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Monday, July 23, 2018

Th-th-th-that's all, folks!

First off, let me just say, if the future of baseball is the Tampa Bay Rays with their random pitching rotation, which there is every reason to think it will be, then I will start following golf.  Or soccer.  Go NYCFCJCBCDC!

Actually, tonight was tremendously clarifying, in terms of what the Yanks should want to do on trade week.

What they should do?

Become a seller, not a buyer.

This team is far, far, far from one player or one pitcher away.  In the course of three days, we have now lost our best starter—a guy who looked like he could be the best starter we had developed in 40 years—and our best reliever.

In addition, we saw tonight that:

—Gary Sanchez is a train wreck.

—Aaron Judge is likely the beneficiary of stolen signs at home, we can now say with authority as he approaches the Mendoza Line on the road.

—Aaron Hicks, alas, is an irretrievable mediocrity.

—Neil Walker should no longer be playing major-league ball.

—Didi is fast slipping back toward mediocrity, with Greg Bird in hot pursuit.

—Something is wrong with Chad Green.

—Our management team is insane.

The last is the only unsolvable problem here.  Re-starts go awry all the time, and with El Matador and El Conquistador still on the team and still young, we have plenty of time to start again.

Unfortunately, our GM and his puppet manager are so committed to doing something the exact same way and expecting different results that all we are likely to get is some savagely bad trade now, for a ragged remnant of a starter.

The sort of daring trades we need would be something along the lines of, say, Judge for Realmuto, Sanchez for a gaggle of Class-A pitchers, Hicks for lottery tix (I can see the tabloid headlines now:  "HIX FOR TIX!"), CC to some contender or another, Gray to a small, low-pressure market, Sevvy and Chappie to whatever rehab they need instead of another 2-3 weeks of pretending they're not hurt, and so on.

THIS is the moment to dynamite this team and begin again.  Right now.  When it will get peak returns.  Not after putting us through five or six years of failure and pretense, while these guys steadily lose all remaining value.

It's not a big deal.  We thought we really had something here, me above all.  We seemed to have so much depth, it couldn't go wrong.

Hey, stuff happens.  One of my favorite movie quotes of all time is from A History of Violence, when William Hurt has Viggo Mortensen's character dead to rights, seated and covered by two of his gunsels.

Next thing you know, boom, the gunsels are dead or dying, Mortensen's out the door, and Hurt just looks incredulous.

"How do you fuck that up?" he says, half to himself.  "How do you fuck that up?"

Well, you do.  Better luck with the next bunch.  



9 comments:

13bit said...

Tell it,Hoss!

Anonymous said...

Wow. That was horrible. How did he go from the Sanchize to the second coming of Jesus (Montero)?

How do they fix it? Closed door players only meeting where they beat the crap out of him and say he slipped in the shower?

Put him back on the 10 day DL with "focus issues"?

Trade his ass.

I don't see how he can stay on the team unless he is seriously hurt and we just don't know it.

Disgraceful!

Doug K.

HoraceClarke66 said...

If he is seriously hurt they need to say so, now, and spare him all the opprobrium that is about to descend upon him.

But I don't see how that is possible. He just got off the DL, and as we all saw, started to speed up once he saw how foolish he had been.

The old-fashioned way would've been a suspension and a hefty fine. But a suspension just leaves the team short a catcher, and it's impossible to level a fine that would be enough to hurt him.

He needs to be traded, the sooner the better. Maybe he'll come to his senses somewhere else, a la Ruben Sierra. But that shouldn't be our concern anymore.

Anonymous said...

ALL THIS....

AND THE RED SOX KEEP WINNING AND WINNING....

THIS NIGHT, IN A STRANGE WAY, REMINDS ME OF WHEN REGGIE AND BILLY HAD THAT FIGHT IN BOSTON.

THEY HAD US, YET SOMEHOW, WE TRIUMPHED IN THE END.

MAYBE SOMEHOW THIS WILL BE A TURNING POINT FOR US.

HoraceClarke66 said...

I'd like to think so, ALL-CAPS, but I think that is just the problem. Nobody on this team has that sort of passion and commitment, mad as it was.

Carl J. Weitz said...

The worst thing to happen to Sanchez was making the all-star team last year. Since then his effort level seems to have dwindled. As if he could henceforth put out a lesser effort. His attitude, if you remember, got him fined and suspended the year before he got called up. His effort on that "single" that took one bounce off the wall in the left field corner was a joke but typical from him all year. Had he not pulled a Joginson Cano running to first at least the game would have been tied.

KD said...

I am hoping for Sevvy's sake that he is not hiding an injury. Maybe he's simply reacting to the negative vibe rapidly overtaking the Yankees.

Sanchez must be disciplined publicly and severely, perhaps even excised from the team.

HoraceClarke66 said...

But-but-but-KD: Ma Boone hasn't finished looking at the videotape yet!

I guess that:

—Talking to Sanchez

—His own eyes

did not suffice.

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