I, el Duque - of questionable plumbing and one working ear - hereby predict:
1. The 2017 Yankees will finish third in the AL East and miss the Wild Card by three smidgens.
2. They will win 83 games - two above the vaunted .500 of eternal doom.
3. October will end with Brian Cashman booted upstairs to become a full-time Steinbrenner family cabana boy, and his hand-picked successor - I'm thinking Gary Denbo - will take the reigns of Official IT IS HIGH Whipping Mule.
4. Gary Sanchez will hit 29 home runs and bat .250. He will be hailed as one of the elite catchers in baseball, but his currently planned John Sterling homer holler - "The San-bino" - will not stick.
5. Masahiro Tanaka will win 18 games and finish third in the Cy Young balloting. He will opt-out of his contract and sign a ten-year, gazillion dollar deal with the Yankees, which guarantees that, no matter how great he'll be this year, we will eventually cringe at hearing his name.
6. Jacoby Ellsbury will have a great season, winning Comeback Player of the Year, Yankee team MVP and a Grammy for Best Spoken Word Autobiography. Then, on October 6, he will be traded for a ham hock.
7. In mid-August, the inexorable twilight of the gods will continue, as the Yankiverse mourns the untimely death of Greg Bird's hairless cat.
8. To honor their announcers' final season, the Yankees will hold "John and Suzyn Day" at Yankee Stadium. In front of a sell-out crowd, Hal Steinbrenner will unveil a bronze plaque of the pair. Suzyn will look suspiciously like the IBS lady.
ALL RIGHT, WHO'S GOT PREDICTIONS? Remember: Number of Yankee vics in 2017!
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15 comments:
87 wins, second in division, wild card!
Recordings of The Master's win warbles will be played right after the last out of home victories for eternity (or for however long the Empire endures). OK, maybe this is a 2018 prediction but You Heard It Here First!
SUCH A TOUGH CALL THIS YEAR.
WISH WE HAD JUST ONE MORE GOOD ESTABLISHED STARTER.
IT COULD MEAN PLAYOFFS OR NOT.
NICE WORK CASH.
84 WINS
Hope, however naive, springs eternal before the season. I have to honor my father’s lifetime Yankee-fandom and be a bit more optimistic. I predict the Yanks will enjoy some unlikely success from a few kids and cast-offs and finish with 89 wins. We will back into the Wild Card when the Blue Jays get vetted extremely at the boarder and not be allowed into the country for their season finale in the Bronx. We win the one-game Selig derby but make a first-round exit in a distasteful loss to the Blow Socks.
The blessing and mostly curse of Yankees’ mystique and aura is we seem to avoid the soul-crushing season disaster that would sober-up everyone to the absolute need to rebuild. We will never accept and agree to pay the price to rebuilding over several seasons. I mean what is this, Chicago?
My hope is that we get 89 wins but the reality of our rotation points to something lower in the 80s.
Here's what I think is going to happen:
1) There will be an injury to one of the older guys currently functioning as boat
anchors.
2) One of the promising youngsters we saw this spring will be brought up and will catch fire, a la Sanchez of last year. This will help.
3) Pineda will NOT be consistent, even though it's his walk year. Larry "Rising
ERA" Rothchild will not know the exact thing to whisper in
his ear, but Pineda's next team's coach will.
4) Severino will not make it as a starter, but will be effective as a reliever.
5) Jordan Montgomery will be in the rotation and will do well.
6) Cashman WILL, after all, trade for another starter, someone capable of giving us
15 good wins (Think: Quintana) and this will help scooch us up from a low 80s
win-count.
Bottom Line: Like KD, my number is 87
Also: We miss the one-game playoff because there are simply other, better teams.
P.S. I forgot to add that the picture of Trump in his Yankees pajamas weirds me out.
I'm sorry to ask, but could you provide more details on the Ham Hock we'll get in exchange for Ellsbury. It might be a heck of a deal!
Ham hocks....mmmmmm....
92 wins, surprise of MLB. Pineda will falter, Severino will progress but falter, CC will be CC, Montgomery will be pretty good, Adam Warren will return to the starting rotation, if temporarily.
Sanchez hit's .280 and the 29 HRs sounds good to me. Bird will be in the same ballpark (nyuk nyuk). But Judge...Judge will go over .300, confound everyone by striking out half as much or less as a percentage of ABs, and has a good shot at over 30.
We'll get stuffed in the playoffs due to lack of pitching. So it goes.
But we'll score more runs than last year. Last year was 680. This year, closer to 800, maybe more.
Ellsbury will start great, and then go down to injury. Gardner moves to center. Hicks might get his best shot for playing time in left, if he can handle it defensively.
Hal Steinbrenner is arrested for wearing nothing but kinky boots in a public park in Florida.
