skip to main |
skip to sidebar
The most insane part of the Yankees appearing on national TV is how the Fox midway barkers gush over the great Gary Sanchez. He's baseball's premier hitting catcher, the best power hitter on the Yankees, the blah-blah-blah... The way they blah-blah-blah, you'd think a .232 hitter who fans thrice per every 10 at bats is the Second Coming of Johnny Bench. In fact, he's somewhere between Matt Nokes and Chris Carter, a human flesh-bot who has never adjusted his golf swing to meet a situation, and who never will. Last night, watching him go 0 for 5, something snapped. Where have you gone, Austin Romine, our nation turns it's lonely eyes to you. And come December, it's time to bid the Kraken adieu.
Late in last night's game, the network cameras occasionally honed in on the last Yankee regular: Giancarlo Stanton. He looked perplexed, as if unsure whether to be pumping his fist or smoking a Camel. Well, I believe I speak for the Yankiverse in saying that Stanton needs to find himself a nice small market city - a Boise or a Topeka - where he never has to see Yankee pinstripes again. There must be an owner somewhere who - if paid $20 million in grease - will take this rusted pile of gonadal tweaks off our hands. I'm sorry, folks, but I cannot even look at Stanton anymore. For this series, the Yankees might as well have activated Jacoby Ellsbury.
I'm not so bitter that I want to see Adam Ottavino disappear into the Sasquatch wilderness. But for all his talk about managing to win each game, Aaron Boone refuses to see that Ottavino cannot close on a batter, and that using him as a leg to our once-vaunted bullpen is no longer an option. Last night, Boone showed every card in our deck, with the exception of Luis Cessa - the Doomsday Yankee (when Cessa comes in, the game is lost) - while the Yankees lengthened their swings and tried to hit home runs on every pitch.
Last night, the Yankees may have lost this series... and the season. And where is the Parrot? We face Gerrit Cole Tuesday. By Wednesday, we could be on our heels, and by Thursday, we could be done. This was going to be the Great Yankee Vengeance Singularity. Now, I'm not sure of anything. Suddenly, this Yankee team resembles all the others of the past decade, the free swinging losers, marching back to the dugout with their bats in their hands. What a difference a night makes. I feel sick.
Posts
23 comments:
Sigh...
@el duque...the precise reason why liquor was invented...
Verlander ain't hay. Neither is Ocuna. There are good reasons we didn't score 50 runs again.
But EE, Sanchez, Didi... missing in action. Otto has been sucking for too long. And why is Lasagna on the roster? We had no better choice?
Of course, Boone leaves Green alone and maybe there's no homer off Otto. Maybe our nameless 3B coach doesn't send DJ, we get a couple runs off a subsequent hit.
And for heaven's sake, we're going home. If someone had said before the fact that we'd split in Houston, I'd have been ecstatic. We could've won two, but 1-1 going into three at home? I'll take that.
Trivia for the Austro-Germanic curious: KRACKEN is pronounced very close to our word KRÜCKEN, which means “crutches,” as in the things you wobble around on when your leg is fucked-up.
For the Italo-curious, CESSA means STOP or CEASE in English.
As for the Parrot, Edwin Encarnación has been attending daily mass at Our Lady of the Incarnation, praying that he may stop swatting at the imaginary evil faeries which circle his head (which only he can see).
FUCK YOU BOONE ET AL!
It's time to bench Sanchez and play Romine. He cannot possibly do worse. I've never seen anyone flailing at a ball worse than Encarnacion (wait...I've seen Sanchez). Ottavino has been worthless for most of the last half of the season. All his slider does any longer is sweep three feet outside or hang right over the middle of the plate. He is lost. Boone is more lost. Could Chad Green not possibly have pitched to one more batter? Green was awesome and blowing every batter away. Had Boone not have felt the urge to appear intelligent and bring Ottavino in, the 2-1 lead may very well have held up. The series is lost. Game 3 is a given with Cole pitching, unless Severino somehow is unhittable for 7 innings. Not likely. Then there are four games left and we must win three of them. Two of the four will be against Verlander and Cole. We had to beat Verlander OR Cole once to have a chance to win the series. The chance we had is gone. Disgruntled as well...
