Time to Cue Ned Beatty

No, not the Ned Beatty from Deliverance, maybe the most embarrassing role ever played by a modern movie actor (and while we're mentioning it, a shout-out to the departed Burt).

I mean the Ned Beatty from Network, the corporate magnate brought in to explain to crazy Peter Finch that all his "I'm mad as hell" raving is futile against the machine, and that he does not understand how the world works.

I've been reading everybody's comments here, and I completely agree.  Particularly with ALL-CAPS' call for the Yanks management team to be cleaned out from top to bottom, starting with the Steinbrenners.
 
In a remarkably short time, these bozos have wrecked any hope for what seemed like a surefire dynasty—the last Yankees dynasty most of us were ever likely to see.  Go back to the Sports Illustrated take on this season.  SI reluctantly admitted that, when it came to both the major-league roster and the minor-league system, the Yankees were the best positioned of any team in the sport to win and keep winning for a long time.

Amazing how that all melted down to the stumble bums we see nightly now—one of the most spiritless, disengaged Yankee ball clubs I have ever seen.

A full assessment of this fiasco can wait until after the last out of our already foreordained, 5-1 loss in Oakland.  But suffice it to say for now that we are in a Chinese finger puzzle of a trap here.

Yep, current management SHOULD be pulled out, root and branch.  But that will never happen until Brian Cashman goes.  And Brian Cashman will never go as long as the Steinbrenners own the team.

And the Steinbrenners, the Snopeses of modern New York...aren't going anywhere.

This is where it's time for Hal—or maybe better, Hank, who has nothing else to do—to enter as Ned Beatty.

All of us fans who have been screaming from the windows, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take Neil Walker anymore!  I want a Yankees dynasty built the old-fashioned way, from the ground up!" ?  We might as well hold our breath.

Corporate is in charge.  And what corporate prefers to do is sign big free agents, so they can keep the advance sales money rolling in.  It's all they know.  It's all they're comfortable with.

Building a great team from the ground up would entail having to accurately identify talent.  It would entail having to hire the right people to nurture and mold said talent.  It would entail having in place people who can tell which talent to keep, and which should be dealt away for the Jeff Nelson's and Tino Martinez's of the world.

It would entail taking risks, which is something no modern American corporation of any kind is ever willing to do anymore.

It would entail having to surrender some modicum of power to people who actually know the game—not just mathematical theory—and who have the confidence to develop and follow their own opinions, not serve simply as robotic extensions of The Great Brain sitting in the GM office.  

As long as G.B. Cashman is there, those people aren't going to be hired.  As long as the Steinbrenners are there, those people aren't going to be hired.

So we should go ahead and do the only thing Corporate is comfortable with.  Sign every free agent in sight, now that the cap has been eluded.

Sign Machado and Harper.  As Rufus T. Firefly notes, this could easily be a disaster.  But more likely, it will at least be something to see.

Is it guaranteed that a Yankees team even with Machado, Harper, Judge, and Stanton, not to mention El Matador and El Conquistador, can win it all?

No.

Even the one champion that Cooperstown Cashman supposedly built, in 2009, was buttressed by Gene Michael's Core of Four.

Are Severino, Sanchez, Didi, and Chapman the equivalent of Pettitte, Posada, Jeter, and The Great One?  Please, don't make me snort out bourbon through my nose.  It stings like hell, and is a waste of good bourbon.

Corporate has, once again, made it clear that all of our hollering out the windows is for nought.

Our real choices are between watching lumbering, overpriced, alleged superheroes slowly age and decay—and seeing the likes of Shane Robinson and Neil Walker in right field, and Sonny Gray on the mound.

I will take the first option, which will probably mean a bunch of playoff appearances, maybe a ring sometime, and at least some nightly entertainment value.

Just the sort of carefully limited aspiration that that ultimate corporate entity, MLB—fast becoming the Rollerball of the 21st century—is willing to grant us.

I'm mad as hell...and so what?