New York Yankees, International Team of Mystery

Joe Robard:  You're a liar, Sidney.  Oh, it's a publicity man's nature to be a liar.  I wouldn't hire you if you wasn't a liar.  I pay you a C-and-a-half to plant big fat lies about me and the club all over the map.

Sidney Falco:  Oh, you mean in that sense—

Robard:  Yes, in that sense.  But you are a personal liar, too, Sidney, because you don't do the work that I pay you for.

—The Sweet Smell of Success

It's in the nature of a GM, too, to be a liar.  But the latest revelations from Kremlin-on-the-Hudson make me think that the Yankees and their general manager never really stop lying.

Or as the immortal Nancy Sinatra put it, "You been lyin' when you oughta be truthin'"—and, truth' when he oughta be lyin'.

As many here have pointed out, when you're trying to move a piece of turned meat such as Sonny Gray, you don't stand around with a megaphone pointing out the strange green color and how many maggots are crawling over the carcass—the way our Brian Cashman has been doing for days now.

And when you have a promising young player who is hurt, maybe badly hurt—we learn today that Gary Sanchez had two cortisone shots for his aching shoulder this year, and one in 2017—you don't leave him out on the field to twist in the wind for writers, fans, and, well, us to abuse him.

This is the second year in a row the Yankees have perpetrated the fine art of scapegoating on a developing player.  Aaron Judge is always so fundamentally open and sweet-tempered that nobody could get TOO mad at him in 2017, but not so with Sanchez, royally abused by all and sundry—including your faithful correspondent—as a perfidious loafer.

But really, this is a reckless and stupid game.  Cashman's justification—offered on those rare occasions when this Hall-of-Fame lock feels the need to justify himself at all—has usually been that the Yanks don't want to tip other teams off to a player's weaknesses...as if those weaknesses are not manifest in the space of a few innings.

Major-league baseball is not a place where you can hide major injuries for long.  But this fact always seems to escape our alleged braintrust.  Hence the sorry spectacle this year of our closer having to actually wave his arm in the air and ask to be taken out before his knee collapsed on him.

The Yankees have long been a purposely mystifying blend of secrets and inexplicable events.

All the way back in 1965-66, the team put it about that Roger Maris, a classic, "raw-ass" gamer to the end, was suddenly slacking.  This was actually because the quack medical help that the Yankees have always inflicted on its stars—Dr. Oz once performed a major operation on a leading Yankee pitcher—in Roger's case failed to detect the broken bone in his hand.

No apologies were forthcoming, and of course there was no question of resting a player who had done so much for the team, in seasons when it finished sixth and tenth.  The Rajah was needed to get out there and keep the box office up!

In half-a-century, nothing is changed.  So, Judge's career is risked, and so is Sanchez's.  Could it really be that Bird's miserable play is due to the fact that he really he needs this much time to recover?

Who can say?  Who knows anything about this Yankees Team of Mystery?