Looks like we picked the wrong century to be Yankees fans.

 

Yesterday, I came as close to dusting the dirt from my feet and turning my back on the New York Yankees as I have since sometime in 1984, when they traded Graig Nettles and I tried to become a Mets fan. Didin't take. 

It's not that the Yankees have been a model of integrity, well, ever. This was a team, as Robert Penn Warren once wrote that was conceived in sin and born in corruption. Its original owners were the nation's leading gambler and the most corrupt police chief in New York City history, which is saying something.  

The very best of the team's owners was a cold, ruthless son-of-a-bitch who publicly humiliated Joe DiMaggio. Most of the rest have been, to quote Lady Caroline Lamb, mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Same goes for so many of the racist, incompetent front office people the Yankees have employed. 

Old George was no exception, a greedy, whining, scheming, bullying nepo baby, who at various times professed a willingness to move the team to Denver or sell it to the Dolans. It was, never let us forget, in Yankee Stadium that a baby-shark Donald Trump cut his teeth not only on the ways of only George, but also his greatest mentor, Roy Cohn, the gift who never stops giving, and who Trump would come to ignore and humiliate like everyone else who has helped him along the way.

Even so, events of the last couple days have marked a new low for our team. 

First came the announcement about Anthony Volpe. The fact that he has been hurt since May is something that many of us here have suspected...since May. 

I agree that Volpe's problems extend well beyond this injury to his non-throwing shoulder. But still: to put him out there to face ridicule from the hometown fans and the further diminishment of his confidence is beneath contempt.

It is also, I'm sorry to say, par for the course for our thoroughly loathsome general manager, Brian Cashman, whose quest to build himself a new Jeter has made him oblivious to basic human decency.

Not much better was the reaction of Aaron Boone. I know that Boone's endless, drivelous attacks of words are his way of avoiding accountability—or perhaps evidence of some terrible brain disease, God forbid. But his answer to questions about Volpe—something along the lines of "I think they learned that the tear was an old injury..."—went beyond his usual absurdity.

You think they learned? What is wrong with you???

Either Boone really can't remember just what happened to his young starting shortstop, or his evasions are in service of his masters. For God's sake, Mr. Boone: stand up and be a man, and stop covering for people. Can this job really mean this much to you, under these circumstances?

Far worse, of course, was the team's collective decision to piss on the memory of the heroes and martyrs of 9/11 by making the commemoration of the day a stage for Donald Trump—one more stop on his endless road tour of Revenge and Destruction. 

I don't expect ballplayers to stand up to a president, especially once as vindictive and thin-skinned as this one. I don't expect ballplayers have very good politics at all. 

(Although, come to think of it, why should that be? These are fantastically wealthy, grown men who made their fortunes by maintaining the most successful union in world history. Time, maybe, for someone to at least ask them about the massive contradictions in how they cash in and how they tune out?)

But their playing the simpering, smiling, grade-school audience for this awful excuse of a man was unpardonable. So was the reaction of Randy Levine, of course, but then who doesn't expect that squalid collection of hair dye not to bow and scrape to anyone with power?

All in all, it was a disgrace—crowned by Trump declaring himself the team's good-luck charm. Yeah? To that I say, "Go, Mariners!" Or somebody. Not, I'm sure, that whoever wins it will be much better, in this supine excuse for a republic.