"THE ONLY TEAM
TO WIN THE WORLD SERIES
IN THE SAME SEASON
THAT THEY WERE SHUT OUT
IN 3 STRAIGHT REGULAR GAMES
WAS THE 1913 PHILADELPHIA A'S."
--Katie Sharp via BTR999
Traitor Tracker: .247
Last year, this date: .315
Wednesday, June 18, 2025
Tuesday, June 17, 2025
Hope Week
I saw some good swings there. - Baghdad Boone
I feel like we're almost ready to turn the corner. - Chuckles the Clown
I see the light at the end of the tunnel. - Double-bubble Dumbo
We're looking right at it. - A.A. Ron the Baboon
A rough patch, soon to end? Or a dead-on glimpse into an empty pit? For the Yankees, which is it?
Brutal. Remember our insurmountable lead, back in May? Seven games up in the AL East. And a lineup of unsung heroes. Rice. Grisham. Goldie. Cody. Yarlboro. The entire bullpen. Judge hitting .415. We owned the division.
Suddenly, we're the Knicks, leading Indiana by 12 with two minutes to go. I mean... wow.
What really hurts? The sense that this year would be different. This was 2025, fulcrum point to the decade. The Yankees had spent all - or at least most - of that saved Juan Soto money to build the roster. They were a lock for the postseason, when all they'd need was an extra win or two. This was not 2024, when June loomed like an iceberg. Moreover, they were on the verge of burying Boston, once and for all. Remember?
Wow.
So, here we are - Hope Week - when Hideki Irabu once killed himself - and we are officially collapsing in YES-Mo. Four straight losses. Worst streak of the season. We cannot score a run. Last night - facing a sub-.500 team - you could feel our desperation grow. WTF happened?
1. Well, fly balls weren't carrying. We hit at least three that, on a different night, might have gone out. But. They. Didn't. They died at the track. The Yankees are a team of solo HRs. They cannot move runners. Come October, folks, that's our Babadook, right there. And he is very real. You can feel him in the batter's box, swinging every Yankee bat.
2. Not even DJ LeMahieu - nicknamed "Fun-D" for his grasp of fundamentals - could bunt a runner to third. It cost us the game. Not to pick on DJ - this was a team loss - but there our moments when you rely on your veterans. Last night, the message became clear: the Yankees cannot rely on their veterans.
3. There's something soul-crushing about rolling over the batting order to reach Trent Grisham and Ben Rice, both of whom are in freefalls. (Last 15 days: Grisham at .200. Rice at .143.) Last night, the Angels comically pitched around Aaron Judge, without paying a price. It's a template for beating them all season.
4. Right now, I'm ready for something batshit crazy. How about this: Bat The Martian leadoff. See what happens? Maybe he'll break out. The Yankees need something bold. The days will soon start getting shorter. Objects in the mirror are closer than they may appear.
5. Yeah, last night, the Yankees got some legitimate, unbelievably bad luck. The juju gods conducted a master class in subversion. Who hits a grounder to 3B that arrives just as The Martian - who was stealing the base - slides directly into the way? Who does that? You can't make that shit up. Still... it happened. In the end, another runner thrown out at third. Remember how they used to say the Jeter NEVER got thrown out at third? On this team, everybody gets thrown out at third.
6. We can blather up and down about who is hitting and who isn't, but one conclusion is starting to become clear: The Yankees, as a team, simply aren't that good. Our so-called youth movement - if it qualifies for such a designation - involves Volpe, Wells, Dominguez, Gil, Peraza and Rice. Hate to say it, but there might not be one future star in that entire group. Either somebody steps up and becomes a future Core Four-level player, we could squander Aaron Judge's greatest seasons in a generational dead zone. What an awful thought.
7. This recent June swoon amplifies the pit-of-stomach fear felt by every Yankee fan: That - on or around July 31 - Cooperstown Cashman will tear apart the organization with garage sale trades of what few prospects our farm system can offer. Whatever prospects are thriving - George Lombard Jr., we're talking to you - they might fly out the door in exchange for a bad contract and a band-aid.
8. That once-insurmountable lead? It's surmountable. In fact, it could be surmounted by the end of Hope Week. Wherever you are, Hideki, Rest In Peace. Wow.
Monday, June 16, 2025
The View From Valhalla: Yankees Immortal Number Three!
All right, it's yet another rainy, grim day in the city of subsidized, nepo-baby sports owners, so I thought I would try to cheer us up a little with the tragic life of Lou Gehrig!
