"Bubble, bubble, toil, and trouble..."

 

The game you just saw—if you could stand it—was a perfect, witches' brew of Yankees incompetence at every level: in the front office, in the dugout, and on the field.

The spectacular sequence of idiocy was triggered, tonight, by Aaron Boone's insistence on once again pulling a pitcher who seemed to be cruising through the ninth inning, yanking Marinaccio with two outs and no one on for this year's Chapman, Clay Holmes.

Here was Manager Boone's postgame statement, verbatim, on what his thinking was:

"Well, you know with Chachi going yesterday I really was kinda, w-wanted to keep him that one inning. Obviously I was willing to use him in two ups there. Umm. And then Holmes' gonna have to finish that game in the next inning anyway. So I wanted to get him in there with two outs against the righty to maybe make a better set-up for goin' into the ninth known' I'm gonna have to get four outs with Holmes there. So, th-that's what went into the decision."

What the devil is he talking about? 

Obfuscated by this "classic piece of frontier doggerel" is the fact that Boone either had forgotten or did not know at the time what inning it was.

Parse that tangle of Bonese, if you can, and what you get is that he doesn't understand that it was 9th, not the 8th, and that if "Chachi" had got one more out, the Yanks might well have scored the winning run in the bottom of the inning.

Instead, what followed was disaster mounted on disaster.  Holmes—for once—came through, inducing a weak fly to left...that IKF, all-purpose blunder boy, botched—perhaps because he had never played left in a major-league game before. 

Next batter, another weak fly—and this time, IKF managed to take out Harrison Bader, which, it must be admitted, could probably be achieved by your average, eighth-grade ballet student. 

"I heard something pop," reported Bader, a perfect epitaph for the season, before being removed from the game, from the year, maybe from major-league baseball, we can only hope, thanks to all the damage that simply setting foot on a field seems to inflict upon poor Harrison.

Another inning, another injury—this time to our promising young infielder, Oswald Peraza, unable to run to second on a virtually uncontested steal of second without putting himself out of the game.

A bad injury?

"Oh, I have no idea. He's gettin' x-rays an' everything, but I don't know," Boone astutely noted in his postgame ramble.

A little later, Boone remarked that "it's a little like the Bermuda Triangle," stoutly continuing in the Yankees' brass tradition of never taking personal responsibility for anything.

Yep, never mind that Yankees now have trouble simply jogging to second base without putting themselves on the DL. Throw in a little incompetent fielding and unclutch hitting by Gleyber "Unconscious" Torres that almost lost the game in the first, an eye of newt, and a toe of frog and hey, we're good to go!

Of course, the real author of this whole comedy of errors had popped his head out of the owners' box before the game, as rare a happening as Punxatawney Phil's prognostications. 

"Don't count us out," Fightin' Brian Cashman informed us.

Actually, Brian, I counted us out once you failed to procure a left fielder or a closer for us today, the consequences of which were so heavily underscored tonight. But hey, now the rest of the season is to be heroically redefined as the Yankees' valiant quest to reach the top 40 percent of the league and make the playoffs where, you know, anything can happen...