Big Black Cow

 

I don't know when it was, exactly. Sometime on Sunday, I think, when the Yankees actually played one of their most entertaining games of the past month.

It was something, or a combination of somethings, that came up.

Maybe how Aaron Judge, the only watchable player on the team, would be out indefinitely. 

—Plus how Oswald Peraza had mysteriously disappeared from the Railriders' lineup, but the Yankees weren't saying anything about it.

—Plus how Everson Pereira had mysteriously disappeared from the Somerset Patriots' lineup, but the Yankees weren't saying anything about it.

—Plus how the Yankees' entries in the Minor League Futures Extravaganza would be Spencer Jones and Clayton Beeter, two prospects whose relative excellence this season (Jones is hitting all of .268) are due mostly to the fact that they are too old for their respective minor-league levels...

Something just broke. Maybe it was the realization that the Yanks will not be any good, not really, for a long, long time. Maybe it was sheer exhaustion. 

Whatever the case,  in this season of Steely Dan reminiscence, a random lyric popped unbidden into my head:

I don't care anymore...

It's nothing new. In recent years, I give up on the Yankees two or three times a season. 

I don't mean, "give up," as in lose all hope that they'll win anything (usually, that hope never really existed). Nor do I mean "give up," in the sense that I will actually stop following the team. 

I confess, after 57 years of fandom, I'm addicted. And even if I weren't, you gang of lovable rogues, roustabouts, and general mountebanks would keep pulling me back in.

I mean, "give up" in the sense that I have to step back, emotionally, from the now downright neurotic way in which this franchise conducts its business.

I don't care anymore

Why you run around...

Much like the narrator in "Big Black Cow" speaking to his secretive yet transparent girlfriend, running around on him behind his back, I just get exhausted by all the Yankees' shenanigans. They are the actions of a classic narcissist—the classic narcissist who runs the team—thinking that he has discovered any number of great, hidden wisdoms and ways of doing things, and cannot reveal them to those of us who simply wouldn't understand. 

Break away

Just when it seems so clear

That it's over now

Drink your big black cow

And get out of here...

Sometimes, I just need to take an emotional step back from looking down into the sandy desolation that is our New York Yankees. 'So, after a scintillating series win against a leading team in the AL, they get an off-day, fly out west...and get beat by one of the worst teams assembled in recent decades. A team whose owner is actively trying to lose...' Okay.

I don't care anymore

And you know the worst part about it? I'm sure I will care again, probably very soon.