Yes, I know I've changed the perspective of the afterlife a little. But hey, our Lou was of Germanic origin—and Valhalla, the Westchester cemetery, is where he is buried.
You do have my abject apologies for not getting this in two weeks ago, preceding the centennial celebration of his most famous feat.
No. 3: Lou Gehrig
He was the greatest ballplayer ever to hail from New York City. Greater than Whitey or Sandy, or big Hank or little Phil, or Frankie the Flash or “Wee Willie” Keeler—and they were all plenty great.
He was the son of German immigrants, born Heinrich Ludwig Gehrig in Yorkville, and raised there and on Washington Heights. His father was a sheet metal worker, hampered by epilepsy, and a penchant for the bottle. Ma Gehrig—often dismissed as a smothering ethno-mother—was one of the heroic immigrant women to be found all over New York at the turn of the century, keeping her family together through incessant toil, even as she lost three of her four children to early childhood illnesses.
“He’s the only big egg I have in my basket,” she liked to say of her Lou. “He’s the only one of four who lived, so I want him to have the best.”
Fourteen pounds at birth, his physiology was at first doughy and unresponsive. A grammar school friend remembered—with a chill of foreboding—how “His body behaved as if it were drunk.”
The boy took charge of his anatomy and his life, training relentlessly at his father’s turnverein, a sort of German gymnastics club. By the age of 11, he was strong enough to swim the deceptive currents of the Hudson, from Washington Heights to the Palisades and back. By the time he enrolled in the High School of Commerce on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, he was coordinated enough to have mastered football, basketball, soccer, billiards, and his favorite sport, baseball.
Almost to the end of his career, he boasted rock-hard abs and upper arms that looked as though they could only have come from the steroid era. Most impressive of all was his “lower body [which] appeared to belong to another species, neither man nor ape,” in Jonathan Eig’s awed description. “Each thigh was bigger than many a man’s waist, each calf the size of a Christmas ham.” In a filmed workout session with former heavyweight champ Jack Dempsey, Gehrig can be seen easily outpacing the boxer, moving effortlessly through endless sit-ups and push-ups.
After school, most of his time was spent delivering and picking up the laundry his mother did for other people, filling in for his father at a janitorial job, and working at a local grocery and a butcher shop. By 12 he was, in Paul Gallico’s description, a “shy, harassed, worried youngster, in castoff clothes.” If he always had enough to eat, young Lou was never wore an overcoat or hat, probably because he did not own one.
He was, almost always, overshadowed—not so surprising, perhaps, for a man who played nearly his entire career with Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio. But even at a young age, when he hit a grand slam home run out of Wrigley Field, to clinch a big, “city championship” between his Commerce High team and Chicago's Lane Tech—an event big enough for a brass band and a crowd of 5,000 to greet the boys when they arrived back at Grand Central…Lou’s name appeared in the papers as, “Gherrig.”
Thanks mostly to his mother, Lou managed to graduate high school at a time when only 5 percent of New York City children did. Mom then got herself a job cooking and cleaning at a Columbia frat where, incredibly, this large, stout, German immigrant woman with a thick accent was able to “network” her way into befriending the graduate manager of the school’s sports teams, who agreed to go watch her Lou play ball.
Lou got a football scholarship to Columbia, albeit one that still meant he had to work full-time in the summer, and part-time during the school year. He pledged a fraternity, but every night Mrs. Gehrig’s one egg went over to wait and clear tables and wash dishes at the rival frat where his mother hen cooked—an almost gratuitous act of self-abasement.
On the gridiron, he was a tackle, an excellent punter, and a bruising halfback with surprising speed. Playing baseball in the spring, he proved to be not only an able first baseman but also a surprisingly good outfielder and an excellent college pitcher, striking out ten or more batters in five of his eleven starts and whiffing seventeen against Williams—a Columbia school record that still stands today. But no one talked of him becoming a major-league pitcher like Babe Ruth.
Where his talent could not be ignored was at the plate. Gehrig hit with tremendous, frightening power, batting .444 in his one Columbia season and slugging a silly .937.
Back then, Columbia’s playing field was on the 116th Street campus. Lou hit a tremendous blast, from near the entrance of John Jay Hall to the steps of Low Library—and for once he was not overlooked. Yankees’ scout Paul Krichell racing to a pay phone to tell Ed Barrow he had found another Babe Ruth.
Krichell was not far wrong.
