Your 2019 YBNH Halligators—The Breakdown, Part Sixto Lezcano: Management!

I haven't read anymore of the Mueller Klapisch Report than you have, but the hot skinny is that it confirms pretty much everything we feared:  Hal a distant tyrant; Coops semi-mad, obsessed with finding "bargains" (and why would that be?); and Ma Boone a hapless captive of the analytics boys down in the dugout.

Gee, what a surprise.

And what a difference a year makes.  This time last season we were so eagerly awaiting Opening Day, worrying over Aaron Hicks' injury, and wondering what sort of trade we could possibly swing to get Jacoby Ellsbury off the 40-man so Coops wouldn't be "forced" to make another hideous trade.

Well, some things change, others don't.  Little did we know, for instance, that it was the secret goal of Hal to hold on to Jacoby so his insurance would keep paying off.

Why is it, now, that every time we hear more about our favorite team, we get the feeling we're being hustled?  Is it just the nature of American life today?  Or something in particular to do with Kremlin-on-the-Hudson?

Going into the 2018 season, our pinstriped favorites looked to be in their best position in 20 years, back when they not only won three straight rings and four-out-of-five, produced the greatest team the spot had ever seen, AND still had the highest ranked farm system in baseball.

The 2017 Yanks had come within one game—and about a thousand rancid, hometown ball-and-strike calls—from going to the World Series.  Almost every single team in their farm system had won their league or finished first during the regular season.  Prospects were stacking up thicker than the jets over the Stadium formerly known as Shea during a midweek day game.

Surely, the long-awaited 10th Dynasty was at hand.

Then, just as quickly, it was over.  No dynasty, but a tantalizing, green flash of greatness, before all descended into darkness.

After a spectacular first half, the Bronx team sunk swiftly into mediocrity, and every single farm team followed, dropping below .500.  Save for a rare few exceptions, every promising young player, in New York or elsewhere, took a giant step backwards, due to injury or incompetence.  And the questionable trades kept coming.

What happened?

Damned if I know.

One MIGHT have expected the Sleuths of the Press Box to have investigated.  I mean, after all, if tomorrow every single Ford dealership declared bankruptcy and the corporation announced its sales were tanking below Chrysler's, business and auto reporters would go look into it. Wouldn't thy?

Not our scribblers and talkers, who preferred to tell us that these were just the growing pains of our wonderful young team.

It's almost as if the editor of the Fargo Fantabulator showed up at the Greasy Grass after the Little Bighorn and assured his readers that the 7th Cavalry was just suffering from saddle sores and foot-an'-mouth.

How DID it all happen?  Did Coops finally hit upon the secret formula—and then just as quickly forget it?  Did he just get lucky?  Was the real genius someone else, such as Gary Denbo, since lured to Miami by our wiley former shortstop?

Who knows?  Not us. William Barr might as well have been put in charge of Steinbrenner security, for all that we'll learn anything, anytime soon.

The known knowns are these:  Ma Boone and his useless coaching staff are, sadly, just the tools we always thought they were, mere extensions of Coops Cashman's "mind."

Coops is just as daft as we thought he was, obsessed still with his bizarre theories:  You get a bargain when you sign an injured pitcher!  You get a bargain when you sign an injured outfielder!  Being a left-handed batter doesn't matter anymore!  All pitchers should be lefties!  Dare to take a called third strike!  Swing for the fences, always!

And on, and on, and on...

The little man in the elf suit will go on working his courtier's wiles, whispering his self-serving stories and excuses, pandering to hi new boss, same as the old boss.

Sure, we should give him his props.  He's picked some gems out of the trash heap.  He's made some good deals in the last few years:  Sir Didi, Hicks (sort of), The Gleyber (maybe), Stanton (meh.)

But as Duque notes, we still don't really know if even his biggest deal will work out.  And there are a dozen or still still live, cast-off prospects out there, landlines just waiting to explode and destroy his endless deals for back-up outfielders and tired arms.

Unlike the Holy Trinity of Bob-Buck-and (especially) Stick, who almost always seemed to know when to hold 'em—Jetes, Bernie, Posada, The Great One, Pettitte, Mike Lowell, Mendoza—and knew when to fold 'em—Russ Davis, Sterling Hitchcock, Gerald Williams, Ruben Rivera, Roberto Kelly, etc.—Coops is just a two-bit slots player, always hoping he's going to pull a million-dollar jackpot in a Vegas bus station lounge.

Ain't gonna happen, and I fear we will see him finally run out of quarters this season.

But as has bean aptly said, a fish rots from the head down.  And that head is the unsmiling man in the kinky red boots.

Hal has decided to fly in the face of long-established Pinstriped tradition and join the meandering herd that is the soulless, corporatized entity so dreadfully known as "MLB."  (See the forthcoming, "A Short History of Chicanery.")

Who's to say if it's in support of his dreams of a burgeoning, international sports empire, or just to maximize profit and minimize risk?  But when Hal passed on the two best young free agents ever available this spring, pleading Stadium debt service payments, he put the dominoes in motion.  Soon, one future free agent after another was reading the handwriting on the wall and signing up with their current teams.

Welcome to the new/old system of baseball, in which free agency is all but dead, terminating what was a huge Yankees advantage.

Hey, I can't say that Manny or Bryce was a sure thing.  It wouldn't be so bad not risking the big bucks on the big stars—but for the fact that Hal also will not ink the people necessary to keep a great farm system going and build from within.

Instead, like so many men who find themselves in a position they did not earn, he prefers a flatterer to real front office talent.  Well, to hell with him.  And to hell with us, too, sad to say.