Fresh mush from Food Stamps Hal: “I was disappointed, quite frankly, with the offense throughout the course of the year, as a whole, even though there were some bright spots. As a whole, they were very inconsistent when it came to run scoring, and they were inconsistent for long periods. That made it difficult to catch the Rays and win the division. And as we all know, winning the division is a big deal in this playoff format. That is certainly one part of the organization and the team that I’m going to be looking at from top to bottom.”

I'm still processing the verbal kettle corn that spewed from Hal Steinbrenner's phlegm faucet this week, his first public hoo-ha since the Tampa fiasco. 

Old Food Stamps covered a lot of ground - conjuring excuses and gaslit dreams - but I believe the above quotation, in all its toxic smog and fog, offers the clearest portrait of why the Yankees are a perpetual 2nd-place team with a 1st-place payroll.

Hal was "disappointed" in the '26 offense. Well, yeah, I guess we all were. That's because the Death Barge entered the year with the same offense that disappointed us in '25, and throughout the regular season, all those acquisitions that were going to save us? Well, they didn't happen. We were left with a roster of disappointments, which now fits neatly into Hal's backwards reckoning.   

If you were to tell me last February that Cam Schlittler would chase the Cy Young, and Ben Rice would hit 40 HRs, I'd had have bet the house. 

Now, that's disappointment. 

After squandering the greatest seasons of Aaron Judge's career - Hall of Fame-level years - the Yankees may do the same with Schlittler and Rice. 

So, Hal is - um - disappointed? Golly. Does he realize how tired those words sound, how insulting they are to Yank fans who are watching time run out on the franchise's legacy? 

An entire generation now sees the Yankees as a bloated monstrosity that always comes close and never wins. They are a team that plays in a lunch-pail ballpark and that owns the primary media that covers it. Thus, you have hitters who swing for the porch and straddle the Mendoza line. (The Yankee lineup last season had three regulars - Wells, Grisham and McMahon - who hit below .215.)

It must be tough for Hal, watching Milwaukee and Tampa play old-school baseball, while he contemplates the murky future of a lockout. 

He's disappointed. 

Huh.