He was a model of consistency—and not just because he showed up to play every day. Until the ALS, Gehrig spent his whole career hitting frozen ropes, while never striking out as many as 100 times in a season. For 13 years in a row, he scored at least 115 runs and drove in at least 107. For 12 years in a row, he hit .300 or better, had at least 27 home runs and 66 extra-base hits, and compiled an OPS over 1.000.
All-time, Gehrig ranks third in OPS, behind just Ruth and Ted Williams. Bill James named him the greatest major-league first baseman ever. So did just about everybody else.
Off the field, he was a cipher. He was intelligent enough to have excelled in philosophy and history at Columbia’s engineering school, and sensitive enough to weep at Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Yet he often seemed to be lost away from a ballfield, playing sandlot ball with the local kids when he came home from the Stadium, or riding the Rye Playland roller coasters for hours at a time.
Childhood friends said that “he seemed from an early age to be carrying around a sense of his own worthlessness,” while teammates found him to be aloof and distracted—before they got to know him. Life magazine opined that he was “one of the slowest-witted athletes in history.”
He ended up marrying one of the Yankees’ “circuit girls,” a name for the “baseball annies” of the day—and he may have been a virgin when he did so. He had not so much as kissed her when he proposed.
Eleanor Grace Twitchell was no Teresa Wright (who is?) but she seems to have been a good match, a wife who was willing to stand up to his mother, look out for his interests, help him to open up. She was 29 when they married, 37 when he died. She never remarried.
In 1938, his game suddenly declined. That October, when the Yankees swept the Cubs again in the Series and sang their traditional victory songs in the lockerroom, “Roll Out the Barrel” and “The Sidewalks of New York,” he sat silently in the background, pensively smoking a cigarette. His physical skills deteriorated so rapidly during the off-season that Eleanor feared he had a brain tumor. He asked Manager Joe McCarthy to take him out of the lineup on May 2, 1939—ironically, a day when the long-retired Wally Pipp was visiting the Yanks in Detroit.
“Lou looks ill to me,” Pipp told the press.
Too late. Death had made him luminous, visible to all now.
He ended up giving the greatest speech ever made on a ballfield, at the very first “Old-Timer’s Game,” surrounded by teammates from the 1927 and 1939 Yankees—widely considered the two greatest teams in major-league history. That was not a coincidence. Lou Gehrig bridged their greatness. He had become an immortal.
Greatest moment: No doubt, that last speech. “I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth”—said at the perfect moment, just as America was moving from Great Depression to World War II. He understood the moment. Lou Gehrig was not about to engage in anything close to self-pity.
Greatest moment in play? Maybe the 1932 game when he hit 4 home runs in Shibe Park, as the Yanks won, 20-13. Robbed only by a circus catch by Al Simmons of a brain-frying 5th home run. (But the next day, the headlines were all about John McGraw announcing his retirement.)
Maybe Game 4 of the 1936 World Series, when he hit what proved to be the game-winning homer off the great Carl Hubbell, putting the Yanks up, 3 games to 1? Game 3 in the 1928 World Series, in St. Louis, when he hit the ball out of the park against Hall of Famer Pop Haines, then hit an inside-the-park homer?
All great. But impossible to beat the speech.
Products: Huskies, a breakfast cereal that hired Lou in its effort to surpass Wheaties as the breakfast of champions. Gehrig famously made a gaffe in his live, on-air commercial, calling them…Wheaties. This became so well known that he originally wrote a joke about it into his 1939 speech. For whatever reason, he decided to leave it out. Good choice.
MVP Awards: 1927, 1936.
Deserved MVP Awards: Hard to say, the rules about the award kept changing so much in his time. He won in 1927, in good part because no one was allowed to win it twice. In 1931, he tied for the league lead in HRs with 46 (because an idiot teammate passed him on the bases during what should have been 47), had an AL-record 185 RBI, and batted .341. But The Babe had a slightly better season at the plate, and the scribes gave it Lefty Grove, who went 31-4, 2.06, and whose Athletics won the pennant.
I would say, 1934, 1936, and 1937.
Triple Crown: 1934, when he had 49 dingers, 166 RBI, hit .363, and led the AL in OBP (1.172) and WAR (10.0). The Knights of the Press Box gave the MVP to Mickey Cochrane, who was not even the third-best player on his own team that season.
The only other Yankee to accomplish this? Mickey Mantle. So far…
Rings on his fingers: Technically, 9 pennants (1923, 1926-1928, 1932, 1936-1939); 8 World Series (1923, 1927-1928, 1932, 1936-1939).
