"Fish Gotta Rot, Bird's Gotta Sit"

We still got no one
Knows how to fix it
Can't help
Wishin' these guys would go home.

As has often and truly been said, fish rot from the head down, and stinking flounders of this team's magnitude are the product, pure and simple, of the team's rapidly decaying brain matter.

This is past tired, folks.  If it were vaudeville—which it increasingly resembles—someone would haul out the big hook.  If it were amateur night at the Apollo—which it also looks like—the crowd would be stomping the joint down.

As for us?  Well, thank the JuJu gods there is alcohol.

How many times is this going to go on, now?

The Yankees run through their paces of incompetence like so many finely trained, syphilitic Lippizaner stallions.

Let's see...

—Top of the first, load the bases—and continue baseball's very worst production in such situations. Check!

—Bottom of the first, put our obviously floundering "ace" on the mound to throw meatballs anywhere but in the general vicinity of our befuddled catcher's glove.  Watch the A's smash them all around the park when he does.  Check!

Right away, game over.  On a date when the Yanks' eternal rival battled back from a six-run deficit like mead-crazed Viking berserkers storming Paris, this flat and incompetent club lurches toward the end of the game as vacant-eyed as Little Orphan Annie.

Something's gotta give, people, and it's up top.

This late in the season, our starter and our catcher cannot possibly go out there not knowing what the signs are.  That situation cannot possibly be tolerated for an entire inning without intervention by our manager and coaches.

Our starter, who two months ago was the second-best pitcher in the league cannot possibly be all right, with this his seventh or eighth or ninth putrid start of the second half.  That situation cannot possibly be tolerated by our crack front office and medical staff while who knows what is happening to his arm.

We cannot possibly still be embracing a hitting philosophy in which we fail constantly and pathetically in situations where pitchers are forced, more than ever, to throw fastballs down the heart of the plate.

Say what you will about this or that individual player—our infield rookies, Gary Sanchez, Severino, whoever—the fault, my dear brutes, lies not with our stars but with our management team, from the owner's box down through the dugout.

Able to produce, for the first time in over twenty years, a modicum of young talent, we have let it crumble to pieces, thanks to a complete failure in perception and instruction.  The bibulous horse doctors we hire as medical experts constantly let players stay on the field until body parts are visibly dropping off, then send us cryptic reports on them about as honest as those emanating from the Kremlin when Stalin checked out.

And atop it all is the chief fish brain, Dr. Cooperstown himself, who, in the final, unbearable irony of this whole, interminable, unbearable season, will be lauded far and wide for all he did for us.

C'mon, let's get the betting pool together:  which Knight of the Press Box will be the first to scribble that, "All in all, 2018 was really Brian Cashman's finest year"?

My money is on Billywitz.