I AGREE WITH LBJ's CRYSTAL BALL, NUMBERS 1 THROUGH 5 ON THE BUTTON....NUMBER 6 IS SCARY...GETTING A STARTER [QUINTANA] COULD BE HUGE, BUT AT A "CASHMAN COST" COULD BE HORRIFYING......HOPING YOU AND KD ARE RIGHT AT 87.
Since you can't predict baseball, I'm going to move away from the safe zone of another mediocre mid-80-win season. Put me down for 93 wins and a wild card behind the undefeated Red Sox. Here's what's going to happen:
Greg Bird is awesome
Gary Sanchez is very good
Aaron Judge alternates between extremes
Tanaka is tough as nails until his elbow ligament finally gives up the ghost in early September
CC settles in and starts winning his starts averaging 5 2/3 innnings, and Adam Warren turns a corner for the good.
Pineda gets hot for eight starts and is consistently inconsistent after that
The bullpen is very good but never as perfect as we'd like, and at least twice, Girardi rides his big horse too hard to the point where we have to put the poor creature out of its misery with a bullet to the head right there on the pitcher's mound.
One of these three will have a good perhaps even strong year: Gardner, Headley and Ellsbury. (My money is not on Headley)
Gradually, it becomes apparent that Castro is not as good as one of the young guys, but Girardi never moves to replace him.
Didi will be out most of the year. Pete Kozma proves to be the Brian Doyle of the year, that is unless Ronald Torreyes equates to Luis Sojo, which would be better.
Anything is possible.
Tip of the cap to LBJ's friend for the "extreme vetting" scenario. That would be awesome.
79 wins.
Tanaka will be the only starter with a winning record.
Gregorious and Castro will not be as good as last year.
Betances gets overworked and is ineffective in August and September.
Girardi gets replaced, probably not until the day after the season ends.
I continue to suffer from IBS, but the IBS Lady never shows up to ease my pain.
I hope I'm wrong.
88 Wins
Betances falls apart in September gives up another Demoralizing homer to Hanley..because of reoccurring Randy Levine Nightmares Heller will be there to save the day or spare a Shreve.
Montgomery as 5th starter wins 11 ALA Aaron Smalls
Castro delivers 88 RBIS
Carter gets CANNED, PRONK STYLE (wishful thinking) Austin comes back to hit 20 homers
Didi joins Bird, Sanchez, Tanaka
Cy Tanaka
BYE Pineda (after the season of course)
Ellsburys greatest moment is getting hurt and paving the way for FOWLER TIME!
Win the wild card and implode because everyone goes on one of those mysterious all team slumps and lack of Starting Pitching Depth
ADDS
*Didi joins Bird, Sanchez and Tanaka in the ALL-STAR Game
97 wins and a world championship. Greg Bird shall lead the way. (The man has the crazy baseball eyes of a champion.)
82-83 wins.
Foolish to try and say a lineup that starts the season will be the same one that ends it, but right now the Yankees are a tale of three teams:
1. Ellsbury, Gardner, Headley, Carter and Holiday are toxic to a batting order. Add "Hicksy" to that list on the days he plays, likewise Refsnyder whose psyche has so clearly been broken by being sent back and forth to Scranton that leaving him in Tampa this weekend for cash/player to be named later would be a mercy at this point, and free-swinging Starlin Castro isn't much better. He might get you 20 HRs, but at the cost of leaving how many men on base the rest of the time?
2. You can have a great back end of the bullpen, but sorry folks, you still need starters. Yankees have about 1.5 in the Tanaka (an ace) and the remnants of Sabathia's knee. Pineda will falter, and if the kids from Scranton were going to be aces, we wouldn't still be wondering who the fifth spot is going to be. Put Severino in the bullpen already and be done with it. Time to give up the ghost. And I'm not saying trade the future for Jose Quintana, but Clint Frazier's far from a sure thing and his ginger ass has to be worth something to somebody in a deal or the Grey Lady wouldn't be writing stories about his haircut.
3. Bird, Sanchez and Judge are the team to watch, plus whoever else comes up this year. For every time Chris Carter supplies two of three outs in a nine-run first inning, the opportunity to see Bird and Sanchez hit back to back is legitimately fun and a sign of what the Yankees as a whole can and apparently refuse to be. I hope they bring up Gleyber before the season's out. I'm still not convinced Judge can handle major league pitching, but I hope he comes through and I'm glad he's getting a legitimate chance, because he earned it.
While there's some hope, and I think that will be enough to keep them around .500 all year, to say they've got a shot at the East seems like wishful thinking. Doesn't mean it can't happen (maybe Boston finally collapses under the weight of its self-congratulatory bullshit, and after all, who among us can claim to predict baseball?), just that a more likely scenario is that it won't.
Bottom line is between largely useless or at very least un-clutch veteran bats (many of whom will provide competent defense, some of whom will not; Didi will be missed for these next weeks), an incomplete pitching staff, and a few exciting kids, we are a team divided.
A team divided cannot take the division.
82-83 wins. 84 at the outside.
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