Last night's game was in the bag. Baltimore - for 10 years, our rented mule - was headed toward a market correction, if not an old school whipping. The floodgates had opened, along with the skies, and one of those nightmare trips to filthy NYC was looming.
Then the wheels fell off. A leadoff walk. (Take him out, Boonie!) A scorcher past Volpe. (Get him out, now!) A HR off the foul pole. (You bum, too late!) And suddenly, Baltimore was alive, and we were back in 2022, holding hands and preparing to jump off the Empire State Building.
Here we go again, everybody...
Twenty-four hours after, arguably, the season's greatest win, the Yankees conjured up the most damning loss of 2023 - a collapse worthy of a downtown Minneapolis bridge. (What? Too soon? It was 2007.) Once again, cold reality is served:
These are still the Yankees of the last 10 years.
That means they practice Newton's Third Law of Motion: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Great victory, hellish loss. Five game win streak, five games of crapola.
Come October, they'll partake of Cashman's First Law of Entropy: In the face of solid pitching, the HR-based offense always collapses. Big game against Houston; 14 strikeouts. Five game series; out in four.
But let's be real here: Nine games above .500, the Death Barge is achieving its prime directive: Stay relevant. It will remain competitive in a Wild Card race that will unfurl through the final dregs of September. Tickets will be sold, and Amazon Prime will get its precious piles of steaming streaming attention.
Soon, we'll be fortified by Giancarlo Stanton, Tommy Kahnle and Carlos Rodon - the Titans of Tweak. Trouble is... that pesky Newton!
His law tells us to expect an equal and opposite number of injuries. We don't know who, or for how long, but somehow, the mighty, $200 million Yankees always reach a Mike Ford/Eric Kratz continuum. If last night's loss left psychic scars, they will soon be replaced by deeper ones.
But a question about last night: Did a twig snap, or was it a piece of the dam?
Don't sweat it. We still have a commanding one game lead for the second wild card. There's no way Houston can catch us.
ReplyDeleteThere is a better chance of me pitching for the Yankees this year than Rondon. But you can’t blame Ca$hman, who would have that Rondon would get hurt. He’s been the Iron Joe McGinnity of this century.
ReplyDeleteI worked late last night and returned home to the family watching reruns of Doc Martin. Little did I know the horrors that were unfurled in the Bronx.
ReplyDeleteWhen are we going to the stadium??
ReplyDeleteIn August, Win! If we're lucky, we can see Boone leave Cordero in for five, six, seven runs...who knows? The sky's the limit.
ReplyDeleteAugust 24th. T-shirt Day. Game time 1:05 p.m.
ReplyDeleteBe there. (I wonder if they have XXLs?)
Totally missed last night’s game, a game that won’t be missed. Looking at the final score I obviously knew something bad happened. It’s HOW You lose a game that eats at a fan’s inside. 8 runs in one inning, huh? So let’s see some of that new found grit tonight and win the series.
ReplyDeleteTo answer Duque’s question, IMO this year’s gonna be a struggle right down to its bitter end in early October. The injuries aren’t done with us yet and bad roster construction will haunt us all season. The cavalry ain’t gonna ride in at the trading deadline.
For some reason I thinking of a song I haven’t listened to in years, by perhaps the most overlooked songwriter in modern pop music, Tom Waits. It concludes :
“…And hey barkeeper what's keepin you keep pourin' drinks
For all these palookas hey you know what I thinks
That we toast to the old days and diMaggio too
And old Drysdale and Mantle, Whitey Ford and to you”
Great song…if memories are all we have, at least we have the best ones.
I was thinking exactly along with El Duque ("game was in the bag") and ("take him out", "too late, you bum"). It was Buffoone "El Raccoone" Babboone at work again.
ReplyDeleteIt's hard to imagine this team making the wild card because of managing like last night. We fans know when to take a pitcher out, but Baboone has to rely on his formula supplied by office stat boys. They're obviously mis-using analytics, if that's what's telling them to keep Cortes in for that inning. Got to rely on your own eyeballs. He had two chances to take Cortes out and passed on them both. Then allowed the game to completely collapse. And we're going to continue to see debacles like this all through the remainder of the season.
Yikes, because of the domino effect, Boone burning out the burnpen, he decided to leave Nestor in. Don't get me wrong, I liked the thought of low pitch count and leaving Nestor in. One could see that Nestor lost it quickly. I would have removed him after bthe first two batters. However, my biggest problem was that it was predtermined who Nestor would face. Did Genius call his Moron Manager? Anyway it was, it is part of Yankalytics, which will cost The Yankees in the playoffs.
