Horrible deadline. Horrible game. Horrible season? Is anybody else smelling 2013?

Wow. A loss for the ages.

A collapse so intense - so profound, so greasy - that it's now easy to imagine this team falling out of the wild card. 

Ten takeaways from last night. 

1. Somehow, the brain trust dealt four of its best prospects without addressing any of the looming Yankee crises. We brought in a clank-glove OF, Heliot Ramos, and a career-year 1B, Luis Garcia Jr? 

Why do I sense that the rest of MLB waits for Aug. 1, just to drill the Yanks?  

2. As the night unfolded, as it became universally apparent that our rivals - the Dodgers, Redsocks, Rays, et al - had dramatically improved, the 8th inning collapse became epically remindful of last year's debacle. 

3. If you recall, last year, we drunkenly celebrated what later turned out to be a horror show trade deadline with a 13-12 loss to the Marlins, a game that ended with a ball rolling between Jose Caballero's legs in RF, where he was supposed to be proficient. Our newly acquired bullpen lit a gasoline fire that smoldered through October. 

4. So last night, we commemorated another lost deadline with one of the worst losses of 2026 - featuring a meltdown of our razor thin bullpen, after we put three of our best young arms out with the Japanese tide. 

5. No catcher. No RP. No 3B. Unbelievable. Cashman's excuse: "It was a very thin market of opportunity." Nice revelation, eh? We spent the last three years trading away catchers, and now we face the worst offensive outputs in baseball. Yeah, Austin Wells and Ryan McMahon homered last night. Wells is hitting .167. McMahon is at .212. And nothing will change.

6. Apparently, the Yankees have promoted George Lombard Jr. up from Scranton for tonight's game. I cannot help but think they are using him to distract from the universal disappointment with the team, the franchise, and the front office. 

7. Of course, they're finding scapegoats: Jasson Dominguez, who plays RF like your grandma trying to solve a Rubik's Cube, and Anthony Volpe, who almost reached MLB mediocrity in his recent incarnation. They will join a long list of Yankee failures - Greg Bird, George Frazier, Miguel Andujar, et al - who couldn't live up to their hype. 

8. Ah, yes, the hype. Honestly, it's that relentless Yankee hype that pisses me off the most. The YES Network is quite good at pretending to be critical, rather than the propaganda mill that it is. At times, you get comical versions of Michael Kay and Jack Curry, seeming to tell it like it is. But they never challenge the front office. They never challenge the owner. They never challenge the real problems that haunt his franchise.

9. It's going to hurt when Boston passes us, probably in the next two weeks. When the Redsocks visit in late August - a four-game series - they will probably be ahead of us.

10. If there is a coded message from yesterday, it's that Aaron Judge is no certainty to return this year. If he does come back, he might be compromised. A fractured rib is not to be trifled with. He'll be a DH, along with Stanton, Garcia, Rice, Goldschmidt and maybe Bellinger.  

Bonus: Last night in the 8th, didn't Trent Grisham botch that fly to deep center that opened the flood gates? It either hit the base of the wall or Grisham. Tough play, for sure. But it certainly looked catchable. The YES men never mentioned it. Close your eyes, everybody. It's almost time to think about football.