Thursday, April 9, 2026

What's keeping the Yankees afloat? A.L. Slop

 

With due respect to Mr. Magoo and Emperor Palpatine, nothing derails a movie like a clueless, unfiltered old fogy, who is flying 30,000 feet over his head and calling the shots, and we all know who I'm talking about.

The Yankees, of course.

With their "mature" lineup - "mature" meaning "aging" - the '25-26, same-as-last-year Yankees are a boring, bumbling team that needs 10 walks per game to score runs. When they lose, as they did last night, they are particularly dreadful to watch. They are Saturday Night Live hosted by Elon Musk. Basically, you have Aaron Judge, a few anecdotes by David Cone and the NAME THAT YANKEE trivia question. After that - well - Ben Rice might turn out to be something. And Giancarlo always entertains, until he gets hurt. The bullpen cannot hold leads, and the starting rotation will only get older. 

But but BUT... we are in first.

How can sit here, farting into my back-breaker office chair, and denigrate a FIRST PLACE team? Am I that spoiled, that out of touch with the realities of baseball? If they're so old, so listless, why are the Yankees in first? 

I say, it's A.L. Slop. 

Yes, Artificial Lousiness.  

Particularly, let's celebrate the once-mighty AL East, a division that was supposed to rule baseball, which - for now, anyway - is a collection of cupcakes and canned tomatoes. 

For example, did you happen to see the throw by Boston's future superstar, Roman Anthony, the other night? He snagged a one-hop single to left field and fired a cannon shot home, with a solid chance to nab a runner. The ball bounced about 30 feet from the plate plate, halfway up the 3B line. It was beautiful. It was magic. It had the makings of a Little League HR. The Martian, lost in Scranton, would be hard-pressed to match it. 

The line on Anthony, according to my Redsock fan sources, is that he spent the winter in the weight room, bulking up so he could wow the coeds over a full MLB season. (He got hurt last year and missed the playoffs.) 

Listen, Anthony is scary. He could be great, a future Yankee killer.  But maybe, just maybe, that MVP trophy that the Gammonites bestowed upon him over the winter - could it be premature? He wouldn't be the first great prospect to weight-lift his way into mediocrity. 

So, here's my personal vendetta list of cold-ass starts. 


Of course, it's wayyyy to early to assign meaning to these numbers. (And Jose Caballero, Jazz Chisholm, Trent Grisham and Ryan McMahon  - the ballplayer, not the Onondaga County Executive - would all crack this list.) But the Yankees, for all their knock-kneed problems, have one thing going for them. 

A.L. Slop. Welcome to the new world.

10 comments:

AboveAverage said...

It’s all fun and games until we lose a few too many of them.

Then it’s….

Pinstripe Purgatory.


AboveAverage said...

We all know that this team is not built to Weathers the coming storm.

JM said...

Camilo Doval...Camilo Doval...if he doesn't scare you, then you must like Pal.

(Cruella, we salute you.)

Great post by Hoss, again. I can't believe we lost last night, even if it was this morning here. But today is a day game, right? So I get to watch it this evening and enjoy the idiocy that is Boone, along with the incompetence that is half our lineup.

ranger_lp said...

The Master would say wait until 20 games into the season...that aside, Bednar is dreadful...

JM said...

Nobody is going to be another Mariano, but this shit...

Meanwhile, as Hoss points out, Williams and Weaver and Holmes are doing great for the Mets. We didn't need any of them, because Genius.

AboveAverage said...

Perhaps, JM (if I may call you JM, JM) if Blake gets thrown out of more games this season then perhaps the pitchers will all benefit from less Blake and perform better whilst on the mound.

HoraceClarke66 said...

Thanks, JM. And yeah, this team is starting to play just like we feared.

Who knew? WE knew!

As for the pathetic hitting—and why, oh, why oh, was the Great Escarra playing in what was a night game after a night game and NOT a getaway day last night?—no doubt it's probably due in part to all the home night games Hal let the team schedule.

On the other hand...this has also probably kept how many balls from flying out against our crack corps of arsonists in the pen—a pen that, just 11 games into the season, is already noticeably coming apart.

Ah, well. It was fun while it lasted.

HoraceClarke66 said...

Love it, JM! And hey, where the hell is Angel Chivilli?

Just call me Angel
Down in Scranton
Then just walk away...

JM said...

The delusional Yankees organization:

'“(McMahon is) a good major-league hitter,” Boone said.'

Not really. Decent at Coors Field and nowhere else. How does the braintrust always miss analyzing these types of stats?

13bit said...

SPEAKING OF MLB SLOP - I need to vent for a moment, but only a moment because I have lost an hour of my life to this and now must take my dog to the vet.

Got the tickets for our get-together but, in MLB's infinite wisdom, they sit in either "MYYankees" account or somewhere in the netherworld of Ticketmaster/MLB Ballpark app. One hour trying to move these virtual tickets so I can transfer them. I'm not tech idiot, been doing this shit for decades, yet their backend is so profoundly stuffed with shit - probably coded by AI - that it's just not working. They appear, the disappear. They say I'm verified, but that I'm not verified. They exist, they don't exist. Unable to do at the moment. "Please try again" etc. I just wrote to our group sales manager and will see what he says. Yes, they take your money, then they fuck you like a crackhead in the parking lot. So sick of MLB. They want your money, your data, your eyeballs and attention, but they don't care about their "product." They are going to lose the next generation of young suckers if they don't turn this barge of donkey shit around pronto.