Earlier this week The Athletic published its survey of baseball fans' optimism, ranked by team. We Yankee fans came in at 22nd (!) out of 30, between the Marlins and the White Sox. Yes: We have slightly less optimism than the Miamiphiles, and a hair more faith than the Pope.
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| The green bar represents the percentage of optimistic fans; the orange bar represents IT IS HIGH. |
Thus far in '26, every time he steps to the plate, something is cooking - and it's not necessarily rice. Often, the pitcher is peeing himself from having survived the game's greatest hitter and one of its cagiest. (Imagine, a batter who chokes up with two strikes.) Or it's not urine at all. He's halfway through the carwash, scrambling to plug the spray.
Rice may be the first Yankee-grown star whose entrance to the NYC pressure cookier was rescued by the newfangled stat of exit velo - that is, by miles per hour, rather than outcome per at-bat. He hasn't as Wee Williie once said, "hit 'em where dey aint." Nope. He hit 'em where dey is - often at a well-placed 2B or RF, that is, unless the ball leaves the park. Cuz dey aint in the bleachers.
Yesterday, in the win over Seattle, Rice went 2-3 with HR and a walk. Thus far, he's hit in every game. Woopie-doo. It's fucking April 2, fer kricesake. The YES team, famously known to gaslight young stars, has gushed over Rice's improved defense at 1B. But, honestly, it's not Micheal Kay blather. The guy has put in the work. He's made himself a legit 1B.
Max Fried Chicken.
Ryan AccuWeathers
Jake Angry Bird
Paul Gold Bon Skin Lotion Goldschmidt
Elmer's Glue Rodriguez
(Yikes. That bit sure ran too long. Should've quit after Fried.) But - wait, back to the Yankees - down in Scranton, The Martian homered yesterday! His first of the season. (He's 5-for-17, hitting .294.) He's no Paul Blair, in fact, he spectacularly blew a fly ball in game one, a video that went viral. But we cannot give up. In spring training, the guy hit .347 with 4 HRs. He was right up there with Spencer Gifts Jones (Wait... is Spencer Gifts still a thing?) who - sadly - struck out four times yesterday for Scranton. (Ugh. So much for that fantasy.)
Last week, we put Ben Rice's HR total as a tie-breaker for the 2026 IT IS HIGH predictions contest. That's because, until further notice, he sits in the center of the Yaniverse. So, have a dish of Long Grain! O, to be Ben Rice.
How crazy is this?
1. We're winning without production from Aaron Judge. Last night, he blinged an 0-4 - which normally means the team falls apart. Instead, the heart of the order came through.
2. Max Fried looks unbeatable. Last night, he skated. He's 32. Last season, his 2.86 ERA and 19 wins - most in AL - amounted to a career year. Could he beat it?
3. Even the comedy team of Headrick & Hill finished with a poetic flourish.
Headrick & Hill
To Victoryville!
4. Who needs a bottom third of the lineup? Last night: a healthy 0-12.
5. Giancarlo seems to be running wild. Last night, he took second on a wild pitch that barely skipped away, then head-butted the ball from the SS's mitt. It was the kind of play that usually costs him a month on the IL. Listen: He'll soon get hurt. We all know this. But it's nice to see him go for broke.
6. I keep saying this, but the April schedule offers a string of tomato cans. There is no reason why the Yankees should not be in 1st around May 15, when Carlos Rodon could return. (With Gerrit Cole on the brink.)
7. It's almost - well - I don't wanna jinx this, but - criminey! - it's almost going too good. There. I said it. Should we be worried? Jeepers, yeah. I mean, there's gotta be a correction looming. For the rest of this season, the Yankee staff will not throw 3 out of 4 shutouts. This is not the 1964 Dodgers. But we have one option: Enjoy it, while it lasts.
8. Over the years, West Coast trips have haunted us. Maybe the way to exorcize those demons is to start the year there, get it out of our system?
9. I sorta feel sorry for MLB umpires, who are watching their reputations get shredded by the new ABS system. They are also losing control. (Everyone thought the robot umps would end rhubarbs and ejections; if anything, they seem to be contributing to them.) I wonder if there won't be a backlash against the murderous, flesh-chopping machines. Nobody is challenging their scoreboard displays, which do NOT show the travel of a ball across the three-dimensional plane. Are we seeing true balls and strikes, or are we seeing simple mechanized versions of the strike zone, which do not make them necessarily better than the human component. Thank you for your attention to this matter. ED
PS: According to late report, Carlos Rodon tweaked a hammy during his rehab, and it will probably mean missed time. Seriously, and this isn't a knock on Rodon, but is anybody surprised? Of course it was gonna happen. The Yankees simply do not go through an entire spring training without injuries.
