Saturday, September 17, 2022

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.

13 comments:

  1. Hoss, your last paragraph says it all!

    Montas needs to go to the bullpen, German to remain in the rotation

    I still feel the team is going to blow the division. Our pitching staff doesn’t have an ace, our bullpen doesn’t have a closer. Who knows what version of Rizzo or Bader we’ll be getting. Carpenter…well, it doesn’t sound promising. Stanton and Hicks are overpaid and basically useless. Not sure why Gonzalez is even here.

    The roster is littered with Cashman’s mistakes and his outdated, failed vision of what a championship level roster should be.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Littered with mistakes?
    I feel like that old Native American Indian who used to cry at the end of the "Give a Hoot Don't Pollute"public service commercials.

    ReplyDelete
  3. bornto

    Yes. The division is still very much in play.

    Toronto has the Covid home field advantage and they were my pick to win the division the whole time. Their offence is great and ours disappears for games at a time.

    We're up by six in the loss column and play them three more times.

    They can absolutely catch us. Then we can be eliminated in the play-in by Castilio in a perfect "fuck you" to the fans.

    ReplyDelete
  4. If I was Judge my price goes up 2 million dollars a day. This is comically sad at this point. Fuck Cashman

    ReplyDelete
  5. We once had a Carpenter

    Who worked hard

    Every day

    He had risen to help

    And show them the way.

    But a hammered ball shattered our dream

    And caused the devoted to give up

    and scream

    So now without hope

    We continue to mope

    and

    Choke

    Choke

    Choke

    Choke

    Choke

    On our 2022 Season

    that has gone up

    in smoke

    ReplyDelete
  6. Amen, Hoss! This team sucks and the manager is clueless. Its GM is worse than clueless. Its owner only cares about keeping the $$$tatus Quo.

    How long are they going to keep up this stupidity with Judge leading off? Yes, tablesetters are lacking, but you go with what you've got. It's still preferable to Judge leading off. Why does this franchise need to re-invent the wheel in every game?

    If they're so intent on re-inventing the wheel, I suggest taking a page out of the Tampons's playbook and using openers & interlopers ahead of Frankie Montas. Do it backwards when you have a lousy starter. It's not a bad idea, as it throws off the other team's hitters.

    ReplyDelete
  7. What a stupid article, by Jon Heyman of the NY Post, I think it was. He's definitely HAL's puppet.

    Anybody with a pulse would be a better GM than Brian Cashman. Anyone on this here blog would be a much, much better GM than Cashman. Jeter would certainly be a tremendous improvement over Brain-less. Hell, Jeter got rid of Millstone Giantrocco Stanton. That alone is an accomplishment that Brain-less will never duplicate.

    Of course, it does depend on whose viewpoint you are looking from. Because according to HAL's accountants, Brainless gets an A+++. He keeps the team just competitive enough to barely make the playoffs every year. But he doesn't rock the boat by winning a championship or "tanking" for high draft picks. He makes money for the franchise and keeps the payroll steady. Not too much profit, not too little profit. Making a steady stream of money and making sure the team doesn't win a championship. I don't know if anyone else is better qualified to do that than Brain-less. Over the last twenty years or so, Brainless has proven that he's the epitome of mediocrity!

    ReplyDelete
  8. Montas should be off the post-season roster and German will be in the pen. Sevy will 100% take German Munster's spot.

    Here's the next Yankee to hyped by the machine. You saw it here first: Andres Chaparro currently at Somerset.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Montas has shoulder pain and will get an MRI, according to the NY Post!

    We'd all heard that Montas was recovering from a shoulder injury, when Cashman pulled the trigger. It don't take much genius to see that it wasn't a great time to trade for him.

    And I'm sure the Cashman apologists in the media will cry "hindsight" or "how could Cashman have known". Hahahaha! I can't take anymore, just can't take anymore of Yankee management insanity! Alice in Wonderland kind of stuff.

    ReplyDelete
  10. There are always a lot of injuries with a Cashman team

    What is the analytics team gonna do about this one in 2023? Maybe they conclude that they need younger players?

    Uh...duh...

    They do track injury analytics too...may I suggest they get rid of 2 or 5 or 7 older players...?

    ReplyDelete

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