Brett
Seriously, I was sick of Torre the last two or three years. The midge/Joba game just iced it.
That being said, the man sat in a lot of playoff dugouts and went through a lot of sphincter-tightening baseball moments. He always maintained that the second game was the critical one. You obviously want to win the first but, if you don't, you can turn it around with momentum on the second game. If you win the second, then you can ice it. Psychologically, whoever wins the second is in the drivers seat for the third. That's why I was always grateful to have Pettitte in those Game 2s for all those years.
Also, this was a horrible way to lose. You don't want to play a game like that, with almost as many pitchers as hitters, going into the wee hours, tension underfoot the whole time, and then lose. That's actually a game you have to win. it was ours to win. We just didn't win. The pitching choices could have been better. Boone - or Brians' stat-based shit via telegram - micromanaged too much. That being said, the pitching gave us a chance to win. We just reverted - as we always do now - to the Yankee Dead Bat Syndrome. A few huge black holes in our lineup. Matter becomes anti-matter in these holes and all hitting disappears. Waiting to hit some big dingers? That doesn't happen as much against good teams, but we have been saying that all year now, right?
Oh well.
Scunnered
“ Scunnered”
Does that mean “sodomized with a toilet brush while contemplating saber metrics?”
JM and Bitty both make some great points. The WAY this game was lost hurt as much as anything.
Had Verlander just gone out there, thrown lights out, and beat the Yanks, say, 9-0, we would've said, 'Oh, well, at least we got one, and let's see what we have back home.'
It was when we had the chance that we needed to win it.
As you know, I'm no fan of Boone's as a field manager. But I don't think he did that bad last night.
It was only the quick hook of Paxton that gave us a chance to win. Maybe he would've found himself? He couldn't find the plate! 14 of his first 25 pitches were balls, and what he did get over they were hitting very, very hard.
I thought he resembled nothing so much as the Paxton who melted down in Fenway this summer, giving us all conniption fits.
As for Ottavino, yes, he has been worse than useless this postseason.
But then, there's always somebody in the pen who gives it up on this team. The Yankees have one of the better relief corps in the game, but it's NOT lights out. It has not been all year long, and it is not now in the playoffs.
All that malarkey about it being the greatest pen ever was nonsense. It's not close to the Yankees' pen back in the glory years of 20 years ago. I'm not sure it's as good as the pen was in 2009, or even 2 years ago.
And again, there's a common theme on the season: the great BoJo Johnson Rothschild makes NOBODY better.
BUT, overall, the bullpen was NOT the problem last night. Two runs in almost 9 innings against one of the best hitting teams in baseball is not a bad performance—just not a stellar one.
The problem was, as many of us have pointed out, the dreadful hitting that once again reverted to full-on, swing-for-the-moon baseball.
A-Rod ALMOST predicted this game with stunning accuracy. He said beforehand that the Yanks would outlast Verlander and beat the Astros' pen. He expected EE to be the one to do it.
Well, EE was trying all too hard to make A-Rod look like a prophet. But there's only so much you can expect from the team's aged DH.
The problem, first off, is our millstone, GC Stanton, the man who will drag this team down to hell for years and years to come.
How you can possibly be a major-league player of his stature and not have been BEGGING Boone to get into that game at least as a pinch-hitter...is beyond me. Stanton is not only a man playing the wrong sport (obviously, body sculpting is his game), he is also a man who has little predilection for the game he is playing.
But the Yanks, being a big operation, have several millstones.
Sanchez is simply useless. His biggest contribution to the postseason thus far is getting hit by a pitch, and there is no reason to expect that to improve. And last night we saw the beginning of his return to shoddy defense behind the plate.
Gardner, although he did manage that late hit, also looked to be back to his slash and miss technique. And Did was, again, largely absent. Too bad.
Dead-on, Hoss, dead-on.
Stanton - the gift that will keep on giving and yes, he seems strangely disinterested in baseball. That's what guaranteed gazillions can do except - NOT. Something else is at work here
Sanchez - did you read recently that piece talking about how he has discovered "mindfulness" or something along those lines. Made old Klondike Bar sound like he had become a New Age barnacle on the side of an ashram. It did not help last night. Both he and Stanton have a talent for getting the meaningless big hit.
