Picking Up the Wreckage

First off, granted: the Rays' Idiot Dome and their whole franchise is a disgrace.

I'd say somebody's going to get hurt playing down there, but somebody already did:  our catcher.

I never like to see a player get injured. But if Gary Sanchez WAS going to tweak a gonad grounding into yet another double-play, well, best he do it just now, when he was stuck in a deep, dark hole and industriously burrowing toward the earth's core.

It will likely give him some time to rest and relax, and get in a better head—and it WOULD give a crackerjack GM time to set up his trade to Miami for Realmuto, assuming we had such a crackerjack GM.

We don't, of course, which is why we are a modern, major-league franchise without a LOOGY. How can that happen?

I have to give Coops Cashman more props than I thought ever possible for getting the team this far. But as I feared, he is simply not the closer GM needed to take it over the top—a fact that will likely be confirmed before long by some absolutely asinine deal for Happ or Hapless. As if pretty much the whole last month of the Yankees' season has not illustrated that that should be about the last item on our to-do list.

Item one, of course, is to stuff Neil Walker into the pod bay, with Shreve to follow.

Item two is to bring up Drury and maybe even give him a shot at second, with the Gleyber at short.

I love our Flying Dutchman, and his numbers are better this last month now, but the truth is Didi is still awful in the clutch, and losing power faster than Jimmy Carter after they took the hostages in Teheran.

Which leads us to Item three: what IS it with this lineup?

I mean, remember 1961, back when Mantle and Maris, the M & M Boys, hit all those glorious home runs...sandwiched around Tony Kubek in the lineup?  No?

This is roughly what we're doing now. You maximize power by massing power hitters together, not by sprinkling them around the lineup. It forces pitchers to pitch to them, not around them.

When we first got Stanton, the idea was that we could stick Bird's Limitless Potential between him and Judge, and thereby stop the march of specialty relievers. But as we've seen, BLP is likely to manifest itself maybe sometime around the Great North America World Cup.

Right now, we need to stop the nonsense, and stick our big two back-to-back. Put the Gold Dust Twins, our wonderful infield rookies, out in front of them, and Frazier behind them. The rest of this woebegone lineup you can shake well and let float to the bottom in any order you so desire.