A big win by a big man... and a lot of big questions

I'm sitting here, staring at the dried-up coffee on this keyboard, and I donno what to write. Jeez, I just donno... 

A piece of me wants to rejoice over the fact that CC took a shutout into the seventh last night, staunching wounds from the Jeter Weekend machete mishap. But jeez, I just dunno...

Five line drives. Five outs.

That's what Kansas City hit. Five liners. For us, five lucky pennies. Five blown red lights. Five balls squarely banged on their brass buttons, directly at us. Two plays by Chase Headley were positively Nettlesesque. Hit them a few feet left or right - the way old Giants fans still think of McCovey and Bobby Richardson - and you've got a flashback migraine. Particularly, I'm thinking of the fifth inning, when Headley snared one to his right, and then Gold Glove Gardy grabbed a slicer down the left field line. In a very, very nearby alternative universe - I mean, we're talking atoms, not molecules - those are back-to-back, lead-off doubles, CC is exploding with sweat, and we're waste deep in another big muddy. But it didn't happen. 

I dunno. I just dunno. It's karma, of course. Over the season, everything will even-out. Our hitters will slam balls into their over-shifts. I should just let it go. A win is a win is a win, and if we lucked out last night, I'll take it. Nothing succeeds like success, and we are leading the AL fucking East!

But jeez, I just dunno...

What if it's a trap? Right now, the Yankee rebuilding plan is a year ahead of schedule. With one of the game's deepest farm systems, we are Xerox copies of the Yankee organization that was evolving in the early 1990s. Then - thanks to Bob Watson, Stick Michael and a young Brian Cashman - we somehow kept the keepers: Bernie, Jeet, Andy, Jorge and Mariano. We turned Russell Davis and Sterling Hitchcock into Tino, traded Matt Drews for Cecil Fielder, and transformed Rickie Ledee and Drew Henson into David Justice, and THEN ditched Ruben Rivera, who was everybody's future superstar, though it turned out to get us Hideki Irabu, who was everybody's future Roger Clemens. We botched a few others - Javy Vazquez, Mike Lowell, Jeff Weaver - but kept Joggy Cano and Chien-Ming Wang. We did all right. Five rings in 15 years. I'll take it.

Today, we've settled in on Gary Sanchez, Aaron Judge and Greg Bird. But even if you add Betances and Jordan Montgomery, we don't yet have a Core Four. Somewhere in Scranton or Trenton are those fourth and fifth gold nuggets, hiding among the iron pyrite. Now comes the tricky part: Keeping the keepers, trading the chaff. 

The fear here is simple: That Cashman jumps the gun and goes for broke at the July 31 trade deadline, one year too soon. Had there been the wild card one game playoff in 1994, might the Yankees have traded Bernie, Jeet, Andy, Jorge or Mariano for a crack at it? (Note: On a few occasions, they came damn close.) 

So I sit here, staring at the screen, now filled with breadcrumb thoughts, and here's what scares me the most: That last night, we WEREN'T lucky. That the juju gods are dangling a false carrot, and one of these days, we're going to lunge for it and in the name of Javy Vazquez do something incredibly stupid. 

The worst trick Beezebud Selig ever played on the Yankees was not the luxury taxes to enrich his small market billionaire pals. It was the extra wild card berth, which coaxes those teams that try to win each year into betraying their long-term strategies. It's like the defensive over-shifts. We have yet to fully adjust.

Five line drives. Five outs. Good luck in figuring it out. Jeez, I just dunno...