Who Will Crack First? The Kremlin? Or the Yankees?

So far, the Russians are still resorting to good-old, Soviet-style stonewalling in trying to pretend that nothing went wrong with their deadly, failed, nuclear cruise missile test.

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2019-08-13/russia-nuclear-missile-explosion-soviet-secrecy

But Putin's Russia's got nothing on HAL's Yankees.

In our Paper of Record today, Coops' Jeter-bashing pal, Bob Klapisch, was busy pushing the cover-up that Aaron Judge is not hurt, nope, nope, right-as-rain, nothing to see here, pay no attention to that .200-month, 95-at-bats-with-one-homer skein.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/14/sports/baseball/aaron-judge-yankees.html

But both cover-ups are beginning to take on water.

That's what happens when you try to hide deadly accidents involving radiation—something easily detectable from all around the world.  And in the Bronx, Carlos "I Could Manage This Well" Beltran let the cat poke its gnarly head out of the bag by admitting that, yes, when you sustain an oblique injury, it can remain tender for the rest of the year and hurt your power.

Of course, that was quickly denied by Judge and the Yankees organization, which blamed the whole kerfuffle on Pussy Riot.

But hey, we seen this movie, too—just last year, when the Yankees did incalculable damage to the brilliant right arm by insisting that the man was just tipping his pitches.  For three months.

How is it that I've come to believe that, if Coops and HAL were running the Titanic, they'd be telling the passengers they're just tilting the boat to improve the water-skiing?

Judge, Great Heart that he is, is hurt.  He may be improving, and he may be aggravating a serious injury.

Who knows?  Maybe not even Judge himself.

Certainly not your New York Yankees, who of late seem to have signed up with the Dr. Kevorkian Rehab Center, disappearing players on the 10-day EL for months at a time.

We can all hope for the best.  But the reality is that our rightfielder is a chronically injured player, whose production is likely to keep sliding as he does lasting damage to a body that was always a tight fit on a baseball field.

Oh, and those Russian rocket scientists ought to lay off the vodka.

Hard truths today, baby.  We're playing Cleveland.