The Seamless Corporation

The Times today managed to run not one but two pieces that inadvertently told us everything we need to know about what was wrong with this now mercifully expired Yankees team.

One was an article by Billywitz, master of the absurd, about how baseball has again become relevant because Spike Lee has deigned to show up for a game.

I won't even try to honor that premise with the opprobrium it deserves.  Of more interest was a paragraph in which witz informed us that:

"One by one, Dellin Betances, Aaron Judge, Andrew McCutcheon and Brett Gardner stopped and greeted Lee with a handshake, a hug and a quick word."

Great.

If the Yankees had a real manager, he would have been all over them.

"Hey cinemaphiles!  If we win the World Series, you can invite Spike to the locker room celebration and dump champagne over his head.  In the meantime, get the fuck back on the field and think about how you are going to possibly manage to hit the great Eovaldi tonight."

Of course, a real manager of a real contender would not even have had to say any such thing.  Can you imagine, say, Reggie Jackson and Thurman Munson and Sparky Lyle lining up like little puppies to meet a trendy film director?

"Hey guys, guess who's here tonight?  Robert Altman!  I know, right?  Autograph pencils out!  The Dodgers can wait!"

Even more telling, though, was Tyler Kepner's piece on how Boone's inexperience is hurting the Yankees.  He is not wrong, of course, but he buried his lede:

"By all accounts, he [Boone] is part of a seamless organization, with the baseball operations department and the dugout staff working harmoniously.  The players like him, and he presents the team well with the news media."

This says more than Kepner ever meant to.

The New York Yankees are indeed a "seamless organization."  That is, one in which every player, coach, manager, and other personnel are a mere extension of the brain of Brian Cashman, such as it is, operating at the dispensation of Hal Steinbrenner.

In a healthy organization of any kind, leaders have enough confidence to keep around opposing points  of view and encourage creative tension.  Not on Cashman's Yankees.

It is all too indicative of how this approach falls short that Boone is lauded for having "present[ed] the team well with the news media."

Oh, yes, that is mighty important.  As opposed to working on strategy and making adjustments to your opponents.

The Red Sox in this series vanquished a Yankees starter who had been giving them fits all season, picked up how Severino was tipping his pitches (something he has apparently been doing most of the year), and figured out how to pitch to Andujar, a man who was threatening to knock down Fenway Park singlehandedly just last week.

The Yankees had no reaction to any of that.  Their only win came against an arrogant pitcher who they have repeatedly beaten.

The Sox adjusted.  The Yankees didn't.  The Sox did it with a rookie manager.  The Yankees didn't.
The Yankees can take their corporate seamlessness and shove it where a dozen pineapples are now lodged.