Anybody Can Coach the New York Yankees

 

So the Yankees brought in The Sage of Many Cities to coach our tremendous hitters. So what?

It just doesn't matter!—as a great man once said. Anybody can coach your New York Yankees.

This was established long ago, in the mid-1960s, when the Yanks had what were considered probably the best pitching coach and the best hitting coach in the business, respectively, Johnny Sain and Wally Moses.

Somewhere around the time the Yankees took their 46th million pennant or so in row, these wiseacres decided to go hat in hand and ask owners Del Webb and Dan Topping for a raise.

Moses soon found himself demoted to scout.

Sain was told to hit the road—which he did, building great staffs around the majors for another 20 years or so.

What did it matter?

Nothing!

These were your New York Yankees! They were going to do great no matter who was in charge of anything!

The team had already learned that when they canned Casey Stengel and George Weiss, the most successful  manager and general manager in baseball history, and replaced them with Ralph Houk and the immortal Roy Hamey.

All those accumulated decades of baseball knowledge? Who cared??!! And just to show it didn't matter, the Yanks soon tripled down on this brilliant strategy by jettisoning Yogi Berra, too—after he'd just won a pennant. In favor of the great Johnny Keane.

Well la-de-dah. Bigg-o deal-o.

I mean, any baseball team is just a collection of algorithms, right? What does it matter who's doing the instructing or the constructing?

What could possibly go wrong with bringing in some random bushes to tell major leaguers they need to hit strikes hard?

What went wrong in the 1960s? I mean, it's not like a 45-year-old dynasty COLLAPSED or anything!

Sheesh!