Of course, he was able to contribute almost nothing in 1939, and in 1923, he was just up for a cup of coffee, 13 games in which he hit….423. The Yanks asked the Giants for permission to have him replace an ailing Wally Pipp on the roster. McGraw, nobody’s fool, said no. Pipp drove in just one run, but the Yanks won the Series anyway.
The next year, 1924, the Yankees sent Lou back down to the Hartford Senators to learn…what, exactly? He hit .369, with 40 doubles, 13 triples, and 37 homers in just 134 games. The Yanks called him back up for 10 games, in which he hit…500.
Pipp, who was a very good ballplayer, had another excellent year, but it’s hard to believe the Yanks could not have made up the 2 games they lost the pennant by to Washington, had they not at least brought Gehrig up earlier.
Then, let’s consider another “what-if”—"if not for his ALS." 1940 was a similar year to 1924; with Gehrig at first instead of Babe Dahlgren, the Bombers almost certainly would’ve made up the two games they finished behind Detroit that season.
Throw in 1941 and 1942, and Lou Gehrig could easily have been on 13 pennant winers and 11 world champions.
Deserved World Series MVP Awards: 1928 and 1932, when despite Ruth’s flashier feats, Gehrig ran up OPS’s of 2.433 and 1.718, as opposed to The Babe’s 2.022 and 1.233—two of the greatest, two-man World Series ever compiled. Hard to believe that Lou would have won them, though, even had the awards existed then.
About that Wally Pipp: Malingerer or maligned? Eleanor Gehrig, who could be a hard woman, said he asked out of the lineup to go watch a horse he had bet on. One story has it that he suffered from headaches his whole life, after being hit in the head by a hockey puck when he was 8 (No truth to the rumor that this was spread by Don Rickles.). Others say that he was had double-vision after being beaned in the head during batting practice.
“I took the two most expensive aspirin in history,” Pipp supposedly told a reporter, long after the fact.
What’s known is this: he was hit in the head during batting practice and hospitalized—but only a month after being replaced by Gehrig. He may have also been hit in the head a day or two before his replacement.
Truth was, Pipp was a declining, 32-year-old ballplayer, and the Yankees were suffering their only losing season between 1918 and 1965, and they had waiting…Lou Gehrig.
Pipp was a college graduate, who was originally signed by the Tigers. The Yanks purchased him, along with the guy with one of my favorite, ballplayer names, Hugh High, and he proved a great pick-up. Part of the original, “Murderers’ Row,” he was one of the best power hitters in the deadball era, twice leading the AL in homers and twice driving in over a hundred runs, and playing a very capable first base.
Sold to Cincinnati after Gehrig’s ascent, he put in 3 okay seasons with the Reds, then retired. And lost all his money in the 1929 stock market crash. And suffered being unemployed and nearly bankrupt in the Great Depression. Wally Pipp worked with kids for the National Youth Administration, was a radio broadcaster, worked in publishing, wrote radio scripts, and helped make B-24 bombers at Willow Run. He died of a heart attack at 71.
Wally Pipp never squawked.
Media: Pride of the Yankees (1942), of course, the best baseball movie ever made (not that it had much competition) until Bang the Drum Slowly, which is about the same thing. Most of it is pure Hollywood cornball, made watchable only by its winning leads, Gary Cooper and Teresa Wright. Until director Sam Wood has Cooper give the great speech, then simply walk down into the Yankees’ dugout and disappear. That absence at the end—that simple vanishing that is the essence of death and loss—would say so much in an America then engaged in the worst war in human history.
Also…Eleanor had produced a song with Fred Fisher, in 1935, called, “I Can’t Get to First Base With You.” After the 1937 season, she got Lou out to Hollywood for a screen test, where he supposedly had a blast, and appeared as himself in the 1938 Western, Rawhide, in which he says he has decided to quite baseball and take up ranching in Montana.
And…there was Speedy, Harold Lloyd’s frenetic, last silent film, in 1928. At one point, Lloyd picks up Babe Ruth in his taxicab, and drives at breakneck speed to Yankee Stadium, while The Babe fumes in the backseat. When they arrive, Gehrig can just barely be seen passing by a cab window, in street clothes—in the background as always.
The Feud: Great pals at first, when Lou used to bring Ruth home for pickled eels and other German specialties of Ma Gehrig, they had a famous falling out—one that apparently made Jeter & A-Rod’s seem like a trifle.
