Today, we sit 5 (five) games out in the wild card youth participation ribbon chase. That might not seem like much - nothing that a quick, 10-game win streak can't solve. Trouble is, there are five superior teams ahead of us. Five. (Okay, maybe four - let's forget Boston; why torture ourselves...)
Seattle has MLB's best record since the all-star break. Toronto faces the easiest remaining schedule, a daisy chain of tomato cans: The Nats, Rockies, A's and Royals. Wow. BYO ziti.
Of course, it doesn't matter who the Yankees play. They just dropped 2 of 3 to the 4th worst team in Creation. Five games out might look doable, if Aaron Judge whacks two per night. But since the Capt. returned, in games we absolutely needed to win, the Yankees are 5-8. That's China Town, Jake.
The final AL wild card berth will likely require at least 90 wins. To get there, the Yankees must win at least 31 of their final 47. (Two prime numbers, by the way. A co-inki-dink?)
Early last year, between April and May, they won at such a clip. Then everything went Ellsbury, and Cooperstown Cashman blew up the roster. Theoretically, they could do it again. But they won't. Nope. No chance. We know this. We have stared wide-eyed into the jaws of hell, and we have seen this team's fiery destiny. It is more likely to lose 31 of 47, and - frankly - we might be better off, long term, with such a fate.
At RAB Thoughts, the great Mike Axisa crunched some numbers yesterday. I'm stealing from him. Please subscribe to his site. But here's what the rest of creation would have to do to NOT win the wild card.
Rays: 20-26 or worse
Astros: 23-24 or worse
Blue Jays: 24-22 or worse
Mariners: 27-21 or worse
Red Sox: 30-18 or worse
Angels: 31-15 or worse
Guardians: 34-13 or worse
Any two of these teams could collapse. But for the Yanks to reach 90, they must not only play out of their skulls, but five of those seven teams must utterly flop. Let's say Cleveland, the Angels, Boston and Seattle go up in flames. That still leaves Tampa, Houston and the hateful Jays. That's a damn dim flicker at the end of a Stygian tunnel.
In other matters...
With his latest meltdown, Luis Severino has now made the IT IS HIGH MODERN YANKEE DISAPPOINTMENT TOP 15 LIST. Here's the updated rankings.
1. Jacoby Ellsbury
2. Carl Pavano
3. Jesus Montero
4. Hideki Irabu
5. Gary Sanchez
6. Clint Frazier
7. Greg Bird
8. Ruben Rivera
9. Luis Severino
10. Kei Igawa
11. Joey Gallo
12. Javier Vasquez
13. Michael Pineda
14. Giancarlo Stanton
15. Miguel Andujar
Super all-time Disappointment Hall of Fame: Brian Cashman
Runner up: Hal.
Finally, here's a simple, long-term solution for saving the Yankees:
Buy Baltimore.
In five years, that team's stars will be free agents, and none will re-sign with the cheapO's. The Yanks should secretly buy the franchise and selectively move its best players to NYC. This must be done with finesse, so nobody gets suspicious.
Already, Gotham should start the recruitment/seduction. Adley Rutschman should host a weekly show on YES. Austin Hays should become a fixture at the Met Gala. New York's army of celebrities should reach out to these young Baltimore stars, and each should be given fantastic Manhattan apartments, overlooking the hooker district, so the upcoming soul-capture runs smoothly. In five years, Gunnar Henderson will be 27. We need to set his table now.
Posts
15 comments:
According to FanGraphs, the Yanks have a 9.0% chance of clinching the Wild Card. We told Hal about this in June...
“OH LORD, WON’T YOU BUY ME - THE BALTIMORE OHS”
how can somebody be so bad at his job? everything Cashman has done since the signing of G.Cole and the pickup of Nestor, has been a train wreck. The trade deadline shenanigans have been particularly awful. I came to the realization a while ago that guys like Cashman are just guessing about potential and skill. But how on earth can somebody be so great at guessing wrong?
Buying Baltimore resonates. The Babe was from Baltimore. The Highlanders were born because the old Baltimore Orioles went belly up, creating league space for the new New York team.
This is a great idea. Unlike practically every one that Cashman has ever had.
"the Yanks have a 9.0% chance of clinching the Wild Card."
It's actually the third Wild Card slot.
So Hal doesn't understand why we are disappointed... A 9% chance of making the play in. I don't know... that sounds DISAPPOINTING to me.
Say I inherited a business, a BIG profitable business, a business I know exactly dick-dog-squat about, a business I have no interest in at all. I own the business but I don't have to involve myself in the day-to-day because that business has been humming along forever without my input generating vast sums of money - we're all wading in money, have to brush the money off the car every morning just to get to work, why would I change anything? That's Hal. He doesn't know enough or care to know enough about baseball to get in and get his hands dirty.
You've got city hands Mr. Steinbrenner...been countin' money all your life.
Sounds like a plan🤪
12. Javier Vasquez
Whenever Javier Vasquez appears on a list of Yankee disappointments, his name should always be followed by the word "twice", preferably in italics:
12. Javier Vasquez (twice)
Very true, Mildred. And yes, Parson Tom, this puts the lie to Cashman's old, "It's a crapshoot" line. If it were a crapshoot, he would win from time to time.
That's NOT China Town, Jake. That's baseball, Suzyn!
@ LBJ, Yeah, that's exactly what I thought too!
I don't how those gamblers calculate those stupid percentages (9% chance of making the last wild card), but we can be pretty sure that it's all horse shit. A few weeks ago, I thought the chance was maybe 1 in 100. Now, it's worse than that. Closer to 1 in 250. Soon, it'll be 1 in 500. And so on, until just before elimination, it'll be 1 in 1 trillion.
@ Parson Tom, "...how on earth can somebody be so great at guessing wrong?"
Well, it comes back to my theory that Cashman is intentionally trying for mediocrity, trying NOT to win championships. They (HAL/Cashman) don't really want to win, although they don't want to finish dead last either. The sweet spot for them seems to be the wild card and then a quick demise. They will spend money, lots of it, but not as much as the biggest spenders. Enough to keep this crap show kicking all the way to the bank. And they don't want to win championships because that could cause all kinds of disruptions to their carefully calculated financial plans.
The theory, let's call it "the intentional mediocrity theory", explains just about all of the insanity here. Notably, as soon as one huge millstone contract expires, they will bring in another one to replace the expiring one. It's carefully orchestrated to make sure that the new player does NOT make the team any better. The reason has to be financial. What else could it be?
Mildred, Hal knows how to collect those millions and billions of profit. As far as he's concerned - that crabbed and soulless prick - collecting profits IS the business. He doesn't care about baseball or winning. He appears to actually hate the Yankees. How else do explain these results for salary cap money? It's actual malice. How else do you explain keeping CashBrain? CashBrain's mandate is to keep profits high, not win. It may actually be to keep profits high and lose.
As long as the business makes 100s of millions ever year and Hal doesn't have to attend a parade, Hal thinks he's doing great.
@ El Duque, Joey Gallo makes the top 15 disappointments list? I'm not sure about that one. Wasn't he hitting something like .200 before he came here? And when he left, he was hitting like .160, right? So he dropped 40 points in batting average under Dillon Lawson, like just about everyone not named Aaron Judge. I had virtually zero expectations for Joey Gallo, so I don't know that I could be disappointed by his performance here. As far as I'm concerned, Cashman brought in a "hanged man" from the gallows, and he got the results that you'd expect from this walking zombie named Gallo.
Post a Comment