Tyler Kepner Does a Victory Dance on the Yankees' Corpse

Yup, you knew it was coming.  Sure, the fogies at the Times can't stay up late enough to actually report the playoff games.  But they took their revenge by running Kepner's incoherent "analysis" today.

There's no other paper in any other town that would run such a piece, gloating over the loss of the only sports team left standing in the city.  But your New York Times—the paper that would rather cover women's ice hockey than baseball—couldn't resist a great big sneer and a snicker over the Yankees' loss.

Kepner used the occasion to point out that the Yankees have now NOT won the World Series in postseason play, more often than they HAVE won it.

Gee willikers.  Wonder how long he's been hanging on to that piece of statistical merriment?

OF COURSE, once MLB, in all its wisdom, started letting not just the two league winners in the postseason—but the two best teams in each league—and then the top one-third of ALL the teams—it was going to become easier and easier to LOSE in October.

Statistically, this is meaningless.  If they let EVERY team into the playoffs, then ALL of them would lose more often.

But Kepner then adds cowardice to stupidity by opining—correctly—that the Yanks won't win without acquiring better starting pitchers, especially in free agency.  He even quotes Zack(h) Britton to that effect.

Why is this cowardice?

Because in pretty much the same breath, he tells us:

It would be foolish to question the effort of Yankees General Manager Brian Cashman and his staff, or the commitment of the Steinbrenners, who have spent more than $1 billion on salaries in the last five seasons, roughly $400 million more than the Astros. But wealthy teams have the luxury of options, and it is fair to wonder if the Yankees have chosen the right ones.

Missing from that critique is that the raw numbers on spending mean diddly-squat.  The Yankees make a ton.  "$1 billion over five years" is $200 million a year.

For the Yanks, that's not a fortune.  In fact, the Yankees spend a smaller percentage of their revenue on payroll today than any other team.

But to write such a thing would be to draw the ire of HAL and Brian.  They might stop returning Kepner's phone calls to elicit their usual, anodyne quotes.

Look, there is only one way that your New York Yankees are ever going to win another world championship.  That is with top-flight starting pitching.

Since they have failed abjectly, over and over again, to develop such pitching, there is only one way they can acquire it, which is through free agency.

And since HAL will not spend on free agent pitchers, there is no way to acquire it.

That is the actual logic of the situation.

Not Tyler Kepner spitting in the eye of Yankees' fans, while cravenly kowtowing to Yankee ownership.