Rumors varied about what caused it: a derisive comment about Lou’s mom by the Babe. More lasciviously, some kind of drunken incident in the Ruth stateroom, involving Mrs. and Mrs. Ruth and Eleanor, during the team’s long boat trip to Japan in 1934, for a postseason exhibition tour (It may have been no more than the three of them getting drunk, while Lou searched the boat for his blushing bride.).
Whatever the case, Lou never forgave The Babe. Not even, according to Bill Dickey, when Ruth, in tears, gave Gehrig an emotional hug after his speech.
The Streak: 2,130 games. It took a toll, especially in the days before body armor, or even batting helmets. There were the agonizing bouts of what was diagnosed as “lumbago” in his back. There were the constant pains in his fingers. It was determined that every one of them had been broken—something Lou didn’t realize until x-rays were taken years later.
At the end of the 1930 season—a campaign in which he hit .379, with 41 home runs and 174 RBI—he had to be hospitalized for a week with a broken finger and bone chips in his elbow, another recurring injury. In 1934, during one of the greedy Yankees’ exhibition games with their own farm team in Norfolk, he was beaned so terribly by a mouthy busher named Ray White that Lou had to be rushed to the hospital.
The next day, the Yanks traveled to Washington, where they had to find their first baseman a new cap to let him play, because his head was still so swollen. They settled on one of Babe Ruth’s—with the seams split in the back. That afternoon, he banged out a double, starting a streak that saw him hit .457 over the next eight games, with 6 homers and 17 RBI. That year he won the triple crown.
How long could it have lasted?: He broke the previous ironman mark (1,307, by Everett Scott, a shortstop with both the Red Sox and the Yanks), by nearly a thousand. Which gives rise to more “what-ifs”:
His record could have been 2,283, had the Yanks just kept him up for their 153 games in 1924.
Without the ALS, he could have added the 145 he missed in 1939, 155 more in 1940, 156 in 1941 (there were “ties’ due to rainouts and dark-outs), and 154 in 1942. That would have put the total at 2,740. And landed us right in the middle of WW II, when Gehrig would surely have been the equal of any wartime players—but too old for the draft—and been able to play another 155, 154, and 152 games, putting us at 3,201.
Add in those 153 missed in 1924, and he might have played 3,354. Throw in another 50-plus World Series game, and you’re over 3,400 straight games played when it counted, a number even Cal Ripken, Jr., might have blanched at challenging.
All right, all right. Hard to believe that Lou, even at 39, would not have signed up and tried to do his bit during the war. Most players were in uniform, one way or the other, by 1943. So let’s put the “what-if” at around 2,950, counting the postseason. Words fail.
Quotes from others:
“This ‘Iron Man’ stuff is just baloney. I think he’s making one of the worst mistakes a ball player can make. The guy ought to learn to sit on the bench and rest. They’re not going to pay off on how many games he’s played in a row. When his legs go, they’ll go in a hurry.” (Babe Ruth.)
“He was tired. It was like a match burning out.” (Johnny Sturm, near the end.)
“[You] told me you were quitting as a ballplayer because you felt yourself a hindrance to the team. My God, man, you were never that.” (Manager Joe McCarthy.)
“I felt like killing him.” (A young Rocky Graziano, when Gehrig, as a youth parole board commissioner, ordered him back to reform school.)
We’ve been to the wars together;
And we took our foes as they came,
And always you were the leader,
And always you played the game...
—Your pals of the Yankee team.
(Inscription on the trophy given him, verse by John Kieran)
Quotes from Gehrig himself:
“There is no room in baseball for discrimination. It is our national pastime and a game for all.”
“I don’t see why anyone should belittle my record or attack it. I never belittled anyone else’s. I’m not stupid enough to play if my value to the club is endangered. I honestly have to say that I’ve never been tired on the field.” (Responding to the Babe.)
“Like hell.” (Responding to a teammate asking him how he felt, in spring training, 1939.)
“Heavens, has it reached that stage?” (When his teammates mobbed him after he made a routine play in the field.)
“There is a 50-50 chance of keeping me as I am. I may need a cane in 10 or 15 years.” (Letter to his wife. It remains unclear if he was trying to spare her, or if the doctors kept the whole truth from him.)
"I am not a cry baby…I am not dumb, or unreasonable enough to ask the impossible…Please don’t think that I am overly depressed, crying, or quitting, for I am not.” (Letter to his doctor.)
“Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”
“Fifty-fifty.” (Last words mouthed to his wife.)
Nicknames: “The Iron Horse,” “Columbia Lou” (from the writers); “Buster,” “Biscuit Pants,” (from his teammates).
The Core is Four.
Four hitters. That's the key to winning a ring.
