Not with a bang.

 

Some wag posted this tasteless taunt on the internet a couple summers ago. It's wrong, of course. The Yankees will win another World Series...

...just not this decade. And maybe not next decade, either, when the team will be officially known as the Starr Insurance-Wendy's Bacon Cheeseburger-Barbie 8 The Rise of Midge Yankees, and, under the latest Manfred rules, every inning starts with a man on third, and another runner in a rundown between first and second.

What we are witnessing is decades of inexplicable, unaccountable incompetence, finally coming home to roost. The wonder is that it took this long—yet another tribute, perhaps, to the durability of the Stick/Buck/Bob team and system built before Brian Cashman took over.

El Duque, our Peerless Leader, thankfully back from being runked, writes that Cashman has painted himself into a corner. More like he has painted himself into a corner, and scattered the floor with broken glass, barbed wire, and anti-personnel mines. 

It's astonishing to look at how many positions on this Yankees team are being played right now by guys who were never anything more than back-ups, starting with catcher, and moving on to left field, third base, etc.. And as my SoCal Yankee fan friend, James, points out, this is hardly the first time. In Brian Cashman, we're talking a GM who thought it was all right to play a whole season with Chris Stewart as our starting catcher.

It's even more astonishing to think that serious people once considered this team a contender. No doubt, it was the pitching. The Estimable Keefetothecity—whose blog you should really check out today—noted this weekend that, when scoring 4 or more runs, the Yankees are 45-12. 

But no could do again last night, and now the pitching is—quite predictably—starting to come apart.

What is to be done?

Well, obviously, sell at the trading deadline. Sell and sell down to the wall studs. Harrison Bader and Sevvy have to go, or the Yanks will get absolutely nothing for them when their contracts expire with the season. Rizzo, DJ, Higgy, and Torres should all go, too. 

So should every single player on the Yankees' 40-man roster who any other team has any interest at all in, if they can get any sort of useful return at all.

This won't happen, of course. 

While I have my doubts about the Mets' big trades, I at least credit Steve Cohen with being willing to cough up $35.5 mill to get rid of Max Scherzer for a major prospect. 

HAL Steinbrenner is never going to do anything like that. He's not going to give another club any part of the $45 mill still due on DJ's contract, much less the $98 mill still owed to Giancarlo after this season. As we have witnessed, he and Cashman will give up players to other teams to get rid of our dead wood, before they give up a single, U.S. dollar (waving sadly to you, Gio Urshela).

So will the Yankees be buyers at the trade deadline this year? Will they continue in the delusion that they actually have a contender on their hands?

Don't count on it.

The defining characteristic of Brian Cashman's tenure as GM is that he is usually paralyzed by fear. This is why all the dumpster-diving around the margins, constantly signing guys that he will only be praised for if they do well. It's the classic sign of a boy who grew up with an overbearing father—or George Steinbrenner. 

Whenever he tries something bigger—such as last year at the deadline, or with Giancarlo—it tends to blow up in his face. He prefers, always, to go after some carefully targeted role player...who usually proves to be not carefully targeted at all. Hence the Randal Grichuk interest.

But now that Grichuk is off the market—now that the only possible additions that would make any difference would entail going big for a Bellinger or a Soto—he's not going to do anything.

I once saw some nature film about lionesses hunting in the veldt. They waited, concealed in the tall grass, while a herd of wildebeests went thundering past. In that usual cat way, their heads flicked back and forth, watching one wildebeest after another. Is that the one? No, maybe that one! Oh, they're all going so fast!

In the end, of course, being lions, they pulled down one of the sickest, most crippled wildebeests hobbling along at the end, and culled it from the herd.

Be prepared to welcome our latest, sickly wildebeest.