Someday, when you're unfathomably wealthy and playing for a big market team where everyone chases personal stats, you must remember this, a kiss is still a kiss, a smile is still a smile...
Sorry. Got carried away.
In this millennium, no words have more frighteningly indicted the Yankees.
Ten ugly thoughts...
1. Every Yank fan on this planet agrees with Murphy.
2. Though the owner, the management, and the YES propaganda mill would deny it, modern Yankee teams are compilations of individual players chasing stats.
3. What else explains the fixation with home runs at the expense of fundamentals? Regardless of the situation, batters take full, ridiculous swings - because that's where the money is.
4. In recent years, the Yankees have lacked one key component: A catcher. A 3B. A soul.
5. This vacuum begins at the top, where Hal Steinbrenner perpetually settles for a contending team. That lack of urgency percolates throughout the organization.
6. Even though the Yankee s are no longer baseball's biggest money pit, to small market teams and fans, they still epitomize excessive, runaway spending.
7. When players become indescribably rich, they're never the same.
8. In professional sports, you cannot buy hunger.
9. The Yankee culture will not change under this management, and the owner will not make changes, because he is comfortable with second place.
10. Yankee fans, and their opinions, simply do not matter.
That's China Town, Jake.
Posts
22 comments:
I've always loved the Chinatown line. Here are a few others for consideration:
"Forget it, Jake. It's chinaberries."
"Forget it, Jake. It's chinachina."
"Forget it, Jake. It's chinaroot."
"Forget it, Jake. It's chinaware."
I think that last one came from a silent slapstick comedy where they break a lot of dishes.
And remember, "It's Shasta, Mr. Shane." Which would've been a very different ending to the movie.
"Forget it, Jake, it's Sam Chinita." Does anybody else remember the great, glorious, long-gone Cuban/Chinese diner, Sam Chinita, on 8th Avenue, in old Chelsea, when the stores on 8th Avenue were half boarded up and real people - along with actual zombies - live in lower Manhattan? It's all chi chi cupcake places, curated, artisanal dogshit emporiums, and boutique clothing stores now.
As for Los Yanquis, fuck them and the horse they dry hump every last day of the year. Money-grubbing assholes - and I don't begrudge them their money-grubbitude, but what happened to team spirit or the desire to win. This is why I hate the guys who are JUST FUCKING FINE sitting on the bench all fucking season, nursing their bruised testes, collecting an unholy amount of money per game, and not giving a flying fuck whether we win or lose, live or die. Jorge was right.
Instead of the Chinatown quote, the better quote is “A dead fish rots from the head on down”…be cause that’s what we have now. It doesn’t have to be this way, as the Milwaukee Brewers just demonstrated. Yet, here we are. And many fans just take it. That’s the worst part.
Baseball aside you would think that such an "astute' businessman like Hal would understand that he's destroying the brand.
Oh, right. He has big time daddy issues. Destroying the brand was probably his goal all along. He's been cashing in. Selling parts of the team. Moving to DAZN. Etc. Trying to remove the one advantage the Yankees have with a salary cap.
I feel sorry for him. It is a Pyrrhic victory. I feel more sorry for us.
wise words!
Baseball aside, my spy at MSNOW reports that next Tuesday night's theme song will be:
https://youtu.be/m4IfxAQ4TqQ?si=qYTueCfw2306gNS4
I thank DOG that I do not suffer from any DADDY issues.
I do however suffer from pronounced and fairly acute YANKEES issues.
I wish to DOG that THEY made a PILL for THAT !
"HORSESHIT YANKEE TEAM!!!" Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Very apt description!
There was another thing Pat Murphy said that was mentioned in the last game. They reported that Murphy said that his job was to motivate his players, not just coach them. That's a real manager. He's obviously figured out how to push the right buttons with each player. That's a very difficult thing to do. Gotta be half a psychologist. But it wins.
