Perspective.

 

This is mostly just to echo our Peerless Leader's sentiments—it is, I think, impossible to out do, "The Yankees exist as a massive cultural and political grift"—but I couldn't let this postgame quote from Aaron Boone pass:

"...all due respect, and with the perspective that they're playing a game..."

Nothing like the 21st Century, when millionaires lecture you on perspective!

Perspective.  Yeah.

—I had perspective when it cost less to get a seat in the grandstand than to go to a movie, and most days you could buy a ticket a few minutes before he first pitch.

—I had perspective when you didn't need to take out a bank loan to buy some stadium food, or a souvenir.

—I had perspective when the Yankees used to get beat out by, say, Earl Weaver's fine Orioles teams, or the Big Red Machine, or even the worthy opponents who were the Kansas City Royals or the Boston Red Sox. Not some bunch of pick-ups playing in softball uniforms and a gimcrack excuse of a stadium.

—I had perspective when the Yankees didn't run the bases or throw the ball around like drunken sailors.

—I had perspective when the Yankees dominated opponents in The House That Ruth Built, not when they lost playoff series to five different teams at home in nine years, in The House That Hal Squeezed Out of the Taxpayers and Locked Us Out Of.

—I had perspective when the Yankees were run by true baseball man who knew and loved the game, not a bunch of sullen, failed apparatchiks who are apparently here for life.

I know this is all terribly unfair to Aaron Boone who is, by all accounts, a perfectly nice man, and only a stooge of the greed heads who run this sad excuse of a baseball team.

But c'mon. "...they're playing a game"?

We were playing a game when my pals and I used to get out the whiffle ball and bat, and hit flies up amongst the tree branches in my yard, and ran around like crazy trying to tell where they'd come down and catch them.

What the Yankees are supposed to be doing in the postseason is giving a command performance by the best players in the world, one which will thrill and delight us. What we saw this fall—what we now see every fall—ain't that.

If you were to go see a performance of Hamilton—which isn't much more than a Yankees postseason ticket—and most of the star sang off-key, everyone missed their cues, the dancers kept falling down, and the whole cast kept sneezing and coughing because they'd just got up after weeks in bed with the flu, you would see the entire audience quickly reassemble at the box office, and demand its money back.

They would get it.

The Yankees regularly evoke the grandeur of their past as a selling point.  The walls of the mediocre, luxury hotspot they forced out of us are decorated with great stars of the past, winning great games.

Not so much anymore. 

Stop trying to sell us the glories of the past when your entire business plan has nothing to do with them. Stop pretending that you are here for the fan, when the people who run your franchise now don't even seem to much like baseball—or anything at all, beyond money.

Stop trying to tell us how we should view your abject failures, and give us something worth watching.