Captain Gary delivered, as usual: three pitches, three strikes, his third stranded baserunner of the game. The sun-blanched crowd booed, the YES team gobbled - they sound more each day like the Michael Kay Radio Show ads, which feature them "hilariously" blathering about U.S. presidents - and the captain sauntered into the dugout runway, toward the post-game buffet, with his teammates, a gaggle of losers on the verge of inscribing its name into the pantheon of sporting disasters. In the second half of 2018, the Yankees have a worse record than the Mets. In this home stretch, they have twice lost series to cupcakes, which makes them a tomato can that dreamed it was a contender.
This is becoming a time for boos. The question now isn't whether the Yankees will hold onto the Wild Card home field advantage - they surely won't - but whether if they're swept in Tampa, they could actually be overtaken at the finish line, and escape the one-game season altogether. A week ago, such a collapse seemed impossible. Now, for this amazing collection of disappointments, built by Cooperstown Cashman himself, no meltdown is beyond imagination.
Seriously. Tell me who on this team has played well enough lately to inspire hope? Voit has reverted back to a career minor leaguer. Gleyber looks a month past his sell date. Didi? Okay, maybe Didi, if his heel doesn't start barking. Andujar's glove is so rancid that he had to be pulled in the eighth yesterday, leaving the lineup without its best bat. Gardy - dear god, will any team offer him a deal this winter? Hicks is tired. Stanton increasingly looks like a guy who compiles big stats on losing teams. And then there is Captain Gary: Oh for four with two strikeouts and three runners left on base, lowering his average to .188. Wow.
Heading into the eighth, the YES men were actually oogling Lance Lynn's Cy Young-level start - five innings, one run! - and touting the lock-down bullpen. But we've seen enough from Betances to know he is a roll of the dice, capable of blowing any lead at any time. The giveaway: If the lead-off hitter gets on - it doesn't matter how - Betances will implode. But nobody was warming in the pen.
Seriously. How does anybody summon up hope for this team? Spit, yeah, I can summon up that. Mockery, oh, yeah. But wasn't there a time when the Yankees were famous for their stretch runs, for their comebacks, for fighting to the end, as opposed to striking out twice on six pitches to end a game?
Frankly,We should hope the Wild Card game is in Oakland. Maybe they'll start it at 10 p.m., so we don't have to watch. And when Captain Gary fans on three pitches to end the miserable debacle known as the 2018 Yankees, there will be no deafening chorus of boos. There will just be the silence of the abyss, as players concoct their excuses, and YES team switches into 2019 promotional mode: Boy, is this winter going to be exciting! Who knows what we'll sign! The Yankees beat the salary cap this year, so they won't pay luxury taxes! Hooray, everybody! Pop the champagne! Next year is gonna be GREAT!
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I turned to Mrs. KD and predicted a loss while watching this boring team last night. we were winning in the 7th but only by one run and I saw no spirit, no desire to win. just a futile procession of one demoralized player after another, doing nothing. I was amazed we were winning at all but I could not imagine our depleted bunch protecting a one run lead, even this late in the game. I was right, unfortunately. Mrs. KD was not impressed. She accused me of being a crappy fan who doesn't support his team. (It's called Tough Love, Babydoll...)
So here's the big contrast for this fan. A tale of two seasons in one. when down in late innings early in the season, I waited to see how The Boys would pull out a win. More often than not, the Yanks were successful. But now? Now I wait to see how they'll blow it. They rarely not disappoint.
I hate this team right now. I am only loving Andujar and am praying the Yankees work with him on his defense, as was necessary with Jeets. Andujar is an extraordinary talent. If we cannot make him successful with his fgielding, then the entire player development system needs to be evaluated.
With the RailRiders done for the year, the Yankees have called up Sheffield and German, now that it doesn't really matter.
Can someone explain to me again how Shef isn't on the 40-man roster so couldn't be called up? I'm confused.
This team is making the NY Giants look good.
Oh, I love Professor Tanaka too. I can't forget him.
I thought Sheffield was being called up.