EE - WTF, MOFO? Just WTF?
And Gardy chose the worst possible time to audition for his victory lap season.
Didi - Maybe we can turn him into future pitching with the "needs a change of scenery" line of crapola.
I agree that it was NOT the pitching last night. It was the hitting. Why, God why? After Sanchez's third mighty whiff, why was Romine not tossed into the game?
The same old " we couldn't get a single or sacrifice fly" Yankees from the recent past.
Boone should have left Green in for Springer, at least or one more inning after that. 3 1/3 innings for a former starter with a ton of rest is nothing, especially in the playoffs. And he should have left Britton pitch the 9th to lengthen the bullpen a bit figuring it would go to extra innings. I almost shit my pants when I saw CC start the tenth.
@13bit...after Sanchez was given a gift foul ball call by the HP umpire, he was a victim of a make up call...yes it was a ball but he should have swung at it...
A few things...
1) Sanchez
It's too bad that 100% is all you can agree with someone because I agree with Duque 50X that. Sanchez should be benched and gone!
Here is why I think it will happen. In the at bat when he stuck out on a pitch that BOUNCED Fox gave us a quick dugout shot of Boone's reaction. He moved his eyes slightly and his lips semi muttered. What the look said was, "This guy is hopelessly stupid." Key word is HOPELESSLY.
I'm sure that he's telling Brian that he want's him gone and Brain is saying don't kill his trade value. And Boone is saying, "He's killing his own trade value" and they agree that Sanchez's (fill in the blank) is barking.
2) EE.
Encarnacion looks like total shit. It's like he aged 10 years in the last two weeks. Give Hicks ALL of his at bats at DH. Can't do worse and if by some miracle they advance he will be more ready.
3) Wade
Wade as a pinch runner would have been on third. Or if he stole second would have scored. How do you leave him off the roster? I'll tell you how. So CC can pitch to one guy in a non crucial situation in the playoffs capping off a fabulous career. The game sacrificed to his ego.
4) Lights out pitchers
Twice now Boone has removed lights out pitchers. Once it worked (Tanaka). Once it didn't (Greene). It's so stupid. When Paxton was taken out early they needed to fill the extra innings before going to the formula. The guy getting it done was Greene. Why the fuck would you take him out?
5) Ottavino
I still like Ottavino, but for the rest of the playoffs no more high leverage use.
6) Last: Stanton
As Blondie might say...
Giancarlo's greatness is is in the past
Turns out he has, a heart of glass
We got the split even if it doesn't feel that way anymore.
Doug K.
If there is a place I can go to especially endorse and make effective Doug K's point #4 above, I will go there.
I'm thinking here about a mind-meld with Aaron Boone's brain, of course.....as long as there is no backflow.
The Yankees are afraid to take Stanton off the roster because he can't come back if they advance. That's why Wade wasn't activated to take his spot. But a strained quad will take more than a few days to heal enough for him to be able to run. All these "freak" accidents are indicative of someone juicing for many years.Boone said he was available for PH duties in an emergency. Whatever that means. However, Stanton looked like he was wearing his sweats so he was probably lying to keep Houston guessing. They have to replace him by game 3 and bring up Wade or Frazier.
13bit
Scunnered
A Scots word used to mean that you are world weary, down-trodden, and thoroughly bereft of any lust for life when these words and expressions are simply too inadequate to signify the magnitude of your slide into "shitdom".
But your version is equally as true
I got 3 hours sleep before having to go to work after watching the game last night
Not happy
Oh and Mike Ford should be playing but Ive been greetin about that for years and no doubt boring the good folks on here. But he should
Scotland, we are NEVER bored by a call for Mike Ford!
Scotland forever!
Thanks Horace
I really want the world to know about this great man who brought back happiness into my life again after my husband left me and the kids 3 years ago for another women online when i contacted Dr Believe he cast a love spell for me within 48 hours my ex husband start calling me and begging for forgiveness for everything that have happened between us. I was so happy to have my family back together with love again here is the email of Dr Believe via believelovespelltemple@gmail.com a man with the great powers you can also call him or add him on Whats-app: +2348156148821
God bless you
I am very grateful for your help in my marriage.
Post a Comment