Alas, poor Boone!

 It's always alarming when New York coaches and managers start to behave weirdly at postgame pressers—usually a sign that they're ready to crack.

Who can forget that Giants coach who talked himself out of his job in the space of about ten minutes? Or the various Jets coaches, too numerous to mention, who seemed on the verge of commitment. That poor Rangers boob who whined, "We just had a bad week in the playoffs!"

Across town, Buck Showalter has turned into Mumbles McGee, his cap pulled down so low over his face that he looks as if he's in the witness protection program.

After yesterday's dreary, first-half finale, it was Ma Boone's turn to tumble into a vortex of meaningless verbiage. Trying to deny that he was anything but joyful to be managing your New York Yankees—remember, expressing doubts or fears on Brian Cashman's team risks a fate like the farmers in that Billy Mummy episode of The Twilight Zone, buried in the cornfield—Boone riffed at weird and dreadful length on what still gives him hope.

Sounding like Teddy Roosevelt—or perhaps Spartacus—Boone repeatedly gassed on about how great it was to be "in the arena" with this team, which generally shows about as much grit and character as overcooked asparagus.

Stranger still, Boonie started gabbling about the "craft" of his team, utilizing a word famously abused by actors and others in the show business.

Look, I got nothin' against show people, there's no people like 'em, like no people I know. But c'mon.

The bit about "craft" was applied in particular to one Gleyber Torres, who Boone has previously praised for his easy, relaxed style of playing—after The Gleyber's whiff on a routine throw from the outfield cost us a game against Boston.

Mr. Torres now seems so relaxed that one might be forgiven for thinking that he has lapsed into a fugue state. Yet Boone seems willing to look past anything. 

Yesterday, he shrugged off Gleyber's disastrous booting of a double-play ball by basically saying that errors happen, and that he didn't think Torres was making a lot of errors, and so what?

In fact, when it comes to physical errors alone, Torres now leads all AL second-sackers with 9 (He has one more at short, just to reassure us that that position was always beyond him.).

That 9 not only leads the league, but already represents 2 more than the 7 Gleyber had in ALL of 2022. It would be nice to think that our manager was aware of such things.

I know, I know: This is the dawning of the Age of Analyticous, and mental errors don't matter, and fielding doesn't matter, which is why Billy Beane has all those rings. Gleyber has a WAR of 1.4 this year—and never you mind that the two former Yankees farmhands who could have replaced him, Thairo Estrada and Ezequiel Duran, sacrificed for a bag of money and Joey Gallo, have WARs of 2.2 and 1.8, respectively.

The fact is that, even by the Yankees' advanced scientific approach of "Swing Like a Drunken Goat" at the plate, Gleyber has quietly been doing precious little for weeks now. Like a wayward toddler, he has simply wandered off.

In his last 20 games before the All-Star break, Torres hit exactly one (1) home run, and drove in all of 6 runs—and all of those ribbies came in a total of 3 games. He's walked 7 times, and struck out 17, and his OPS has drooped from .770 to .739.  

True, these figures are not yet close to Gleyber's horrendous August, 2022, when by some statistical frameworks he was the very worst player in the majors, hitting .180 with a .464 OPS (and a 24 OPS+), hitting 2 homers, driving in 5 runs, walking only 3 times and striking out 33.

But hey, there's still half-a-season to go!

It's past time, I think, that Boone gave up on behaving as if this were the Royal Shakespeare Company, and tried another approach.

I keep thinking about Gil Hodges' famous walk out to left field, to remove Cleon Jones from the second game of a long, terrible doubleheader loss by the Metsies to the Astros, in 1969. 

Jones was hitting .346 at the time, and the Mets were already the feel-good story  of baseball, but Hodges wanted to send a message about effort.  And surely, that game—one in which the Mets were already trailing, 8-0, in the third, after losing the opener, 16-3—was one that must have taxed everyone's ability to hang in and pay attention more than any game that Torres has ever been involved in as a Yankee.

I know, I know. Pulling anything similar today would probably get a manager hauled up before a court in The Hague. But there has got to be some way to motivate a problem like The Gleyber. Allegedly, that's the manager's job, not to prattle on about craft in the arena.