Andujar should go to left field. But I've given up on speculating over what this team should and will do. It will do whatever one, short, balding, enigmatic man says it will do. A man who likes to dress up in elf costumes and rappel his way up buildings.
Oh, and that Yankees team that launched a great stretch run, always battled, and staged constant comebacks? Wasn't that just last year? Oy.
Some facts:
1. I've been a Yankees fan forever. My first deep non-family memory (age 7) was the feeling of pain when Mazeroski hit that accursed HR in 1960. I have hated the Dodgers, the Giants, and the Mets -- simultaneously -- for the National League's abandoning of NYC. I hate those 3 teams worse than the Red Sox, and worse than ISIS.
2. I come to this blog to get perspectives I don't already have, to learn things, to laugh, and to commiserate. I already can see that the team is made of players who either don't care or can't adapt. Everyone has also hit that particular nail very, very hard (and often). It's not conjecture (to me) -- it's Fact.
3. If the team sucks (as it obviously has and is), I might well be booing 'em at my TV. But it's also likely that I won't come to this website quite as often.
4. I'm not sure how many people are like me in this, and how many differ. I am not an internet maven, don't own a smartphone, and actually read books (you know, paper, binding, etc. - not Kindle!!!).
So maybe I'm unique in all or most of the above.
HOWEVER: On the off-chance that the NYY team sucking big-time in the playdown game and stinking up the off-season is going to be bad for IIH, you might want to go easier on the criticism and offer some helpful ideas to Cashmoney (or his replacement).
Joe, here is the best advice I can give to Cashman in order to to help the Yankees cause and elate their fans: "Resign"!
Two responses;
1. John M - this team is not as bad as the NY Giants. Not even close. Eli already looks shell shocked. We were out coached, outplayed and outhit in the Cowboys' laugher last night. And we lost two starters in the process, to injury. The Yankees, even if we lose them all, will still have a winning record. NY Giants fans are already starting to hope for next years' number one pick, so we can again ignore the offensive line and QB positions. Maybe there is another great running back we can team up with Barkley.
2. Joe FoB) - all year long we offer helpful ideas for improving this team. The problem; Cashman doesn't read them.
Letter of Resignation
Brian Cashman
Yankee Stadium
1 E. 161st Street
Bronx, NY 10451
October 1, 2018
New York Yankees, Inc.
1 E 161st Street
Bronx, NY 10451
Dear Hal Steinbrenner:
Please accept this letter as my formal resignation from General Manager effective today, October 1, 2018.
This announcement comes with a heavy heart, as I have sincerely enjoyed my time at the New York Yankees. With your guidance and mentorship, this position has been one of the most rewarding work experiences in my life. I will greatly miss my teammates and friends made in other departments. All this was possible due to the unique culture at the New York Yankees.
I am deeply appreciative of the numerous opportunities to build skills in numerous areas. I feel better prepared to face my next position’s challenges. I look forward to reconnecting in the future.
Please let me know how I can be of assistance during the transition period. I wish you and the organization the very best going forward.
Sincerely,
Brian McGuire Cashman
Joe FOB,
I feel your pain. This team has not is not easy to watch. You made a couple of statements that I think are worth looking at because they are important ones.
"If the team sucks (as it obviously has and is), I might well be booing 'em at my TV. But it's also likely that I won't come to this website quite as often."
And
"I come to this blog to get perspectives I don't already have, to learn things, to laugh, and to commiserate."
I think the second ameliorates the first. Pretty much all of us are longtime lifetime Yankee fans. I know that I suffer from "Baseball Seasonal Affective Disorder" and drop off a cliff when my daily 3 hour escape from reality ends in October
What day in October varies - as far as this year goes, to paraphrase the great Rodney Dangerfield, "Ohhh, I'll be drinking early this October"
We come here for solace and express ourselves and we do it in ways that are unique to ourselves. Whether it's writing in all caps, or garbled screams, or by imitating arcane literary forms, or trying to squeeze a laugh out of the pain caused by epic failure (I'm looking at you Sancho!)
Where else are we going to be able to do that?
Even more importantly, where else are we going to see all these other people doing that? Sometimes it's funny sometimes not but it's pretty much always interesting, particularity when you add the actual bloggers.
