These Yankees are sad, bad, and excruciating to watch.

With apologies to Lady Caroline Lamb.

Met an old friend for a couple of beers last night, and we descended—it was literally below street level—to one of New York's rapidly disappearing, fake Irish bars (the Blarney Rock Paper Scissors, or some such), to watch your New York Yankees try to play baseball.

We weren't really expecting much. Hey, we figured, four-game winning streak, division looking all but clinched (the key word here being "but"), and Frankie Say I Suck on the mound. With no expectations, how could we be disappointed?

Boy, were we wrong! 

Friends, Yankees baseball these days is almost impossible to watch. But you knew that.

We both departed with the score tied, in the seventh inning. It wasn't that I thought it was impossible for the Yanks to win, playing the "Brew Crew"—as it said on their ridiculous, "City Connect" shirts, those Sunday softball uniforms posing as a social movement. It was more that I simply couldn't take it any longer.

Yes, another bullpen meltdown—but I can't blame the pitchers so much. When you're putting 8-9 guys out there every other night, you're almost invariably going to find the rotten apple in the barrel, the guy who doesn't have it that night. 

And yes, this team is now a hodgepodge, a ridiculous grab bag of players, seemingly ordered and placed at random. 

Another crucial error by our shortstop—who is a Gold Glove third baseman playing out of position. Another ball that should have been an error, eating up our current, Gold Glove third baseman—playing in the shortstop hole at the moment. 

An awful play on a flyball to right—by our rookie, who had almost never played there before coming up. He was later switched to first—where he had never played before. At one point, it seemed like the Yanks were trying to see if they could get every player on the field to take a turn at first base. There were so many switches that it broke the YES play-by-play, which started churning out things like, "Andujar moves from left field to left field."

This will be blamed on the injuries, of course. But right now, the Yankees have their top two power hitters batting first and second. In fairness, it must also be said that they don't really have any table-setters to set the table. Save for Judge and IKF, no active player on this team is hitting as much as a quarter (.250). 

Sure, things might improve some when they get Anthony Rizzo back from (yet another) stint on the DL. And if and when Godot Bader ever gets here.  

But then, quite obviously, Giancarlo Stanton has not truly recovered from the latest in his increasingly mysterious series of injuries. (Demonic possession? Actress/model strain? A small dwarf or toad, located in the pit of his stomach?) 

Stanton is hitting all of .180 in his 50 at-bats since returning from the DL, with 7 RBI (3 in his first game back) and 19 strikeouts. He is a shell of his once not-terribly-formidable self, and the mystery is why he is still taking up a spot on the active roster.  

(The greater mystery is how, watching this Human Millstone inevitably sink the Yankees season after season, there are still members of the New York press corps who believe that Derek Jeter could not do as good a job as Brian Cashman.)

It was good to see Ma Boone, for a change, looking a little agitated and even annoyed last night. But his team is not responding. The Yankees, who had the best road record in the majors during their long-ago first half, are currently 10-21 in other cities not their own—yet another indication of a real lack of focus and desire.

I'm sure that Cooperstown Cashman has already organized and alphabetized his many excuses for this, his latest abject failure. But they won't wash.

There were a lot of injuries? There are always a lot of injuries with a Cashman team, and yet he did not build a bench, or try the rookies, when the Yankees had a huge lead.  

His trades didn't pan out? Any sentient individual could see they were a bad idea.

Cashman has once again built a team that is too old, too unmotivated, and too mediocre to possibly win. HAL Steinbrenner has once again refused to fix these glaring mistakes with the cash he has pretty much pouring out of his eyeballs by now. Their overmatched field manager has tried to cover over these mistakes with desperate improvisations, like a journeyman plasterer trying to cover up the slipshod work of incompetent carpenters.

It won't hold.