Virtual Off-Day: Still No Word From Sweat Lodge. Concerns Continue About The Master.

The Virtual Yankees got a virtual day off today, but there was still no word on the continuing confab between slugger Giancarlo Stanton, and baseball commissioner Rob Manfred and his retinue.

While nothing official was reported from the conference, which is being held in a Navajo sweat lodge in New Mexico, there were reports of raucous laughter, chanting, drum playing, and "oohs" and "ahs" emanating from the lodge.  The conference is now in its 120th hour, and alarm is growing amongst non-Yankee fans that Stanton may not be arbitrarily punished for nothing.

Meanwhile, concern also increased at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, over the mental state of much-loved Yankees broadcaster, John Sterling.

Sterling, who has been looking increasingly haggard of late, told his doctors today that he had once again managed to slip through the 1904 time portal located on the site of Hilltop Park at the hospital, and this time lived in New York all the way into the late 1920s.

"My God, it was hard, but I did it!  I found old Pete Alexander, all right, and I got him a good doctor, and got his epilepsy diagnosed!" Sterling raved in one session.  "Then, I got the Yanks to trade for him early in 1926.  I didn't have to do that, you know!  I coulda just gone to the bullpen in the seventh game of the World Series and told him, hey, Pete, let's get a beer.  But I couldn't do that, I couldn't deprive him of his greatest moment in history, striking out Tony Lazzeri, and the Ronald Reagan movie and everything!"

This was hardly news to the doctors, of course, who were well aware of how Grover Cleveland Alexander's career was revived after he was picked up from the Cubs by the Yanks.  As every schoolgirl knows, Alexander famously struck out Rogers Hornsby with the bases loaded in that game, which was won on a grand-slam home run by rookie "Poosh'em Up" Lazzeri.

No one could recall any movie involving Alexander, who became a crusader against alcohol abuse following his retirement from baseball, and lived until 96.  Sterling's evocation of one, "Ronald Reagan" also baffled many, until someone recalled a longtime Cubs broadcaster by that name, who retired in 1964.

"Then I stayed around just to see that 1927 season.  Oooh, boy, you shoulda seen that!  Especially now that I got the Yanks to sign Lefty Grove," Sterling babbled on.  "Ha-ha-ha, you thought that team couldn't be better, did you?!  Well, think again!"

Of course the doctors knew all about the Yankees' magnificent, 1927 season, when the team won 136 games and lost just 18, not to mention the long and brilliant career in pinstripes of Moses Grove—though no one ever remembered a "lefty" of that appellation.

"To do anymore good, I'd have to live into the '40s!" said Sterling.  "But I just don't know if I can do that—don't know if I can stay alive that long, I tells ya!"

Sterling also said that his powers to change history in this imagine "other" world seem to be limited solely to baseball—an illusion that doctors had never seen before.

"I made sure to be in Munich when Hitler tried to run his Beer Hall Putsch, but I couldn't get the shot.  Boy, you should've seen that little weasel run!  You know, there's no predicting which way fascist sociopaths will turn when they're in mortal danger."

Doctors took this as one more sign that Sterling's condition is deteriorating.  A photo produced by his longtime broadcast partner, Suzyn Waldman, that appeared to show Sterling carrying a rifle and in the uniform of the Bavarian state police in 1923, was dismissed as a coincidence.