In fact, when the team sucks, (Cough. Now. Cough.)we get all riled up and get even more creative. Think of Sonny Gray not as a mediocre to bad pitcher who seems like a head case and should never throw another inning for us but as sand in our collective creative oyster. The results manifest in the pearls of a bunch of song parodies or a detective story.
So stay. Even when they suck. Stay because they suck Because buddy, you have been and are a Yankee fan for life. We are luckier than most. We get to bitch about 90+ win seasons. And, if you have to go down with the ship at least we are collectively literate enough to have our choice of shipwrecks.
Doug K.
Joe FOB, I have also been a Yankees fans for nearly as long as I can remember—1966, in fact. Not as long as you, but then I started in a more bitter year, and missed the last blaze of glory from the Mantle-Ford years. i envy you that.
Please don't let me spoil it for you, my emptying of my bitter heart upon you, as the old Yiddish phrase goes. I am naturally a pessimist when it comes to most things.
I think I speak for almost all of us here when I say that I do not expect any general manager, owner, or player to take a single word of suggestion from a bunch of yahoos on the internet (you will pardon the characterization, my friends). They would not be doing their jobs if they did pay us any heed.
We are simply engaged in the time-honored tradition of enjoying something we have absolutely no control over. That is the sublime gift of things like baseball. We can not affect them in any way, and they mean nothing—aside from what meaning we foist upon them.
That is why, incidentally, we fans are the game. Not the suits in the suites, or even the athletes, graceful as they can be. We are the ones who keep the game alive through the years, tell its tales, impress it onto the narrative of our own lives.
We have, nonetheless, offered up all kinds of ideas toward improving our favorite team over the years, bad and good. I'm sorry that you seem to have missed the many positive ones—which are, above all, draft and trade for young players, and develop them with care.
But what seriously vexes us about this team right now—what vexes me, anyway—is that it reflects how the entire game we loved and have followed for so long seems to be slipping away. What you are reading is just the frustration of human beings (and especially sports fans) being deprived of one of the thing we need most of all: form.
There no longer seems to be any form to this team, or this game.
Oh, we all know how the Long Season of baseball works. How it's full of setbacks and streaks, slumps and miracles. We get that. We get how variable—and even heartbreaking—careers can be, too. Players who look like they can't miss just never develop, or get hurt, or get traded. Guys have off-years, or do stupid stuff.
We get all that.
But now...players come up, get better, then don't just slump but inexplicably implode. All the strategies of a hundred years are discarded—in favor of ones that don't seem to work at all. The game becomes suddenly one-dimensional, baffling even to its players; stupid.
As the poet said, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
The Yankees and their management, all of whom are richer than almost all human beings in the history of the world, try to fob us off with various excuses for this wholesale dissolution. A cliche here, an injury excuse there.
We don't buy it. We think what they're mostly talking about is money. Still more money for them, in return for less effort.
And so we rage. Mock rage, though, mostly, and frankly I think most of it is pretty funny.
Also, what is this thing you call a "book"?
John Savage read books too. It made him commit suicide.
That was beautiful, by the way, Doug K. I should have just let it stand and written nothing.
WOW A bat, a ball, a dusty field. Growing up (after reading this ) really sucks.
Hoss,
Thank you. In the spirit of the season I forgive you. :) :)
Doug K.
It's horrible. I am totally blown away. Chokers and I just can't believe this manager. Who stands there blowing bubbles getting them stuck on his nose and looking like a buffoon night after nite talking a bout an elite team. Sorry no yankee pride
Orlando,
"BUT HERE AT NICARAGUA IF YOU DON'T FIGHT IF YOU DON'T SHOW THAT SPARK THAT PURE LOVE FOR WINNING SO...YOU'RE OUT!!!!"
You should be the Yankees Bench Coach! They need to hear that over and over and over.
And now my attempt to use my eighth grade ALM Spanish (Level One)... Mrs. Rothburger would be proud.
Si! Los Yankees de Nueva York es muy mal. Y Sonny Gray, él lanza albóndigas.
Doug K.
My hope is they trade Scary (defense) (or offense) Gary and move on.
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