Two Weeks.

 

Hope is on the way.

Just two weeks. Fourteen days. And we will have the chance to see dazzling young athletes who are willing to go all out, every time they compete, for Olympic gold.

All right, they're playing for real gold, by the bucket, and many of them are taking PEDs up the wazoo.

But still. There is not one Gleyber Torres among them. Not one Carlos Rodon. No Olympic DL with Giancarlo Stanton as permanent resident. No Brian Cashman to rationalize away predictable, obvious failure, and pretend it will all be good next year.

There is no next year. 

I used to feel sorry for these Olympic athletes, and I felt the whole spectacle vastly inferior to the likes of baseball, with its long season. Just a few minutes, even seconds, to make a name for themselves and it's all over—a stumble or an injury erasing a lifetime of work.

Now, I salute them. 

Now, I breathe a sigh of relief that their ranks won't include a .205 hitter putting on his home run jacket, as his teammates salaam to him up and down the dugout. Now I won't have to watch, night after night, the shoulder shrugs and the blank stares, the mumbled words about hope and good swings, as another season slinks off into the night.

This is it. No guaranteed contracts—yet. No excuses, afterwards—no one is going to stick around to hear them. 

I propose that, for the duration of the Olympics, we boycott the Yankees. We watch only the games from Paris, and give our mumbly, shruggy, ouchy, grouchy, barely conscious players (and their insufferable paymasters), the air.

You can't get up for the game? Then we can't either. We're going to Paris for the summer. See you when all the true athletes are done.