Worst Season EVER???

 

There used to be an old baseball tradition of insisting that the team in first place on Memorial Day would win the pennant. The tradition died, as they will...because it was really stupid. Plenty of teams that weren't in first at the end of May won pennants, World Series, etc.

What I think we can see by this Memorial Day, however, is that your New York Yankees are indeed the great pile of pigeon droppings that many of us feared they would be.  

The just completed Baltimore debacle demonstrated that this Yankees team is like trying to pull a three-foot sheet over a six-foot man: something will always be exposed.

Last night it was the woeful hitting. The night before, it was the depleted staff and the burnt out "burn pen," as I think El Duque christened it.  

Folks, somethin's gotta give, and it usually does.  

Last night saw both Volpe and Cabrera drop below the Mendoza Line. Next it will be the Joey Gallo Line. I think we should keep playing them—or, at most, have Volpe and Peraza swap places—because the alternative is yet another season of IKF and Jackie. But it's clear that they're not ready yet—and, at 22 and 24, respectively, they may never be.

Worse still than the actual performances on the field was the attitude, as the Yanks went down like a bunch of whipped dogs at the hands of a soft-throwing meatball named Kyle Gibson. His win put Gibson a game over .500 in his 11-year career (95-94, 4.49). A career in which, moreover, he has usually been royally pummeled by the real NY Yankees, not that group of imposters who showed up last night.

(Gibson lifetime v. NYY:  2-6, 5/93.)

People, I know it's a long season, and the boys can't be up for every game. I realize the umps were lousy—what a surprise—and even the video replay let us down. But last night's game was a big indicator of why our grandchildren will probably go to watch a curling match before they turn on a baseball game.

I'm not saying there was necessarily a lack of effort out there—except that I am. "The attendance was robbed," as Casey Stengel used to say, and in this case it was 41,520 fans, forced to pay top dollar for tickets, "beer," and rat-feces dogs. And a team that seemed to be mostly daydreaming about whether they'd get a Memorial Day weekend invite to a really cool Hamptons party, or contemplating the grave problem of why so many airplanes keep nearly colliding on the runway. 

Let's just say that your Yankees looked less than enthusiastic last night. It's not the first time in this young season—and it speaks again as to why Ma Boone is not a good manager.

Sure, we can forgive him for being trapped inside the strategic genius of Cashmanalytics ("Hit strikes hard!"). But no matter how many times he gets himself thrown out of a game, it's quite apparent that his team respectfully declines to play hard for the man—and he has no means of firing them up. ("C'mon, skip, you're gonna give yourself a stroke!")

Expect this season to dribble and dawdle on much as it already has in the Bronx. But worse yet—out in Flushing, some rough beast, its hour come round at last, is already slouching toward Aaron Judge's one-year-old, home-run record. 

(By which I mean the real record, set by men not taking substances that make their heads expand.)

Is this the year of the Polar Bear? Pete Alonso, the thoroughly likable kid who has already broken Judge's rookie home-run record, has been running up the score on assorted National League palookas, and at his current rate, he might well pass the magic no. 62.

What's more, the Mets might very well be the team that Brian Cashman thinks these Yankees are. Able to stick around, sneak into the new, ginormo-playoffs, and then make a real run if The Old Ones, Verlander and Scherzer, are still fit. 

Big ifs, I know, but a real possibility—particularly if the Mets' kids, Alvarez, Baty, and Vientos—are able to do what ours are clearly not up to. 

What, thought you'd already suffered through enough this century with four Red Sox rings and the horrors of 2001 and 2004? Imagine a miracle Mets championship, with the Polar Bear carting the home-run record over to Queens. 

So much karma to pay back for that amazing 20th century...