"When Black Friday Comes..."

The opening lines to that song by the inestimably great Steely Dan read as follows:

I'll stand down by the door

And catch the grey men when they

Dive from the fourteenth floor...

This is, I think we can assume, a reference to people jumping out of windows after the stock market crash of October, 1929.

(It is, of course, always a mistake to assume anything with the Master Dudes, two of the most subtle, talented, and elusive of our rock songwriters. The lyrics could mean something even more apocalyptic or sinister. Wasn't "the Grey Man" some notorious child murderer from years past?)

But I digress.

The point is, no Wall Street executive or stock broker actually did dive out of a window on Black Friday or Thursday or any other day. Suicides in New York City as a whole were actually below their usual rate that October-December, 1929. 

The vast majority of people then would not have dreamed of investing their money in the stock market, even if they'd had any. And the money traders...still had plenty of money, and took, as usual, absolutely no responsibility for the havoc they caused.

Which brings us to Brian Cashman.

Secretly, somewhere, both Brian and HAL are smiling, relieved that they now have a ready-made excuse for why their standard, spit-and-a-prayer, jerry-rigged contraption of a team will once again fail to make the World Series. Or, this year, likely not even the playoffs.

This was, to be sure, a new record for the injury plague to descend upon the Yankees, decimated before the winter was even officially over. But it's not something that should surprise us—even if it does shock the little lambs in our local sporting press.

What's the old Ian Fleming saying? "Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action"? 

Well, the Yankees now seem to sustain record or near-record levels of injuries every year. Remember when, after one season—2018? 2019?—Cashie promised "an investigation" into all the injuries? Wonder what happened to that. Probably moldering under old copies of the Iran-Contra report. 

Then there was last year's Trade Deadline Debacle, from which, by my reckoning, every single player the Yankees acquired has now been hurt.

No, the Yanks' perennial, devastating plagues of injuries are not due to enemy action. Just dogma and gross incompetence, a much more deadly combination.

I distinctly remember an article, sometime in the spring of 2018, I think, where Jordan Montgomery, coming off a strong rookie season, was talking about how he did not naturally throw very hard, but how the Yanks' crack coaching staff had shown him a couple tricks and—voilà!—suddenly he had added five mph and some nasty spin to his every pitch.

Soon thereafter, Monty vanished from the regular rotation until 2021, en route to a happier fate in St. Loo. Some trick.

The great mystery that Cashie's vaunted Lost Patrol of investigators failed to uncover is that the Yankees under his leadership either:

—Dogmatically insist on turning every single player, pitcher and hitter, into the sort of one-dimensional bozos approved by the Sabremetricious. Or

—Have no idea of how to turn players into Sabremetric studs.

—Both.

True baseball acumen—like the true education or training of almost anyone, in anything—requires the understanding that different people have different capabilities. 

Not everybody is going to be a power pitcher. Not everyone is going to be a power hitter. But they can still make invaluable contributions to your team.

This is often difficult to comprehend even for people who are, unlike Brian Cashman, smart.

Lou Piniella spent years in Cincinnati trying to make Paul O'Neill into a power hitter. By Lou's lights, assessing Paulie's swing and physique, he should have been a power hitter, and he trying to make him one even as O'Neill's game visibly deteriorated.

But he just wasn't a slugger, at least not primarily. Gene Michael and Buck Showalter were able to understand this—despite the considerable temptation of Yankee Stadium's right field porch—and a result, O'Neill became a terrific all-around hitter (with plenty of power).

This spring, by contrast, we got to watch Harrison Bader—already a chronically injured ballplayer, to be sure—wreck his season by fanning on a low, outside pitch he was trying to pull.

Eh. So it's back to the dumpsters (his favorite place to be) for ol' Cashie, and back to his life of Florida indolence for HAL. Once again, we can look forward to hearing about how valiant it was of the Yankees to make—or almost make, or win 65 games—despite all these freakish, completely unanticipated injuries.

As the poets write:

When Black Friday comes

I'm gonna dig myself a hole

Gonna lay down in it

Til I satisfy my soul.

We should only wish the same for our own, grey men.