The July Days

This was the name given to violent demonstrations and protests the Bolsheviks staged in post-czarist Russia, in July of 1917—sort of a test drive for revolution.

It didn't work out so well for them.  Kerensky took over the provisional government of Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries and put down the uprising.  Lenin was forced to flee to Finland, while Trotsky was arrested.

But the crackdown, combined with Kerensky's determination to keep prosecuting World War I, proved disastrous in the long run.  By that November, the Bolsheviks had seized power.

Here in the Yankeesverse, we've had our own version of the July Days, and they've proven just as disastrous for us radical Bolshie prospect huggers.

Over the course of the last week or so, our catcher of the future has imploded in a welter of Ring Dings and Devil Dogs, we lost our ace and our closer, our manager has been reduced to fretful mumblings, our own mad Rasputin of a GM keeps trotting Neil Walker out to play actual major-league ballgames, and our supposed Tower of Power has seen his batting average on the road dip almost to the Mendoza Line.

Clearly, this is not a revolution that is going to bring about the Yankees Fans' Paradise anytime soon.  But rather than listen to us who would rather keep building Yankeedom from within, or maybe purge the ranks of counter-revolutionary failures in return for new prospects, Comrade Coops has doubled down on his three-month plan to win the Series this fall.

I don't know if Dillon Tate will ever quite be the potential star he's looked like intermittently in his minor-league career, and I don't know what Josh Rogers really has.  But both Rogers and Cody Carroll at least deserved a look, and Tate a spring training next season.

Now they're gone, in favor of Zach Britton, who will fill in for Machine Gun Chappie if he can't go, and stretch our pen all the more, if he can.  Hell, if Chapman somehow proves to be okay—he's not—then we can actually skip Sonny Gray altogether, mayhap, and go with one of those Tampa Bay Whitman's Samplers of pitchers.

Sure, and why not?  It will surely work, just as the Russian Army was going to finally rout Ludendorff and the jerries.

What makes me think we're going to end up like Kerensky, another longtime New Yorker who spent decades talking wistfully of what might have been?

Color it a red October, comrades.