Imitation of greatness.

The sellout crowd was on its feet. It was getting very late, and the Yankees still trailed in a game they had to have. The tying run was on base, and the muscled slugger stood near the plate, watching while the new pitcher took his warm-ups. 

The TV cameras shot him from the side, a classic shot of the big man in the big house. They cut to numerous shots of the crowd, everyone standing, banging on the sides of the stands, hoping, cajoling, begging for one moment of ecstasy in what had become yet another dreary postseason of disappointment.

They would not get it.

In the past, other Yankee greats have come through in situations like this, Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle, Babe Ruth with his called shot and Reggie Jackson with his three home runs on three pitches.

But they were immortals, and even so none of them faced quite the mountain Stanton had to climb last night, taking only his second at-bat after more than 160 days out of action.  

I've long believed Stanton to be a fraud, a chemical creation whose presence on the team has been hugely destructive, soaking up so much money that could have been spent acquiring ballplayers who could at least stay on the field.

But no one deserves to have happen what the Yankees did to him last night, batting him in such a critical spot where he had almost no possible chance of succeeding.

The idea that they would even consider resorting to just such a thing indicates only how brazen Yankees management has become in its indifference. Giancarlo Stanton was sent up there like a living, breathing avatar of the great Yankees and the great Yankees traditions that Hal Steinbrenner, Brian Cashman, Aaron Boone, and other resident toadies constantly invoke but never seriously try to match.

Like all too much of America today, Steinbrenner and Cashman are men already wealthy almost beyond imagining but interested, respectively, only in the bottom line and a manufactured adulation, battening ceaselessly off a past that they neither understand nor truly respect.

Like Stanton at the plate last night, they have made our team merely an imitation of greatness.