Fried Funk or did Boone Fart again ?
They overturned five close calls on pitches, to be christened by The Athletic as the MLB team most likely to benefit from ABS.
And it led to... drum roll, please... a run.
Yep. One run. All night. Five overturned calls. Five second chances.
One stinking run.
Listen: Every season is full of games like last night, dive-bar cocktails of well shaken hope, mixed with bitters of dread. You coax a dutiful start from your fourth starter, a guy with microscopic expectations, and then, as the innings burn off, you forget your pregame vow of apathy, and you start to believe the Yankees might steal a game... which then slithers between your fingers, withAs always, it's the little things. Jose Caballero getting picked off first. The bottom of the lineup going 1-12. The bullpen, creaky from overuse in San Francisco.
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| Irritabelle, from another era |
Listen: There will always be games like last night. They're actually quite common, maybe 15 per season. As soon as you get hopeful - and they reel you in so delicately that you don't even know they're doing it - they slap a walk-off single and slam the door.
Five overturned calls. One run.
I wonder how long the Yankees will maintain an advantage with the ABS system? (If, in fact, they truly have one at all.) Yes, they have veteran hitters and, yes, they have two catchers skilled in the art of framing pitches. But they just pissed away a decent start from Ryan Weathers and five overturned calls. So much for that great, season-opening, self-congratulating win streak.
Two more games in Seattle, then a relatively easy schedule through April. Cupcakes and tomato cans. And perhaps an advantage to exploit. But they better not have more games like last night. And they better watch those hammies.
Yesterday, while the Yankees cruised the coast, up to Seattle - the city of Windows '95 - the Railriders of Scranton were shivering in Buffalo, Bronze winner in the 2026 Golden Snowball contest for upstate NY cities. (Note: It was won by Syracuse, the UCONN women's basketball program of snowfall, with 141 inches - or 11.5 feet.)
After being frozen-out on Saturday, Scranton played two against the Buffalo Bisons, a farm of hateful Toronto, the Gainesville of Canada.
Fortunately, our two most promising hitters, Jasson Dominguez and Spencer Jones, seem to have avoided an early Cashman Derangement Syndrome slump. At least, not yesterday. Here's what the kids did:
Jasson Dominguez: 3-for-8, three singles, an RBI, one K.
Spencer Jones: 3-for-8, a HR, 2 RBIs, 3 Ks.
Oswaldo Cabrera: 0-for-7, 3 Ks.
Yanquiel Fernandez (an interesting 23-year-old Cuban OF castoff, via the Rockies): 1-for-8, a HR (his 2nd on the season), 3 Ks.
On the mound, Carlos "Radar Love" Lagrange pitched 4, fanned 3, gave up a run.
It's too soon to say nuthin. (Not that that ever stops us.) At least Dominguez and Jones are not mired in a hitless funk, depressed from being in Buffalo rather than the Pacific Northwest.
Tonight, Ryan Weathers pitches. God knows how he'll do. If spring training showed anything, we're in trouble. To get Weathers, the Yankees went Flo - they bundled their home, life and car insurance - a full package of prospects. In Tampa, he pitched 17.1 innings and gave up 17 earned runs. If you're doing the math at home, for your own sake, stop.
For Weathers, the Yankees paid heavily, then pretended they didn't, doubling down with Cat-4 hype. Ever since, he's been The Babadook. Thus far, our starting rotation has been otherworldly. We know this cannot last. And if Weathers doesn't start showing something, calls for Lagrange are going to increase.
Technically, these April games matter. Spiritually, I'm not so sure. But tonight could be telling...
And the game of baseball changed, forever.
In last night's 3-1 Yankee win over San Francisco, seven Automatic Ball and Strike challenges reversed calls by umpire Whitson. One, in the 3rd, turned a called-third strike on Trent Grisham into ball three, leading to a walk and a run. Another, in the 9th, nearly led to a Giants rally. Whitson started the game as its Supreme and Undisputed Boss. He finished looking like a castrated flyspeck, a vestigial organ perched ornamentally behind the catcher.
Never again will home plate bullies - the mistake-prone Richie Garcia or the arrogant "Cowboy" Joe West - decide the outcome of ball games.
From now on, the faceless, lifeless eyeball of A.I. - the HAL 9000 of sports: ("I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that") - will overturn calls that were accepted for more than a century.
From now on, a K is not a K, until the ABS challenge is complete.
And damn... here's the rub:
I dunno if we should celebrate this... or fight it with all we got.
