Saturday, October 10, 2020

The Wild Card Team


That is what the Yankees now are.  A team who will fight , scrape and grind ( Aaron's adjective for 2020) to qualify for, and often win, the wild card game.  It's ticket to the real playoff rounds. 

But that is all we have.  And that is all we achieve any more. We lie dead in the grave before the games against the good teams begin.

The Yankees continue to be a patchwork team.  A few, rare, young players of quality. An aging group that muddles on, and on and on. And it is usually the most expensive old living room anyone can buy

A team that, each year, adds a $300 million part.  But by the time we have enough of those, the $300 million parts that originally formed the base of the " championship" pyramid are now aging out, slowing down and striking out.

We have a GM that is part of the furniture now.  Ownership is realty not interested.  The money is flowing in just fine. 

Until, and unless, one of the grand-children reaches maturity , with a George Steinbrenner fire in his belly,  we cannot expect any changes. Other than , " more of the same."  We should each write up the rhetoric that will soon flow about how the Yankees are one swing away from their 28th championship. 

Look for the biggest hole we have in the line-up, identify an available "super star" at that position who has had a few peak performance years, and we'll offer maybe $400 million for 7 years. 

And we'll sit back and wait for the championship to be awarded. The tea is served, gentlemen. 

The truth is;  all four of the teams still playing ( including the cheaters ) are loaded with better baseball players than we have. Those teams are young and full of energy. Atlanta pitched three...maybe four...shut-outs to get where they are. The Dodgers can hit anybody.

The Yankees are weak at catcher, have an aging centerfielder who never hits .250, a streaky home run hitter in right, a second baseman who is better at both second and first than anyone on the team, a shortstop who is a lousy fielder, an aging veteran in left who is still more dependable than any replacement on the team, and about three people who can pitch. 

So we will trade for another bunch of average players, give no real shot to anyone in our own system, embarrass our best young pitching prospect in a decade, and go with the old tired closer.

As long as we play the dregs of the league, we can look much better than we are.  But put us up against quality pitching and we shut down.  Tampa hit more homers in the playoffs than the Yankees. And that is our mirage strength.

Announcers love to gush over the distance of Giancarlo's meaningless hits. 

The Yankees are in the grave.  Buried with Whitey.  Nothing changes. 


14 comments:

  1. Alphonso,

    To your point, from Mike Lupica in today's Daily News, "Only the reality is this: The only reason the Yankees got to the second round this time is because baseball added a round.

    You know who the Yankees have beaten in the playoffs over the past five years? They’ve beaten the Twins, who can’t beat anybody in the playoffs. They got a Wild Card game against the A’s, who hardly ever beat anybody in the playoffs. And they’ve beaten the Cleveland Indians."

    Doug K.

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  2. All too true, Alphonso.

    The only hope I truly see is Steve Cohen. If his purchase of the Mets is confirmed, it will mean the Queens team is owned by a nasty Wall Street pieces of work, instead of a couple of real estate grifters who were mostly intent on milking the club for everything they could get, and providing Fredo Wilpon with something to do in his waking hours.

    Cohen, I presume, will want to see results in the limited time he has left in this mortal coil, and will spend accordingly.

    If there is a chance of the Metsies taking over the town as completely as they did from, say, 1969-1973, or 1984-1990, well then, THAT might cut into Hal's bottom line enough to make him pay attention.

    But that means rooting for the Mets. Long, painful shudder.


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  3. The staggering incompetence of the Yankees' "brain trust" in two lines--benching one of the team's best players in a key series in favor of one of the team's WORST players based not on what they did all year but on what each did in the last week of the season. No other team in either league would be capable of perpetrating such a folly--not even the Mets.