Four good, reliable, major-league hitters. At least.
Even after the worst weekend of the season (so far), baseballreference today puts the Yankees at 98.8 percent sure to make the postseason, 78.3 percent sure to win the division, 29.1 percent likely to win the AL pennant, and 15.1 percent likely to win the World Series.
This makes them the favorite to win it all, out of every team in the American League—and every team in the show, save for a certain outfit that plays over in Flushing, which is at 16.9 percent.
Your new York Yankees are not going to make the World Series, much less win it. I don't know if they will even win the division.
The reason?
For once, not pitching (though I suspect that the Yankees' staff will get dangerously worn down as the season proceeds).
For once, it's hitting. The Yankees don't have it.
As many have noticed, Aaron Judge seems to have hit one of his slides, in which he seems terrifyingly unable to see or hit strikes. Granted that the umps have been screwing him royally of late (something that no longer seems to agitate our manager, for some reason), he struck out 9 times in 11 at-bats in Fenway.
Reggie Jackson once explained to me that guys are usually not clutch because they are trying to do too much, and I think we can certainly see that in most of Judge's sloughs.
The Estimable Keefe demands that he bat first, like Ohtani. Like most of us here, I don't agree with that argument. I prefer Judge where he can drive in as many runs as possible, preferably early in the game.
But I doubt that hitting him third, as I would prefer, would really help the Yankees' run production much, either.
The Yanks simply don't have enough hitters to both get on base before Judge and protect him when he's at the plate.
What history tells us is, in the modern game, at least, is that you need at least four (4) decent, respectable major-league hitters to take it all.
Every single, Series-winning Yankees team of the past had at least four—some six, or seven, or even eight.
It's true, as well for almost every other Series champion, from every other franchise. About the only exception I can really think of, offhand, are the 1965 Dodgers, who were playing near the nadir of the 1960s pitchers' era, in a pitchers' park...and with Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, and Claude Osteen at the head of the rotation.
Keeping their heads in the game. The whole game.
But that would mean having a manager like, well, Walter Alston—or Carlos Mendoza—instead of Friendly Aaron Boone. It would breaking away from algorithm baseball, and the swinging for the fences all the time, every time.
It would mean having consequences for getting picked off second, or stealing third on your own, or otherwise running the bases "like drunken sailors," in The Master's words.
The Dodgers can get away with batting Shohei Ohtani first, because they have people like Mookie Betts and Will Smith, and above all, Freddie Freeman, hitting behind him. That's on Brian Cashman. But if the Yanks really do want to contend, they're going to have to face the fact that the only real hitters on their team are Aaron Judge, Paul Goldschmidt (who is 38), and maybe half of Cody Bellinger.
That adds up to 2 1/2. Which is not 4!
On a weekend when the ground shook, Boston makes a deal for the decade
They traded our greatest nemesis, Rafael Devers, for four young players, each a potential Crochet or Verdugo. By doing it in the postgame glee of a three-game sweep - a humiliation of their foes - the Redsocks set course on a second-half of 2025 that will bring glory or a train wreck. No middle ground.
Ten takeaways from what could be the most pivotal Yankee weekend in this decade:
1. In trading Devers, Boston employed a strategy foreign to the Yankee brain trust: Deal the star when things are going well. Devers had just homered, and Boston had crushed us. Therefore... so long, chump! The Yankees, on the other hand, trade players after their tents have folded. Sort of how Boone removes pitchers: Wait until the damage is done.
2. There are no words for the Yankees' weekend. "Debacle" comes close. "Fiasco. Meltdown. Disaster." I'd go with bloodbath, but the Yankees played so timidly, so bloodlessly, that it doesn't work. The way they so sacrificially knelt in the late innings, 1-2-3, 1-2-3 - they were efficiently awful. I wonder how good this team really is.
3. Aaron Judge has fallen into one of his dark crevices. We knew he'd hit one. Here it is. Strikeouts and double-play grounders. Flailing at pitches. Turns out, he's not the greatest RH hitter of all time.
4. With Judge on the fritz, there is only person capable of carrying this team: Giancarlo, of course. We'll soon see.
5. Horrible baserunning this weekend. Three young Yankees were tagged out at third - inexplicably - in critical moments. Anthony Volpe tried to steal. Idiot! The Martian forgot the count. Imbecile! Ben Rice got picked off. Dartmouth? Fundamentals. The Yankees cannot seem to teach them.