Soon, every stat, every outcome, every disputed play that was to eventually become a vagary of the game... they'll be gone. Someone will hit .400. Or a pitcher will throw back-to-back perfect games. Everything we once took for granted will be subject to review. Baseball history is no more.
This week, the Yankees swept SF. But the real winner was The Machine. For now, teams are allowed only two wrongful challenges per game. That rule will not hold. After all, why should a bad call in the ninth - or any time - be allowed?
Every fan remembers at least one at-bat - a called third strike in the dirt, or a bases loaded walk, right down the middle - so botched by the home ump that we screamed at the TV and kicked the puppy, and - frankly, we will take the outrage to our graves. Never again, right? Well, we'll soon get our wish.
But I wonder: Did baseball just kick humanity in the balls?
Smith's random jeer at Aaron Judge the other day—after the Yankees won their opener, 7-0—referred to Judge as a "Goliath of a man," as if Judge's physical size should give him some invincible advantage in the game.
Yet there's a good reason why nobody remotely Judge's size has ever played major-league baseball at this level before, and it is that being very tall and very large confuses home-plate umpires and affords crafty pitchers all sorts of weak spots to hit if they can.
Someone who actually knows something about the game would understand this. But of course, Stephen A. Smith knows nothing about baseball.
Smith also tells us that in, "Too many moments," Judge "comes up considerably and conspicuously small"—clearly implying that the Yankees' Opening Day contest against a mediocre team not in their division or their league is a big moment.
Anybody who really knows anything about the game of baseball knows that this "moment" was only considerable or conspicuous because a big corporate media sponsor decided to "buy" Opening Day and festoon it with all sorts of ads for its other, decidedly mediocre products.
But then, Stephen A. Smith knows nothing about baseball.
"Everybody around him came up big but him," Smith told us—as if we really needed Judge to, say, whack a finishing, three-run homer that would have turned a 7-0 game into a 10-0 game.
Anybody who really knows anything about baseball knows that it's great if the whole team is hitting, and that if the big kahuna doesn't get a poke that day, probably all the better, because it's all the more likely to come in a game where you really need it.
As it did for Aaron Judge, in the very next game of the season.
But then, how was Stephen A. Smith supposed to know that? Stephen A. Smith, after all, knows nothing about baseball.
The Contrarian feels that we really shouldn't hold this against Stephen A. Smith because Stephen A. Smith is not really supposed to know anything about sports. Because even though Stephen A. Smith appears constantly on channels and in shows, and on all sorts of other forums that claim to give us first-rate sports analysis, he is really just an "entertainer"—much like a rodeo clown, or a burlesque house tumler, or maybe the current president of the United States of America, which is a position that Stephen A. Smith apparently now aspires to.
Okay. But true wit proceeds from knowledge.
Last week, on Stephen Colbert's show—canceled, in an unprecedented move, by the proto-Stephen A. Smith who currently resides in the White House he has so foully vandalized—Triumph went through his usual, filthy tirade...and ended by saying how Colbert was being canceled "for financial reasons only."
Smigel was willing and able to mock the powers that be throttling what used be the "Tiffany Network" of television, by dismissing their excuse for blatant, craven censorship.
It was speaking truth to power—as opposed to what Stephen A. Smith prefers to do, which is to spew insults from a place of ignorance.
Judging by what the American people now seem to prefer in a leader, Mr. Smith should be a lock in 2028.
Next up - after SF tonight - three in Seattle. Do they still have Jay Buhner?
Then three at home against lowly Miami.
Then three at home against the homeless A's.
Three against Tampa at George M Field.
Four against the Angels, LA's ugly sister.
Three against KC.
The first four weeks resemble a march of animated tomato cans. It will be April 21 before the Death Barge faces a truly hateful foe - Boston, Houston and Texas will be lined up - and there is no reason why the Yankees should not be leading the AL East.
You almost don't want to say anything, or write anything, for fear of upsetting the bingo board. The Yankees can be their own cupcakes. But but BUT...
1. If Max Fried and Cam Schlittler are for real, the chances of holding the pitching staff together until Rodon/Cole return suddenly look much better.
2. Hot or cold, Judge and Giancarlo still scare the hell out of opposing pitchers.
3. In Scranton, the Martian went 1-5 (one K), and Spencer Jones 1-4 (Two K's.) Oswaldo played SS and went 1-5 (two K's.) And the pitching staff threw yet another shutout.
Monday, Will Warren starts game three. It's one of those horrible West Coast starts, at 9:05 p.m., where everything seems out of kilter. Warren had a great spring, was the Yankees best starter. No jinxing here. Let's see what happens.
The Yankees are undefeated - just like Boston, Baltimore and Toronto. No tomatoes to be had.
On that note, I apologize.
