"You finally really did it. You maniacs! You blew it up! Goddamn you! Goddamn you all to hell!"

Back in 1951, the Yankees had a very promising 19-year-old outfielder, a converted shortstop who amazed the sporting world with the great spring training he had.  He could hit a ball farther than anyone had ever seen, and he could run faster to first base than anyone, ever—3.1 seconds—and he had a cannon for an arm.

This guy was so good the team felt obliged to bring him north, even though he still seemed pretty raw.  Once up in New York, he did not disappoint, playing very well indeed.

So the Yankees, a great big, coldhearted operation that didn't feel it needed to do anything for anybody, decided they could just leave this kid—who had never been in anything resembling a real town before, never mind the biggest city in the world—alone to ferment in the Grand Concourse Plaza Hotel.

The kid was pretty lonely there.  He wasn't the type to check out America's postwar literary renaissance at the library in between games, or to venture out to see Broadway theatre in the midst of its golden age.

Instead, he mostly sat in his hotel room, scared and miserable, until, inevitably, he found trouble.  Or rather, trouble found him in the form of a showgirl about twice his age, who claimed that he asked her to marry him and in any event got him to sign over a large portion of his future earnings to her scamp of an pimp agent.

The Yankees could've done something like the other baseball team just across Manhattan was doing with its own prodigy, which was hire a wise, broken-down old pug to put him in a boardinghouse run by a protective, loving old matron, and otherwise keep him away from bad women, bad whiskey, and the lonely, existential ache that infests all our souls when he find ourselves far from home in a big, drafty hotel.

This prodigy on this other team would go play stickball in the streets with the kids sometimes, and the broken-down pug would make sure that all the newspapers in New York sent reporters and photographers to watch it, and pretty soon their kid was the most beloved ballplayer in the city.

Which was funny, since our kid was ALSO playing stickball in the street with the kids, but nobody paid any attention.

But hey, broken-down pugs and lovable boardinghouse matrons and newspaper shutterbugs cost money, don'tcha know, probably at least a combined $40-$50 a month back in the day, and these were the New York Yankees, with a bottom line and a business to run.

Sometime in late June, the kid was really stinking up the joint, and getting very mad at himself, and the Yankees let the Knights of the Press Box paint him as a spoiled brat, who couldn't control himself when he struck out.

Actually, he wasn't doing that bad.  He was still leading the first-place Yankees in RBI—although we all know now that RBI really has nothing to do with clutchness and is just a figment of our fervid imaginations—and he was striking out A LOT, though in his entire career he never came close to striking out as much as once a game, which was maybe the real problem he should've been striking out more because that's a very good thing, don't you know.

Anyway, out of thin air, the Yanks decided to send this kid down to Kansas City.  Somebody or other was coming back from the DL.  Maybe it was Cliff Mapes, who hit all of .216 on the year, or Johnny Hopp, who hit .206, but the new kid had to go.

Down he went to KC, where he proceeded to get reeling drunk, have a near breakdown, and threaten to quit the game.  Only the intervention of his zinc miner father kept him playing.  The Yankees, of course, had better things to do than worry about the feelings of the best player anybody had seen in a generation—maybe the best raw talent what ever was.

Well, as you all know, the kid screwed his courage to the sticking place, or screwed something or someone somewhere.  He hit .361 in Kansas City, and after another month-and-a-half he was back in New York where, just the next season, aged only 20, he was already the best player in the majors.

Not that the Yankees deigned to notice.  In the 1951 World Series, they let him go out and permanently destroy his leg because they were too busy to worry about some drunken groundskeeper covering a sprinkler head and because nobody dared to say anything to their god in centerfield, Joe DiMaggio, about how maybe it was time to let the kid take the balls he could no longer get to.

Hey, DiMaggio could have told the kid while he knelt over him, as the teenaged Mickey Mantle writhed in pain:  the Yankees don't care about nobody or nothing.  It was a lesson he had learned his rookie year, when the team let some clubhouse quack burn his heel to a crisp.

So it always was, and so it is again.

Of course the kid who now wears The Mick's number times two is no Mantle or DiMaggio, and never will be.  He is, frankly, not even all that likable, with all his caterwauling about fitting in, and I fear he even may have a screw or two loose, beyond the ones he jarred free running after balls last year.

But he deserved better than this.  And so did we, the fans.  We deserved a lot better than the Annual Hal-Coops Pennant Charade, in which another awful series of trades is made for the one player who will finally bring the team over the top.

One pitcher—not Madison Bumgarner, not even Max Scherzer—is going to do that for this squad which is already, really, 2 starters down and may soon be 3 or 4 down.  A better play would've been to sign Keuchel, or sign Corbin, or sign or trade for any one of a readily available, 5-6 top starters over the past few years.

But that would've cost money—money, mind you, that would've been more than made up with pennants and World Series.  But like some vicious Bavarian peasant out of his ancestry, Hal Zeig Steinbrenner doesn't believe in money unless it is cold, gleaming coins, jingling in his palms right now.

So, here we are.  I hope, wherever he's going, Clint Frazier wins the Triple Crown.