Bad. And Sad.

 

In the end, it was very much Brian Cashman's team. 

No, The Brain did not make the Yankees infield forget how to make plays they probably mastered in Pony League, and no, he did not make Aaron Judge lose a flyball in the lights of the luxury boxes, or whatever happened there (More on Judge later.).

But it was very much Cashman's team. It was right there before us, as Aaron Boone likes to say. On the field you could literally see the difference.

The Dodgers had Mookie Betts, future Hall-of-Famer, brilliant, all-around, throwback player who can start almost anywhere on the ballfield, and whose hustle in a game his team was losing 5-0, sparked the Dodger turnaround. 

We had the fraud the Red Sox traded him for, Alex Verdugo, who despite a couple of nice plays in the field was just as dismal as he was at bat all year, striking out to end the Series.

The Dodgers had Freddie Freeman, the Series MVP and another, future Hall-of-Famer who would have broken records if he'd had the chance to target that right field porch in Yankee Stadium.

We had Anthony Rizzo, the first baseman we signed instead. A nice guy by all accounts, a former champion with a heroic story of overcoming cancer, but someone who has been a physical wreck almost since he joined the Yankees, sustaining one devastating injury after another. He should not have been playing first this Series, but there he was, as real as Bill Buckner—ending his Yankees career with 112 consecutive at-bats without a homer, and contributing to the worst fielding meltdown in World Series history.

Both Verdugo and Rizzo were classic, Cashman bargain ducks, retrieved for his master, Hal Steinbrenner, like a good water spaniel and dumped at his feet. So what if they weren't championship caliber anymore? They were cheap, weren't they?

As Hammer has pointed out, most of the rest of the Yankees...were merely playing out of position. But then, positions aren't something that Cashman, a fervent convert to analytics, doesn't much care about, either.

Remember about 20 years or so back, when Billy Beane's Oakland Athletics would make the playoffs on what we were told were his brilliant mastery of analytics? On-base percentage was everything, and the likes of fielding or fundamentals simply didn't matter. And then, every year, the A's would lose in the playoffs thanks to...fielding and fundamentals.

The Yankees have become that team. 

The A's had the excuse of being a small-market franchise with a tiny budget (though really it was the roids as much as the stats that powered them through the season). Cashman has no such excuse. 

Yet here we are with yet another Yankees team that can't hit in the clutch, can't come up big in October, lacks the necessary role player or two to get over the top. 

Yes, the Dodgers are a much better-constructed team, and their owner has a more financially innovative front office. But they had been so overwhelmed by injuries that they were distinctly wobbling last night. I actually felt a pang of pity for Ohtani, playing with a dislocated shoulder, when Cole struck him out with high fastballs he couldn't touch...just before disaster hit. 

The Yanks had been fortunate in their draws the entire playoffs, and now L.A. was on the verge of going under; their best starters mostly on the DL, their relief corps visibly fraying. 

Faced with this, the Yankees...went 1-10 with runners in scoring position, and left 12 men on base.  And then came the fifth inning, when the character of this team was fully exposed. 

Including, I'm sad to say, the character of their manager. 

It wasn't enough that Boone stuck to his usual, idiotic lineup, in which Jazz Chisholm was inserted in the four spot, separating Judge and Stanton. Nor was it enough, this World Series, that Boone continued to make pitching moves as if he were scratching off a lottery ticket. 

It was in that already infamous fifth inning that the skipper failed his team most.

After Betts' hustle and Rizzo and Cole's brain freeze, the game was still just 5-1. This was the moment for Aaron Boone to call time, hustle out to the mound, gather everybody around him, and say something like, "Hey, I thought it was me who was supposed to cover first base." Or maybe, tell the filthiest joke he knew. 

Something.

Instead, Boone—who to become manager passed all of Cashman's written tests on modern baseball, in a nine-hour interview process—stayed in the dugout, where he would remain for almost the entire rest of the game. Standing in one corner, seemingly talking to no one on his obviously shellshocked team, periodically burying his face in his sleeve.

Afterwards, Boone talked about how sad it was for him, never to go home for the year after having celebrated. That is sad. How good of him to share his feelings.

As for Cashman...well, there are always the number to get back to. Maybe, somewhere in his heaps of data, he will happen upon a team with a soul. But I doubt it.