A good faith effort.

 

That's about all you can reasonably expect from a sports team, and that's not what we are getting from our New York Yankees these days.

It's not what we're getting from the team the Yankees put on the field. It's not what we're getting from their befuddled manager, or their general manager. It's not what we're getting from their absentee owner. 

But it's also not what we're getting from the people who run the sport—and by that I include not only the awful, nepo owners and their odious commissioner, but also the militantly unionized, militantly right-wing, increasingly unaccountable ballplayers.

So here are 19 or 20 observations on all that:

—Dropped pop-ups, egregious baserunning mistakes, and gobsmackingly terrible decision-making: we have seen all of these help the Yankees fritter away game after game once again this past week, and really all season long.

You've seen them all; no need to nauseate ourselves further. But more than anything, I think, they display an overwhelming inattention.

—I understand that teams slump. I understand that the season gets very long, particularly out in Chicago on a hot summer's day. 

"You have no idea what a grind it becomes," I remember Reggie Jackson saying to me—or words to that effect—in explaining how wearying the long season really is. 

And I remember thinking (though not saying!), 'There are people in this country who work 12 hour days, six days a week, all year round, in meatpacking plants and sweatshops.'

—I'm not somebody who likes to accuse ballplayers of not playing hard. 

For the most part, in sports such as football and basketball, which are now played by giants at a terrifying pace, I think it's impossible not to play hard without getting torn apart.  

In hockey, maybe the players aren't so big. But it's still fast, and they give them sharp sticks they can whack each other with.

In baseball...the game depends much more upon being alert, all the time. Anticipating. Making instant, on-field decisions. That's not what we're seeing.

—Traditionally, this was something a manager might take care of. Chewing out players, benching them. Fining them. Shipping them down to the minors.

I realize that all of those methods are gone now. Guys have no fear that they are going to end up in those self-same meatpacking plants or sweatshops, and that's a good thing.

—Still, what methods there are—looking at you, Phil Jackson—seem beyond the capability of Aaron Boone. His lack of basic baseball instincts as a field manager is depressing—though of course it is hard to know exactly what orders he is getting from The Man In the High Castle.

—But his field smarts—or lack there of—aside, Boone seems to be operating from an archaic idea of what it is to be a Yankees manager. 

He seems to think that he is the new Joe Torre, here to protect his players from both their insane owner and a rabid sporting press, and keep them focused on the game.

Well, Hal is no George, and the sporting press barely exists anymore, sad to say. And Boone's players sure as hell aren't focused on the game.

—Of course, Boone is not responsible for the roster he has been given, or the prevailing culture of the team. That's on our general-manager-for-life, Brian Cashman. 

—We are about to be hit with yet another influx of trade deadline, pennant-drive acquisitions, as if Cashman were a modern-day George Weiss. He's not—and what we will get is the usual slop of burned out relief pitchers, back-up outfielders, and infielders who either can't hit or can't move. 

Mark my words: the suppurating wound that is the catching position on this team will not even be addressed.

—Yes, the 2026 Yankees are beset by injuries. As they are every year now, and as many teams are. Cashman promised to thoroughly investigate this...after, I think, the 2018 season. 

Nothing was done, and why would it be? Why should Cashie deprive himself of his usual excuse for the team underperforming?

—It doesn't help that the ballplayers themselves do nothing to ensure that they can stay on the field. 

The other day, Cody Bellinger topped a season of awful hitting and inexplicably bad positioning in the field by pulling a hamstring just by sprinting out of the box. He is laid up for 4-6 weeks, at a time when his team needs him the most.

—Injuries of this severity, in this circumstance, never used to happen. Four-to-six weeks, from taking two steps from home?  

They occur all the time now, and the reason they do is that, quite obviously, the players have bought into the algorithms and analytics, as instructed, and decided to routinely overwork their bodies in the weight room. 

But hard as they might work on the weight, this too is not a good faith, baseball effort.

—Bellinger, you'll recall, took part in an extended holdout this year before he realized that the Yankees were only bidding against themselves, and grudgingly signed a contract that pays him $42.5 million a year.

Look, I don't like to make everything about money, either. And I admit that, were I to get $42.5 million a book, I might lose a bit of motivation, too. 

—But at a certain point, as Casey Stengel used to say, the attendance is robbed. You get that sort of money, for any performance, you need to take a certain amount of responsibility upon yourself to...well, show up and perform.

—It's true that fish rot from the head down, and in Hal Steinbrenner, you have one rotten fish. 

What makes watching this team so unbearable is how bad the game is in general. This is something that has been imposed upon it by the owners, in the name of efficiency, and accepted by the players, both without a thought as to what the viewing millions might think about it.

—Boring, insipid play at mind-boggling prices for tickets and TV? These problems with baseball today don't seem to occur to Hal and his fellow owners.  

—They are too busy shoving their players into clown suits, mostly to milk still more money from the gearheads. Even great, traditional uniforms such as the Yankees' are now besmirched with advertisements, and it won't be long before they resemble the regular unis of racing car drivers and soccer players.

And the players go along with all this, without a murmur. 

—Incessant, blaring advertisements—and permanent, player-maiming ads on the outfield walls—obscene prices for all concessions, countless thousands of seats lopped off stadiums for the space required to build luxury boxes and bars, game-time lotteries in the ballpark, monopolistic TV channels that nonetheless peddle games off to other streaming services for still more money...

But you've heard me say this before.

None of this is a good-faith effort in regard to the entertainment they are providing. 

And neither the suits nor the players seem to actually know or care what the average fan experience is, or what we might think of the game they are steadily diminishing.

—Players and owners alike have decided to play the game they want, with as much effort and attention as they deign to expend, and geared solely to the elite customers they most value.

And now, on top of this, Hal is about to throw in with his fellow owners in yet another labor battle, and thereby make it all the more impossible to actually use his huge money advantage to compete.

—The ugliness of the game on the field, where today no one can hit .300, or pitch a complete game, or hit to the opposite field, or think for a moment, reflects the ugliness of its soul—and the shame of so many of us who let them get away with it.