"Live, Tinkerbell, Live!"

Don't you miss the good old days, when the Yankees were run by a plain old raving maniac who fired people left and right, spent like crazy, brought a new superstar to town every year, and blamed all his many mistakes on "my baseball people"?

Like so much else in American life, the team of our adoration now seems to have become one more labyrinth of disinformations and weird media schemes.  

Joe F. was good enough to bring to our attention the latest plea from the Kremlin-on-the-Hudson to its fans:  "New York Yankees fans must keep the faith in Brian Cashman."

Okay.

The piece is by one Allison Case, who describes herself as an aspiring reporter from upstate, which already makes her all right in my book.

Ms. Case still seems to have a little ways to go when it comes to logic and sentence construction.  She credits Brian Cashman, for instance, with various moves that "make the team better," as in "Britton fills in the slot that David Robertson vacated when he went to Philly," and lauds our Coops for "all of these massive moves" over the years, beginning with his signing of David Justice in time for the 2000 playoffs.

He did indeed do that, though I have to say that I have limited appreciation left for Cashman deals that took place in the last year of the Clinton administration, and I can't quite see how re-signing one pitcher for slots formerly filled by two pitchers improves anything.  But never mind.

"Cashman may seem like a wizard, and in reality, he definitely is," Ms. Case tells us, and also: "We've had faith in him before and it has always paid off.  Why lose faith in him now?"

Why indeed?  

Again, I don't want to pick on Ms. Case, who seems like a genuinely good, enthusiastic person, and I wish her a wonderful career in journalism, during the ten minutes remaining to that profession.

But...we've always had faith in Brian Cashman and it's always paid off??

First, you might want to have faith in Almighty God if you believe it will save your immortal soul, and it's a good idea to have faith in, say, your spouse, at least until you have to start counting the silverware.  But in Brian Cashman?

You don't have faith in a general manager.  You think he's good or he's not good, and I'm of the understanding that Mr. Cashman, in fact, must have set some kind of record in North American sports for being GM of one team for which he did NOT provide the core of a single championship season.  

But even if that were not true, exactly how would us having faith in Coops "pay off?"

He is not some four-foot-eleven sub on the freshman basketball team that we all try to cheer like crazy when he comes in and dribbles the ball off his foot.  

He is, instead, the multi-millionaire executive of a phenomenally rich, professional baseball team, with a remarkable penchant for fobbing off his many failures on somebody else.  I suppose I can summon up a certain, cockeyed admiration for the sheer rascality of that "skill." But faith?

Faith's got nothing to do with it.  Brian Cashman could not care less if anyone this side of Hal Steinbrenner has faith in him.  Even if he did care, our faith would not alter the objective reality of his ability one iota.  (JuJu, which of course is very, very real, applies only to players.)

I don't know what to say—except to ask, as Joe F. does, why we are seeing this sort of blather now?  What Yankees mole running "Elite Sports" needs us to "have faith" in Brian Cashman, as if he were the flickering light of Tinkerbell at some Sunday afternoon Playhouse for Tots production of Peter Pan?

I think this bodes no well.  It strikes me as the vanguard of an all-out propaganda campaign designed to make us fans shut up, sit back, and count our blessings.  I think it's one more in a growing mosaic of signs that Bryce ain't comin', Manny ain't comin', and we need to all just take our meds, and get in the mood for another season of "Dare to Take a Called Third Strike."

All right, then, I guess:  "Live, Brian, live!" 

A wiz you iz.