It's all YOUR fault!

 

"I shouted out 'Who killed the Kennedys?'

When after all it was you and me..."

—Rolling Stones

Happened to notice that Elizabeth Holmes was back in the paper, and it puzzled me as to why the Yankees had not signed up Silicon Valley's favorite sociopath.

Holmes, after all, is and was a proven master at the sort of grifter mind games that your New York Yankees would like to play on us all, but which they're just so damned inept at.

Case in point being Aaron Boone's cri de coeur (That's French for, "Get the damned dog off me!") over the weekend, his admission that the Tampa Bay Devil Rays—with their famously tiny payroll, apathetic fan base, awful ballpark, and absentee owner—were blowing the Yankees' doors off this season because:

"They can do some things that we can't do. I'll just say that. They can do a lot of things that we can't do."

Oh??? For instance?

Like all of the Yankees' clumsy apologists, Ma Boone quickly retreated—and only sunk himself deeper in the quicksand:

The Rays, Boone informed us, make "really sound moves of when to be able to move on and finding those diamonds in the rough throughout Major League Baseball that they bring in, all while maintaining a top-line farm system that they can always kind of grab people from. I think you got to respect them as one of the more well-run teams certainly in baseball, but also in sports. They do a great job."

Wait, back up a minute here. 

So, what exactly is it that the Rays do and the Yankees cannot?

"Find diamonds in the rough throughout MLB that they bring in"? 

Huh. I thought that was Brian Cashman's stock-in-trade.

"Maintain a top-line farm system"? 

That's not possible for the Yankees? Funny, it was for decades during their original dynasty years, and then again under the likes of Stick Michael.

What Aaron the Fumfah King was driving at, of course, is the same-old, same-old party line out of Kremlin-on-the-Hudson. That is, the idea that the Yankees "can't" really compete with teams like TB because of YOU. And me. And all us Yankees fans.

It's become a very familiar shibboleth, one that Michael Kay, chief TV mumblebum, was pushing earlier this year when he said that Yankees fans' expectations were too high.

Yeah. Great Expectations. Wasn't that the Dickens novel in which the innocent young boy is deceived by some delusional person living in a home stuffed with the cobwebbed memories of a once-glorious past? Yeah, I thought so.

What Kay and Boone and often Brian Cashman are hinting at oh-so-subtly here is that we spoiled Yankees fans just want to win all the time, and thereby prevent Cashie from doing the regular meltdowns and rebuilding jobs that are now to be expected from all teams in professional sports.

Well, you can pretend all you like that the fans of other teams like that. 

You can pretend all you like that you are NOT selling one of the very most expensive teams to see on the basis of their past glory and tradition, the fact that they are playing in New York, "the greatest city in the world," and blah-blah-blah.

But that's exactly what the Yankees do. And contrary to what Boone and The Office Boy and Michael Kay are pretending, that's NOT how Tampa Bay operates.

The Rays don't tank every other year. In the last 15 seasons, they've had 11 winning records, made the World Series twice, made the playoffs 8 times, and won 90 games or more 8 times. 

TB is a regular contender, on a budget about one-fourth the size of the Yankees. And all that speaks to is the fact that their front office personnel is much, much, much better than ours. 

They don't have much better draft choices than we do. They don't get secret printouts of the waiver lists, or other teams' rosters. They have no advantage whatsoever over the Yanks, and several enormous disadvantages.

In fact, there is only one reason why the Rays can do anything that the Yankees "can't do." His name is Brian Cashman.