Special Midnight Earthquake Yankees Emergency Post.

 

Ah, for the days when frustrated managers used to overturn the postgame buffet, take a bat to the water cooler, and curse out their wayward players to their faces! 

Instead, we are subjected to this sort of gobbledygook, after yet another brain fart on the field by a Yankee:

"It's a guy tryna make a play. I get it looks bad, and it's a bad play.  But, it's not a case of a guy that's, you know, doggin' it or, like it's...it's...you know.  Uh, just tryna make a play. And, you know, just because it's going bad right now, and the world's on fire, I'm not just gonna take guys out for giving a crap. 

"You're gonna make some mistakes on the bases. I would argue with you that we're not making, in compared to the league, a number of outs advancing or outs on the base. I don't think that's, that's true. I'll, I'll dig into it some more, I looked into it a few weeks ago. But, when you're the New York Yankees and you're losin', and you make a mistake...Look what just happened. I can show you around the league, it happened all the time. Doesn't make it okay. 

"We wanna be as clean and as perfect as we can be. Without question. Don't, don't get it twisted. Don't think, 'Oh, yeah, it's fine.' We have to be better. Don't get it twisted. Okay? We have really good players. We have a really good team. We haven't realized our potential yet. We gotta get there. We gotta couple months to do it yet. We better hurry."

All of that delivered, of course, with the quavering voice of an opera diva, or maybe Gladys Knight singing, "Midnight Train to Georgia."  

It was yet another Yankees press conference dedicated to telling us things nobody asked and nobody wants to know. 

Has Aaron Boone actually spent time digging into statistics on how many mistakes other American League teams make compared to the Yankees? Is he actually promising to do it again, and share the results with us?

It may be that the demise of any great institution is signaled when it starts comparing itself to others. The New York Yankees were always supposed to be themselves alone, a towering, formidable monolith of success that stands above and apart from all other teams. 

Now they're down to wondering whether they make more or fewer boneheaded, base-running mistakes than other American League squads. Really?

What rankles even more is the constant lying and gaslighting, as many here have noted. Boone is really going to try to pretend that Jazz Chisholm was just trying a little too hard to make a play that would turn things around? 

Chisholm is a histrionic but mediocre player who we acquired for a budding young catcher (hey, could we use one of those?), and despite his record of constant injuries and erratic play. Yesterday, he was not trying to, say, score from second on a single that was maybe hit just a little too hard, or to steal third when he didn't really need to.

The truth is that he lost track of how far he was from the bag on a routine pop-up to second, and got thrown out diving back to first. It was a very alert play by Miami's Xavier Edwards, a young slap hitter with all of 192 games in the majors. Edwards was maximizing his chances of staying in the majors despite limited talent. 

Chisholm was doing no such thing. Neither was Austin Wells the other day. Playing on a team where no one is ever held accountable, they simply fell asleep during one more ballgame.

They are joined on this team by the likes of the Yankees' "ace," Max Fried, who is guaranteed to miss several starts every year with blisters that somehow cannot be healed, and their number two starter, such a mountain of maturity that he flipped off a couple of fans who dared to boo the great man after yet another dismal, disinterested start.

Most annoying of all, though, is Boone's flippant remark that "the world's on fire." He means the Yankees, of course, but the greater world, outside of the narrow cocoon of privilege and luxury in which he and all major-league players, managers, and top executives dwell, really is on fire. 

There is a terrible war going on in Ukraine, and a terrible war going on in Gaza, and a runaway president who is systematically taking apart our nation, and a Supreme Court that keeps ruling that laws don't really mean anything, and a warming planet that seems ready to melt us all like so many birthday candles. 

The last thing that those of us who turn to the Yankees for relief and distraction is to hear a manager having a hissy fit because he doesn't dare call out his malingering players. Or an organization that constantly sells itself on its winning legacy telling us, hey, we're not so bad compared to some other guys.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled tremor.