Damn, I hate that line. It counters everything sacred in baseball. The seven-inning game. The 60-game season. The extra-innings lead-off runner. The vanishing pennant race.
The Death Star has played 11 games - or 18 percent of this abbreviated season. Normally, 18 percent - about 30 games - would put us into May, gearing up for Memorial Day. Cooperstown Cashman would be fine-tuning his roster, scouring the scrap piles for spare Aaron Smalls, and calling up kids from Scranton. We'd still have a month until the All-Star break, when it was time to lard up with contract dump-trades for the final stretch.
But here we are... a measly 11 games in, facing the dog days of August, gearing up for Labor Day. The nights are cooling, the tomatoes reddening, the morgues filling, and the long ago words of Green Day - recalling the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina - still haunt us:
Summer has come and passed.
The innocent can never last.
Wake me up, when September comes.
The innocent can never last.
Wake me up, when September comes.
Eleven games in, it's later than we think.
If we're going to survive this, it's time for everyone to have a plan. It's time to make changes.
That includes the Yankees.
Aaron Hicks is hitting .200. Yesterday, he let a lazy pop fly drop in front of him, a screw-up that led to J.A. Happ's self-immolation. It wasn't Hicksy's first botch this year. He looks frozen out there, and his arm - coming off TJ surgery - remains suspect.
Meanwhile, whenever he gets a chance, Mike Tauchman crushes it. Last night, Tauchman's clutch double - a brilliant, hard-fought at-bat - won the second game. He's hitting .359, (albeit in a small sample.) I'm not saying Hicks should disappear, but the Outfield Atomic Clock needs to start ticking. Over his career, Hicks has shown one great consistency: As soon as he gets hot, he always gets hurt. We can't wait. This isn't May. Until he cools off, Tauchman needs to play... and maybe CF.
Then there is Happ. Following yesterday's debacle, his second straight, the Happster told reporters he's figured out the problem: He walks too many batters. Well, duhhhhhh... he fucking walked in a run! Early last winter, the Yankees were shopping Happ to anybody who would pay his contract. After Luis Severino and James Paxton went down, they congratulated themselves for keeping him. Well, he's showing the same woes as in 2019, a disastrous year. Another bad outing, and it'll be time to pull the plug.
And this post cannot be complete without returning to Paxton. Frankly, I donno what to do. A guy coming off back surgery needs extra time, even if he claims otherwise. Paxton remains above Happ on the depth chart. Moreover, the Yanks have nobody hot in Scranton. (That's a joke; there is no Scranton.) The wonder boy, Deivi Garcia, is a mythological creature, not a real human being. After Paxton, we have - checks roster, throws up - Luis Cessa, Michael King and maybe Mean Chad Green, who has become a valuable bull pen lug nut. But Paxton's fast ball is supposed to hit the mid-90s. It's coming in around 90. That's a problem, and we don't have time to build up arm strength.
It's August, folks. Eleven games in, the stretch run has begun. We'll soon start watching the Magic Number. We're going to Florida, the COVID capital of the world. This is no time to round into shape. We can't wait. We're here.
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7 comments:
Throws up is damn right!
Damn you Happ, damn your rheumy eyes!
We sent the Pharoah and Miggy down.
Miggy.
You gotta be fucking kidding me.
And Sanchez just keeps sucking. And anyone with a large enough contract remains safe, regardless of how much they stink up the joint.
Gleyber is no prize so far, either.
Sending down Miggy is insane. More career murder. Players as talented as Andujar and Frazier, sitting in limbo—this is Cashman at his worst.
There's a reason why this guy has been the GM for 23 seasons and never produced a winner of his own...
...Speaking of which, the big reason why the Yanks have tanked so often in the postseason under The Office Boy is raising its ugly head again: not enough starting pitching.
We have long chronicled here Cashie's Gawaine-like quest to find enough starting hosses.
He was able to do that for 2009, by simply buying C.C. and A.J.—though of course, that probably would not have been enough without Pettitte, first found by the ancien regime.
This time, he ponied up the money for the Cole Train, which was great, but he has failed to come up with a No. 2. Without that, at least—and probably a good No. 3—that Yanks will go down in the farce of a postseason.
The first round two out of three is the scary one as most teams have a couple of good pitchers. Look at how badly the Yanks did against the Philadelphia starters.
But as mentioned in this thread the real issue standing in the way of going deep in the playoffs is our lack of quality starters. So...
We are going to once again, have to trade for pitching with a GM who is notoriously bad at finding them.
There is one good thing though that should not be overlooked. Larry Rothschild is gone and his replacement is allegedly one of the best so this time if we get a Sonny Gray he might get better instead of dropping off a cliff.
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