwalking, second-division teams. That's what the Yankees were.

But this Red Sox team, which now seems to have become as churlish and cocky as its fans, couldn't leave well enough alone. They chose to take offense at what was a perfectly fine, tit-for-tat, Sevvy brushing Betts back after they plunked Gardner exchange.

They chose to make it World War Z...and they woke up the zombies, in the end. Kimberly's purpose pitch to Stanton—with a 4-0 lead, the Yanks almost finished with another somnolent effort, and much of the lineup showing how well it had absorbed the inane franchise dogma of, "Dare to take a called third strike"—was a tactical error.

It's not a coincidence that back-to-back doubles and two walks followed. That these Yankees looked fully focused for the first time in over a week, at least, and actually mad for the first time in over a month.

You go out of your way to humiliate an opponent that is already mailing it in, and you haven't done yourself any favors. Kimbrel got to put 32 more pitches on his arm, and look pretty vulnerable. The Yankees looked mad.

Call me a cockeyed optimist, but this suddenly seemed like a team that might even be interested in trying to win ballgames again.