6. I'm particularly losing hope for Rice, whose BA (.227) is headed toward Mendoza. With Stanton returning, he is the fifth wheel on a golf cart. The Yankees should consider sending him to Scranton and letting him catch, full-time. He deserves a shot at an actual MLB career. He certainly does not belong as a DH, batting second in a lineup.
7. Yesterday, I listened in frantic disbelief as Suzyn Waldman killed us with juju. She spent the entire pre-game show telling us how Boston pitcher Brayan Bello was having a horrible year - how his change-up had gone south, how his ERA was outlandish, how he was about to be dumped in the rotation. I was screaming, "NO, NO, NO!" It did no good. Is Suzyn trying to tank this team? Of course, he was going to shut us out.
8. I cannot rate the Devers deal. Seriously, what do I know? The two pitchers will help their staff, though they'll face unbelievable pressure. The two prospects are down in Single A. It could be a reincarnation of the Juan Soto deal - where the Yankees gave up Michael King - or it could be another Mookie Betts giveaway.
But I will say this: In three years, Boston will look smart for ditching Devers. His body doesn't look like a 3B. He looks like a DH ready to degrade. The Giants will absorb $250 million. That's money the Redsocks will use to buy a star.
This is the deal the Yankees should have made with Giancarlo, four years ago. But we'll have him forever.
9. The chances of Devers ending up a Yankee - the John Mayberry scenario - just increased enormously. I suspect SF will happily deal him to Gotham in, say, 2028. He'll be hitting .227.
10. What happened this weekend did not end the Yankee season. But being swept by Boston will remain a stain on this team through the playoffs. And if Boston's youth movement catches fire, this weekend will be remembered ruefully for a long, long time. This will be the weekend when everything went south.
Sunday, June 15, 2025
Devers traded to SF, making Soxfans stop caring that they just beat the Yankees
From reddit.com/r/redsox
"Even if everyone in the FO despises Devers, this is putting hurt feelings over the good of the team."--dinkleburgenhoff
"I'm in this thread every day watching and talking about games with all of you, but after this man fuck this team"--cookthegoat
"I'm fucking out, no longer tuning in or spending my money while Henry is the owner. Fuck em."--bostonboy08
"Mookie and now this? Fucking dogshit. Dogshit ownership. Dogshit GM. Dogshit team. What the fuck happened to my Red Sox."Then-Contract-9520
"I'm also pissed at every fan who wanted him gone. This is a horrible day."--DannyC724
"Is this what rock bottom feels like?"--TheUndertows
My Fragrant Martian: Another blunder dooms the Yankees
A winnable game. A not-so-fearsome opponent. A lackluster effort (See Joggin' Jazz Chisolm.) A key defensive error. A stunning baserunning blunder - the greatest thus far in Jasson Dominguez' somnambulant career.
A grand moment, in case you missed it...
Perched on 2B, amid a Yankee rally, seventh inning, game in the balance, the Martian forgot the 2-2 count on Trent Grisham. He thought Grisham fanned. (A reasonable assumption, considering his recent output.) He slumped. He stepped toward 3B. He scratched himself. He farted. He pondered the war in the Ukraine, the bombings between in Iran and Israel, the nationwide protests, the looming economic slowdown, the assassination in Minnesota, the happy birthday parade, the end of insurance-coverage for medical vaccines, the looming hurricane season, and the final episode of White Lotus, which he felt was too neatly wrapped up, but - hey - that's Hollywood. Again, he looked at the catcher. He sensed something wrong. He glanced at the SS, now standing on second base. He saw the catcher preparing to throw. He said to himself, "Uh oh. I should probably run toward a base." He glanced to heaven. He saw no evidence of God. This disheartened him, and he ever-so slightly crapped his pants. He started running toward third, saying to himself, "Run faster, darn it, faster." He watched the throw beat him by 10 feet. He said to himself, "Dive, and throw your hands toward the base." He dove and threw his hands toward the base. He felt the glove and ball on his forehead.
He didn't bother to seek a video replay review.
Welp...
Fortunately, though, with the Gum-Slinger at the helm, Dominguez will face no consequences for his mistake. Yankees never do.
Yep. It was an artistic, world class, what-me-worry botch job, the kind you don't often see above Little League. It goes down in the box score as a pickoff. But it wasn't really a pickoff. It was a nose pick. It was a failure by a team starting to creak at the edges.
Yankee fans can sense it. In recent years, we've learned the signs of collapse...
It starts with Aaron Judge in a mini-slump, showing he is human. Nobody picks up the slack. They just wait for the batting order to turn, until he comes up again. The bullpen starts to groan. The starters get whacked. The Yankees botch a game. Then another. They somebody notices that they aren't so far ahead anymore.
