According to the Internet, the longtime hard luck franchise will be sold for $1.7 billion to - well, let's face it - a pair of superrich assholes, who vow to restore the O's to their glory days of Brooks, Cal Jr. and Pancake.
The new owners are buying the youngest, most prospect laden lineup in baseball, with budding stars at C, 3B, 1B and CF, and the game's No. 1 prospect at SS. If they add talent at the trade deadline, Baltimore could run away in the AL East this year and leave the Yankees chasing the wildcard by mid-August.
Here's the deal: Another longtime Yankee doormat could be flipping the rivalry, as an ownership with limitless money sits down at the table. The Yankees went the 20th Century with a cash advantage over Boston. It's gone. They celebrated the first 20 years of the new millennium with a cash advantage over the Mets. It's gone. The Blue Jays have ascended, the Dodgers are now the Gold Standard, Philadelphia eats our lunch, and soon the Orioles could follow suit. To save themselves, the Yankees have counted on their legacy.
It's gone.
Which is why it might be wise for Hal Steinbrenner to go "all-in" on 2024. If Baltimore's talent surge continues, and if its new owners show more savvy than the Jukes Angelos, Baltimore could rule the AL East for years.
A parlor game: Close your eyes and imagine the Yankee 2024 batting order. Add a bit of luck, and you can see a divisional contender. Now, look at the pitching rotation. You see a fragile staff that - with a few tweaks and tears - could collapse by June 1. If the Yankees think their current rotation can carry them through the season, they are doing mushrooms.
I realize that we all possess a frugality instinct, and it pulses when we hear of the outlandish sums of money being demanded by starting pitchers. But what is crazier is hitching an entire year to a team of horses that will be lucky to make it out of the gate. In fact, I wonder... are the Yankees a CIA psyop?
The only thing stopping this team from dropping to last place is the fact he Red Sox give even less of shit about winning than Hal does.
ReplyDeleteBleeding Yankee Blue is also reporting--though without much enthusiasm--that we might get a new closer...named Noah Synde...Noah Syndaga...you know, Thor.
ReplyDeleteYeah, that sounds pretty iffy.
ReplyDeleteThat's assuming the Orioles new overlords are actually willing to spend what it takes to keep the band together. Rich greedy assholes become rich greedy assholes by being greedy assholes and there's a better-than-zero chance the Orioles sell off the good guys come cash-in time and move to Salt Lake City, become the Hastings Cut-Offs.
I was reading the Athletics' weekly power rankings breakdown for the NBA. The Knicks are number 6 by the way and deservedly so. They've been a pleasure to watch.
ReplyDeleteThe reason I mention it is I like how they break down the teams into categories:
"Incomprehensibly bad – These guys are historically inept right now.
Not tanking but maybe someday — They haven’t started tanking yet, but it’s on the table this season.
Looking to make the Play-In — They’ve been rebuilding/retooling and think they can crack the top 10 in their respective conference.
Play-In Tournament teams or better — They should be in the mix unless something disastrous happens.
Playoff teams — Probably don’t have to worry about dropping down to the Play-In Tournament.
On the brink of contention — A piece away from us believing they can win the title.
Contenders — They are contending for the championship, barring a massive injury."
--
If applied to MLB The Yankees are in the "Play-In Tournament teams or better — They should be in the mix unless something disastrous happens."
And of course something will.
That said, the Playoff category is the THIRD from the top. Slightly better than mediocre with no end in sight. But they should make the heavily diluted playoffs
It's a damn shame.
“…Baltimore could run away in the AL East this year and leave the Yankees chasing the wildcard by mid-August.”
ReplyDeleteIt is my contention we are already chasing the WC, and bringing back Greg Allen for the 15th time ain’t gonna change that.
Just wait for 2025, when the Blow Jays sign Soto and the O's actually go out a spend money on real FAs. Meanwhile Ca$hman will be signing some more losers who have career .200 BA and 6 ERAs
ReplyDeleteGood piece, Duque. I beg to differ only in saying that, once Tom Yawkey bought the Red Sox in 1933, the Yankees did NOT have a big advantage in money over the Sox.
ReplyDeleteYawkey had money and was willing to spend it—often more freely than the Yankees. True, he usually had a racist regime in the front office...but sadly, as we all know, so did the Yanks, at least until 1961.