    Frazier's 2020 OBP/SLG/OPS/OPS+ slash line:

    .394/.511/.905/149

    Gardner's 2020 OBP/SLG/OPS/OPS+ slash line:

    .354/.392/.747/108

    ReplyDelete
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  5. Hard to follow that last one. The Yanks’ penis problem is failure to develop any pitching. And Cashman’s trades have been useless...Gray, Pineda, Paxton. Cole gave us a top tier guy, but a mere cherry on top of a pile of shit. Tommy Johns, wife beaters, and declining skill players make up the rest of the pitching group. We have one potential star on the rise, and Yanks deployed him as a decoy. Then, as every year, the offense has their worst outings of the year. Rays play every game with accountability, because they need to perform to keep their name in the lineup, pitching rotation/pen. Judge knows even if he goes 0-5 and .100 overall the entire playoff stretch, he is still hitting 2nd. Gary still gets his hacks. Torres will make errors, but never replaced for better defense. Crappy Chappy still gives up HRs to end series’ but forever the closer. There is a 100% chance Yanks will have those exact same issues in next years playoffs and results will never differ until they make some radical changes.

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  6. Ownership already knows the formula to win world championships from the late nineties. Pitching, defense and professional hitting. This style of baseball does not sell tickets and viewership as well as home run baseball does. You cannot win a World Series when you basically have a group of home run, mistake ball hitters. Pitching is simply too good in the later rounds of the playoffs and these home runs become easy strikeouts. All ownership really cares is selling their product on the YES network and making money. This translates to exit velocity and 500 foot home runs. Everyone always talks about how smart the NY fans are in general but apparently they are too stupid to figure this one out.

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  7. The solution is simple. Raise Gene Michael from the Dead, or hire Buck S, to be our GM. Get a baseball guy, not a "metrics " guy and get starting pitching. Oh, a real lefty bat would help too. This is so simple it is maddening.
    Godot

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  8. I will be sitting shiva for the next few months. Discussions about next season will have to wait.

    I think it is safe to say that Yankees fans aren’t stupid. We are still enjoying the afterglow of having been rocked into another world by the dynasty years of the late 90s - that period was like having the best sex of my life with the hottest girl in town, and I am still having masturbatory fantasies long after she woke up and realized who she was sleeping with. She then got up, got dressed and married the richest guy in town and moved to Florida. And here I am, left with nothing but memories and bitterness over my current dilapidated state that promises, but never delivers.

    I want Byung-hyun Kim again. I want Scotty and Tino. Andy and Jeter. I want to face the Mets and Padres in the World Series again. Instead I get Giancarlo teasing me. My baseball erection goes limp with the bases loaded and Gary at the plate. I soil my sheets with the sweat of Chappy watching yet another fastball disappearing over a fence far far away.

    We Yankees fans aren’t stupid. We’ve been to the mountaintop and the reality of everyday life down here in the suburbs with Hal and Brain and Aaron will never measure up to those lofty heights of yesteryear.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Maybe it shouldn't, but it continues to amaze me that a bunch of aging fans with no pro baseball experience can clearly see and diagnose the problems of this team. And point out exactly what needs to be done to fix them, while the actual professionals do little to address them.

    I have to think they must see what we see. How can they not? Or are they so close they can't see the forest or the trees, and too overtaken by Moneyball to have any actual ideas?

    And as for that--I get the impression that Yeankees, who supposedly use stats and number crunching more than any other team, actually don't. They use them a lot, but they also make moves based on what I can only call the Steinbrenner Way of the 80s and early 90s. It's a mix. And it doesn't work.

    Well, I have all winter to mull it over. Or forget about it and save myself the aggravation.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Mentioned it before...the Yanks are built to win as many games as possible in the regular season. They beat up bad teams with HRs. As soon as the playoffs happen, they face better pitching than the O's and the Jays. The dominant right handed hitting lineup doesn't help which is why Hicks bats third. They need to fix that as well.

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  11. That's a great point, JM, but I think the answer is that they don't have the same goals we do.

    We just want to see the Yankees win—everything, every year, if possible.

    Hal wants to maximize his bottom line, and having already, deliberately built the smallest ever Yankee Stadium, he has limited ways to do that. Sure, winning a couple rings would boost YES ratings and souvenir sales, but he can't really get many more people in the park, and he has to weigh those revenue surges against the ever high salaries he would have to dole out to his championship team. It's a careful calculation.

    Brain would also like to win it all, to show what a genius he is. But to bring in the brainstrust necessary to to that—people who know a lot more about baseball than he does, would be to endanger his own position.

    I suspect it's not so much a question of them not seeing what needs to be done, as not necessarily wanting to do it, because of these other priorities.

    ReplyDelete

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