Welp, on May 28, we were up by 7 games in the AL East. The lead is now 4.5 games. Over the last 10, they are at .500. And they are 1-4 against Boston, whom they have personally escorted back to relevance.
The Martian came up in the ninth and lined a double down the left field line. He died there. I suppose all is forgiven. Welp... Isn't it always?
Saturday, June 14, 2025
The Gum-Slinger gets tossed, and the Yankees run themselves out of a game. Ten Takeaways...
2. Gum-Slinger Aaron Boone got ejected, after protesting two video replays. No typo. He went Chiclets ballistic over two replay reviews. There's somepin you don't see every day, Chauncy: A manager going full Tanya Harding over the decision of faceless lawyers in a faraway studio. Honestly, both calls could have gone either way. But they went against us. How can you blame the umps on the field?
3. A generic rule of baserunning: Never get thrown out at 3B. Apparently, Anthony Volpe missed that memo. His failed attempt to steal third - a questionable decision, at the least - effectively killed us. Does Volpe have free reign to steal any base, at any time? I didn't realize he was Lou Brock.
4. To be honest, I thought Volpe stole third, or the play was too close to be overturned. But it was. Hate to be a hardass, but repeating: You're never supposed to get thrown out at third.
5. The two 10th inning video challenges - Volpe at 3B and LeMahiue's near double down the RF line - added about 10 agonizingly dull minutes to the game. How to kill an audience? Stand around for 10 minutes.
6. I hate to put ridiculous emphasis on a game in mid-June, but tonight, the Yankees really need a win. They should have the advantage: Carlos Rodon - their number two, arguably an all-star - will face the mouthy Yankee-hater, Hunter Biden Dobbins. We gotta win.
7. Over the last two weeks, Trent Grisham and Ben Rice have been plummeting in value. Grisham is hitting .200; Rice is .179. Right now, neither should be near the top of the lineup. If we need lefty bats, go with Jazz or the Martian.
8. I'll deny this in court, but last night - damn - I found myself wishing Giancarlo Stanton could grab a bat. The Yankees have scored 2 runs in 19 innings. We need a spark, maybe a tall one.
9. History is upon us. Boston has entered the Age of Marcelo and Roman. (That's Mayer and Anthony.) We should bow to their magnificence.
At least we no longer have to see their farm system ranked at the top of MLB. Maybe they'll join Tampa, Toronto and Baltimore as teams who enjoyed top ranked farm systems - with nothing to show for it.
10. Talk about bad baserunning: The Martian should have scored from 2B in the fifth inning, on DJ's sharp single to right. I don't understand why they held him back. The Yankees are still losing games due to blown fundamentals and stupidity.
And you're not supposed to lose them like last night.
Friday, June 13, 2025
Yankees sweep KC en route to Boston and the Murdoch world stage
Seriously, did this happen?
1. Will Warren - battered by LA (7 runs in 1.1 inning) and whupped by Boston (4 runs in 5) - suddenly throws six zeros in a cloudburst?
2. The Yankees - sans their hottest bats: Judge, LeMahieu and Wells - steal a game with five hits?
3. Pablo Reyes - in maybe his last-ever Yankee appearance (when Stanton returns; he goes) - is the hero?
4. We sweep our main rival from the 1970s, after losing to our main rival of the 2000s. Which raises this chestnut from the war lords at Fox.
Last Saturday night's game drew more eyeballs than anything MLB has ginned up - I'm talking Ohtani, Yamamoto, the Dodgers, everything - in three years. It was a one-off in June. No September drama. No Pedro v Clemens. Not even a pennant race. The biggest Saturday night audience baseball has summoned since 2023.
Yep, like olden times: Yank v Bosocks, 3 million viewers.
Keep in mind that 3M still falls below NBC's Happy's Place (3.3 million) and a mile behind the Boomer fave, Law and Order: SVU (8.7 million). Thus, it's not as if the American zeitgeist is suddenly focused on the return of Scott Effross. Still, for one night, last Saturday, the eyes of baseball were on the Bronx.
And Saturday night, they will reconverge upon Fenway.
That will feature our second chance at Hunter Biden Crock-o-shit Dobbins, the Redsock hurler powered by hate. Donno about you, but I'm closing my eyes and imagining 2003. Can we coax the ghost of Don Zimmer to make a run at the mound? We just exorcized George Brett. Could we do the same with Big Papi?
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