3. The last tv broadcast talked about this. John Smoltz (I think) said that today's coaches make their players take their "A" swing on every pitch, every situation. They actually teach players never to deviate from their home run swing. And Smoltz said he thinks that might maximize run production or winning during the regular season, but it doesn't win a playoff game or come through in any one big situation. (I paraphrase.)
So it's not the players are selfish and swing for the fences to make more money. It's that the coaches (and Yankee coaches in particular) tell their players to swing for the fences. That's the analytics today.
Of course, it's bullshit. Horseshit, as Pat Murphy put it. And the Brewers just proved it this year and this World Series.
Re-inventing the wheel. And our dumbass manager, Boone, goes along with it all. Jorge Posada would never tolerate this level of bullshit. That's why Posada will never manage the Yankees. Posada, Jeter, A-Rod, these guys will never be Yankee manager, bench coach, or GM.
I forgot to post this about HAL's statement that it's all the players' fault:
Straight from the movie "Apocalypse Now": the bullshit piled up so fast in [Yankee Land] that you needed wings to stay above it.
I miss Chinese-Cuban restaurants. Cheap, good, gone. Of course.
When your coaches are dictating how to do everything, it takes a special level of player to do what YOU want to do. And you better be good at it, too. And get results pronto. Because if you don't do what the coaches want, you'll get canned or sent down to the minors.
As long as the bullshit estimates for the franchise valuation keep going up, HAL don't give a damn whether or not he's destroying the brand. I guess our only hope is that the financial gurus cut down the Yankee franchise value to "worthless". That's the only way HAL might get off his ass and get a new GM.
Yeah, I gotta side with Hammer on this. I don't think that it's the players who are particularly selfish on the Yanks; it's the philosophy imposed by management.
There have been plenty of awful, "selfish" Yankees in the past. Roger Clemens springs to mind. Reggie Jackson was, oh, shall we say, a tad self-centered...but also a lot of those 1970s Yanks, who couldn't seem to get along with anybody.
They still won.
If you're always being told, "You must do things in a certain way," you do them. That's on Hal & Pal...
Motivation is something else, and I think it must be really difficult for any manager or coach to instill these days. Torre seemed able to do it; so did Phil Jackson. I guess Pat Murphy does, and good on him.
One key to doing it on the Yankees, I think, might be letting players know that they will play and keep playing if they do well—not just if they happen to have the highest salary at their position.
But again, this goes back to H & P.
As for brand, I fear it is a word understood only in today's (rapidly vanishing) business schools. I also fear that Hal has already demonstrated to himself that he can let the Yankees' brand rot slowly away and nobody cares. There are still enough corporate clients, still enough families and campers up for that one-time trip to the Stadium, still enough of us addicted altercackers who will at least tune in.
He may get to the point where he can't maintain the team as a steady contender that never wins, or but until that time he won't even see a drop off in revenue. (And I've been waiting for him to reach that point for a looong time!)
And yeah, Bitty, I miss a lot of stuff from that 1970s NYC that I thought would never go away. Such as independent bookstores, revival house movie theatres, affordable Broadway plays (that weren't 30 years old), etc. Like so much else in America, the city changes slowly for the worse.
Oh, and as far as Chinatown goes, someone wrote somewhere after bin Laden was killed: "Forget it, Jake. It's Islamabad." Not bad.
And from your lips to God's ears, Carl!
Yeah, enshittefication. All encompassing.
Who knew that Marlon Brando was a great prophet of the Lord when he uttered those infamous words in response to the question posed:
Q: What are ya rebelling against, Johnny?
Brando: What do ya got?
What we really need now is some of that righteous fury from the late '60s and '70s, as only The Sex Pistols could deliver:
I am an Antichrist
I am an anarchist
Don't know what I want
But I know how to get it
I wanna destroy ... passerby
Cuz I...
Wanna be ... anarchy!
Went there a couple of times when I lived there...
I miss the character of the city even back in the 80s before gentrification...
Post a Comment