(Even sadder, so did almost the entire American League. The Yankees still had the AL's first Black MVP, and first Black pitcher-catcher battery in the World Series.)
Really, with the reserve clause and later the draft, it was hard to have much of a money advantage, at least until free agency. TV didn't become big until the 1950s, and even then the local contracts weren't huge.
Those old Yankees teams won mostly on smarts, on building great organizations of baseball men, and big minor-league networks.
This is where the Steinbrenners are such abject fuck-ups. From 1975 on, the era of free agency—combined with cable television and lavish public subsidies from New York taxpayers—SHOULD have given the Yanks an almost insuperable advantage over other teams. They have NOT had that...mostly because of front office mismanagement.
And for the last QUARTER-CENTURY, that mismanagement has emanated directly from the incompetence of one man, Brian Cashman.
Now the Orioles will spend and be another team to overtake the Small Market Yankees.
ReplyDeletePeralta left at the alta
ReplyDeleteWaaaaaaaaaaaaaahndy to the Padres
What's next, Brian ?
Cashman signing in the dead of night
Players with broken wings that can not fly
On and on, you are just a f*ck-up ruining the Yah-Yank-eez
Cashman GO
Cashman GO
Into the dark and smelly night
time for more coffee
MLBTR:
ReplyDeleteThe Padres have agreed to a four-year, $16.5MM contract with free agent left-hander Wandy Peralta, Ken Rosenthal and Dennis Lin of The Athletic report. The deal contains three opt-out clauses, meaning Peralta will have the annual ability to opt back into free agency. The agreement is pending a physical.
Peralta is replaceable, but it’s apparent to anyone who left their rose tinted glasses at home that the team will only be mining the scrap heap until the trading deadline, and maybe past that.
Fucking Cashman. Fucking Hal.
ReplyDeleteOh Wandy,
ReplyDeletewell you came and you gave without taking.
But we sent you away.
Oh Wandy,
when you came in you'd stop us from quaking...
and we neeeeed you.
How did Ca$hman miss out on IF/OF Trey Cabbage? He hit .208 with a 46% SO rate in 22 games last year. If that had kept King they could have had Cabbage & Kings!
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteSome background:
George Steinbrenner wanted to wind down his involvement with the Yankees so he put his son Hal in charge.
Peter Angelos wanted to wind down his involvement with the Orioles so he put his son John in charge.
With that as background, it would seem that John Angelos and Hal Steinbrenner have a few things in common.
How can we orchestrate a meeting between these two scions? A meeting where John Angelos smugly shows off the hay-bales of money lying around his yacht floor and Hal gets insanely jealous? So insanely jealous, in fact, that the only way for Hal to get the better of the young Angelos is to sell the Yankees?
How can we make this happen?
Or an I thinking of some elaborate sitcom plot straight outta I Love Lucy or The Honeymooners?
Regardless, we need to make this happen.
Sadly, LBJ, Hal has no real concept of what money is. OR, his concept of money is not what ours is. He probably looks at some spreadsheets - maybe the same metrics team that works in the jockstrap-scented bowels of the Stadium? - and just laughs at how HIS columns dwarf the columns of of John Angelos. At this point, his little column also swells with blood and he realizes he can continue to hold onto the Yankees and slowly bleed them - and us - to death. Because we must never forget that his disregard for field victories stems from the role that the Yankees played in stealing his childhood.
ReplyDeleteI argue that the Yankees sucking and losing and making their fan base miserable feeds Hal, makes him whole, heals him. We don't need Angelos to meet him. We need for him to meet a shrink, perhaps followed by an exorcist. Big George might have unknowingly put a curse on the Yankees for years through his actions. This could be a generational thing. We may have seen the last Yankee series win in out lifetimes.
13bit - at this point we need someone like Herbert West from the Re-Animator movie to inject whatever is left of the dearly departed George with his glowing green reanimation serum and then direct the reanimated Boss to terrorize both Cash and Hal until better choices are made for the team. Either that have the old reanimated Steinbrenner kill everyone in senior management and the analytics department.
ReplyDeleteThat might have an impact.
In the only competition that matters to Hal, he sees John's 1.3B haul, compares it in his spreadsheet to the 7.1B that the Yankees are worth, laughs and celebrates by leveraging his Yankee assets to buy a soccer team in Europe.
ReplyDeleteSuch is the life of nepo-babies. They only people they compare themselves to are themselves.
After all, does anyone else really matter?