The Yankees just enjoyed the most pleasurable 24-hour stretch in memory, beating up on the hapless, itinerant San Francisco Giants in a laugher victory that started Wednesday night in the second inning. Thanks to opening day schedules, we've had a full day to gloat, to imagine Cy Young awards and breakout seasons, and to bestride the planet like the colossi of truth and wisdom that Yank fans are known to be.
It's all downhill from here.
That said, let's enjoy this. The Yankees clobbered SF, even if Netflix was more self-absorbed with celebrities eating hotdogs than with the actual game. (I'm still wondering: No Sydney Sweeney?) And yesterday, that one game was being used to validate an entire winter of standing still, a front office strategy that remains only partially cooked.
But, of course, that's only a fragment of the Yankee narrative. The larger, easier and more slow-moving plot line involves Aaron Judge. By now, even those self-isolating natives on that North Sentinel Island, off in the Pacific, the ones who kill Christian missionaries on contact - even they know that Judge, in the opener, went 0-5 with four strikeouts.
It's a development that had to be reheated on every cultural burner because, well, Judge is Judge and the Yankees used to be the Yankees.
So, Stephen A. Smith - who is running for president, they say - went on a 90-second bender about Judge failing in big moments. This is the world according to anecdote - to the reality of podcasts. We all remember when Judge swings and misses. When he uncorks that massive lunge, when he swings through fastball, he is the Babe, he is Mickey, he is Roger, he is Reggie and he is A-Rod, because you don't get to fully appreciate the greatness of a player unless you also tag along when he fails.
Two weeks from now, when Judge leads the league in every slugging category known to mathematics, Stephen A. Smith - who is running for president, they say - won't issue a retraction. And nobody will care. He'll be onto something else, creating flames from broken wind.
Here they are, everybody: Your predictions for 2026. Clip and save.
Reg Season Wins Ben Rice HRs Gerrit Cole W’s
Stang 104 49 19
Captain? Here, you had a veteran lineup, full of stars, and the last thing it needed was somebody acting like King Tut. He didn't ask for it. They just anointed him.
(Maybe they should have named Tarik Skubal "Admiral." Maybe he would have pitched one more game?)
Early on, they asked for a speech. He hemmed and hawed. They were like wedding ushers, banging spoons against the snifters. They demanded a speech, which he botched.
Their reaction: More hype. Heavier praise, grander accolades, more crapola. Now, he wasn't just the best player on the Yankees, or the best hitter on Team America, or the best slugger slugger in baseball. He was the best ever, the greatest of all time, and we should open the Hall now, rather than wait.
Then came his final game in the WBC: 0 for 4 with three Ks and enough stranded runners to win the tournament.
And then came last night's new incarnation: A return to California as the prodigal son, and poster boy for a Netflix cultural power grab.
And here's what America saw:
Bad Aaron.
Yep. We saw Judge, lunging at balls in the dirt, watching strikes right down the middle, unable to check faulty swings, then trudging back to the dugout, bat in hand, turning once to acknowledge his hopelessness.
The Judge we've seen, off and on, throughout his career.
The dirty little secret about baseball's greatest player: He goes through stretches where he couldn't hit your Aunt Gladys's fastball with a tennis racket. It's a lucky game when the Yankees can absorb a Judgean 0-for-5, and still win. And really, let's be thankful that, last night, he didn't waste a 9th inning HR to make the score 8-0. Those are the events that drive Yank fans crazy.
Judge will come around. But clearly, the World Baseball Classic - and the overbearing hype of playing opening day in his geographical back yard - has messed him up.
As for Netflix, what did you expect? Everything was hype. Everything.
At one point, around the 5th, they wheeled in Rob Manfred, the Commissioner of Hell, to be interviewed by CC Sabathia and Hunter Pence, swooning like OAN interns at a Melania photo-op. They were literally giggling with anticipation, claiming to have stayed up the previous night - I'm not making this up, they had been like first-night college freshmen, going over the pig book - thinking of great questions to ask. Then Manfred sat down, and the interrogation began:
Do you remember your first Opening Day?
My God. They didn't ask about rule changes, which now happen every season. They didn't ask about the impending lockout next winter, which threatens the future of baseball. They didn't ask about expansion, or salary caps, or A.I. umpires, or elbow surgeries, doctored bats, lost statistical frameworks - whatever you wanted to hear about - they didn't ask it, and their reaction to whatever Manfred blathered was to act the San Diego Chicken oogling a cheerleader.
Insert sigh here.
Well, here's what we can say about last night.
1. We won.
2. Judge got it out of his system.
3. It's over.
First place in the AL East, baby. Check it out!
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