ReplyDeleteE.D. - as it applies to your t-shirt sizing question - whilst there will be no XXLs available, the first 25 fans over 250 pounds will receive 4 medium sized shirts that they can modify in any way that see fit . . . to fit.
ReplyDeleteMy rule, which has proven correct every time with Nestor's he following;
ReplyDelete" If you get 5 innings out of him, the tank is nearly empty. If he has a 1 run lead or a 7 run lead, you always ( as manager ) do the following: Give him one more batter. If he gets that batter, give him one more. If he gets that batter , give him one more. You see the pattern here? But the irrevocable rule is this: If anyone gets on base, no matter how that happens ( error, hit etc ), you remove Nestor. "
So far, Boone has never once followed my rule. And it has the cost hime, and the Yankees, dearly.
@ El Duque....No XXL because they wont spring for the extra material cost involved in making that size tee-shirt.
ReplyDeleteMichael Kay was vocally perplexed as to why the fans were boooooooooooooooing boooooooooooooone last night when trudged out of the dugout to make a pitching change.
ReplyDelete"The manager isn't pitching" - said Kay. "Its not his fault the pitchers aren't getting anybody out."
Paulie chimed in saying something like, "Uh huh, yup - somethin' had to be done, right there, right now and that's what Aaron Boone is doing."
Absolutely Scintillating booth chatter.
By the way, my fave Tom Waits...
ReplyDeleteMost vagabonds I knowed
don't ever want to find the culprit
That remains the object
of their long relentless quest.
The obsession's in the chasing
and not the apprehending,
The pursuit you seek
and never the arrest...
Foreign Affair
About this time, right here is when JM is expected to opine on Boone.
ReplyDeleteBoone is an idiot, AA. Kay is a mouthpiece, and O'Neill just isn't very bright to begin with.
ReplyDeleteNice one duque…
ReplyDeleteThe more I think about those comments by Kay and O'Neill, the more pissed off I get. When a game is lost because the manager didn't take quick enough action, it's not his fault, it's the players. But when the team wins their division or wins the WS, the manager is given credit along with the team.
ReplyDeleteThat's what pissed me off about Torre. Because I always thought that when your players are so good, any decision you make pans out. That takes no skill. When your team is flawed, that's when the manager can make some level of difference. And Torre thought because he was the genius that managed the late-90s teams, he shouldn't be held accountable for the performance of later teams that actually needed a skilled manager.
To his--and Kay's and O'Neill's--mind, you get credit when the team wins but have no blame when the team fails. And that, my fellow grumblers, is complete bullshit.
JM -- You and others here are on the right track about Boone's chronic ineptitude with pitching changes. But there is a way to bring this into clearer focus: More proof that the Yankees don't have a clue about analytics: Cortes got hammered the third time through the lineup. Kevin Cash et al. almost never allow a pitcher to get beyond the second time through. This is what's known as evidence-based decision-making vs. seat-of-the-pants stupidity. Sure, you can cite exceptions--but the overwhelming evidence points to getting your guy out of there after two times through. This kind of data was not available to previous generations of managers, but it is now. The smart ones pay attention and excel on one third the payroll of the Yankees.
DeleteBoone just need to call up Girardi and ask to borrow his Binders
ReplyDeleteI knew you'd come through, JM.
ReplyDeleteWe said, Sir.
(hope all is good in you and your wife's world)
AA
Ho-Hum, another day, another LF-er
ReplyDelete2B Gleyber Torres (R)
RF Aaron Judge (R)
1B Anthony Rizzo (L)
CF Harrison Bader (R)
DH Willie Calhoun (L)
SS Anthony Volpe (R)
3B Oswaldo Cabrera (S)
C Ben Rortvedt (L)
LF Greg Allen (S)
Indeed! And JM, to my mind, Torre was never a good field manager—and got progressively worse as he went on.
ReplyDeleteWhat he WAS, though, was invaluable at the time: a VERY GOOD clubhouse manager, and terrific with the press. These abilities were what stopped the Mad George madness, and kept Steinbrenner I from turning your New York Yankees into Dolan's New York Knicks.
For that, I will be eternally grateful. Even as I will never quite forgive him for his manifestly awful decisions in the 2001, 2004, and 2007 playoffs.
I thought that Girardi was a good field manager who was ultimately too tightly wrapped for the clubhouse.
i think that, while a nice guy, Ma Boone has no redeeming features as a manager—save for the fact that he's the only thing Cashman will accept.
Just started a game day thread
ReplyDeleteDoug:
ReplyDeleteNo left fielder, too many low average hitters. Volpe slumping again.