'Twas a Famous Victory

Word is that last night was an important win, which is true if you consider beating a kitten to death with a wedge of cheese to be a great victory.

It's true, as somebody on YES said, that if you're going to play four hours of baseball, you might as well win. But what a four hours! Any kids who watched that game will certainly become...hockey fans.

I know the injuries don't help, but it's grating to see just how bad and sloppy this team's entire approach to the game is.

I can't remember ever seeing a Yankees pitching staff, for instance, that bounced so many balls in the dirt, or on which the pitchers so often seem to be throwing to a spot diametrically opposite from where the catcher has set up. Just before Abreu hit that game-tying home run off Cashman's Brilliant Mid-Season Acquisition, Britton bounced a ball so far in front of the plate I thought I had somehow switched to a cricket channel.

Situational hitting aside, almost no one on this team seems to have even a vague idea of the strike zone. It's like that quote from Woody Allen's music teacher, when he's playing the bass in Take the Money and Run:  "He had no concept of the instrument. He was blowing into it." I'm often pleasantly surprised these days when Yankees hitters are holding their bats at the correct end.

In the field, the whole team looks as though it could use another spring training month. Simply catching the ball, from Bird's failure to do so against Boston to Stanton botching a routine flyball last night, is suddenly beyond their capability—a suggestion that there is a growing lack of concentration on this ball club, as much as anything else.

More specifically:

—Only a genius such as Brian Cashman could have reduced a team with the depth we saw in the spring to this. Sure, Higgy got robbed of a home run last night, and he had a great frame of a key Sonny Gray pitch, but come on. This is what we're down to now behind the plate? (I take it that Romine is hurt again, not having played yesterday.)

Shane Robinson in the outfield? And Luke Voit, I will give him his props, had a key hit last night, which is more than you can say for Greg Bird since maybe last October, but the guy looks like that idiot child of Giuliani's who kept acting out during his inauguration. It is time for him to seriously consider salads. It is time for us to seriously consider McBroom.

—None of us can know, of course, whether Goldilocks Chapman's troubles are of heart, head, or arm, but the idea that this guy will ever boot us home to a world championship is delusional.  He couldn't find the plate because he'd had too much rest, but then he was too tired to go last night? Whatever. He's yet another soap opera character who needs to be off the show.

—Watching Brett Gardner take that broad, desperate, sweeping, utterly powerless swing over another breaking ball last night, I had a sense of deja vu. Where had I seen that before?

Oh yeah: in just about every Brett Gardner start, ever. Yeah, the guy does a lot of good things, but he never should have been a regular, or a leadoff man, and his average strikeouts over a 162-game season—119—are simply not justified by his average number of home runs—11—in same. Time to bid Gardy a fond farewell after this year.

—I cannot adequately describe how profoundly depressing it has become to watch Neil Walker play baseball.  Worse, even, than Chris Carter or Brian Roberts, in their Yankees stints (Okay, sure, not as bad as the stygian depths of Stephen Drew. But still.). As a National Leaguer for marginal clubs he just seemed excruciatingly dull. Now I marvel at his ability to live down to the worst possible outcome.

Walker is like the short-order cook of the Yankees Ptomaine Diner. "Need a strikeout with that? Right away!" "Want a double-play to kill off the inning? Coming up! And how about some pie?" It is inexplicable to me that he is still on a major-league team.

—Maybe it was just the lighting for the postgame presser, but Aaron Boone seemed as though he'd taken a little less of his daily horse tranquilizer dosage last night. But still. We need him to get mad, to get happy, to get something.

When we finally pulled that mangy dog of a victory out of the river of toxic defeats last night and brought it home, all I could think about was what I did NOT see.

That is, I did NOT see anybody vaulting over the dugout guard rails, and running out to pound Sonny Gray on the back and high-five everybody else, the way a certain Mr. Derek Jeter used to do. Granted that nobody on this Yankees team has the status or the leadership qualities that Jetes did, what we need is for their manager to pick up the slack.

He should have been out there, in wee small hours of the Chitown night, pumping a fist and screaming encouragement. Maintaining an even keel is fine. At other times, you need to shout.