Let's play five

I think it's time for a marathon. Let's play five against the Mets starting Saturday morning. 30 minutes between games. Play until all five are done.

That's 35 innings of baseball, pretty much non-stop.

There's no way Gary, Hicks, and Gardy could play more than one or two games each. That would give a lot of guys some at-bats and also chances to impress in the field. Hell, I bet Frazier and Miggy could play three or four out of five if called on. Tauchman, too. Not to mention the great opportunities for our young pitchers to come up and shine, before being sent back down in favor of someone older and more mediocre.

If we start at 8:00 a.m., we should be finished by midnight. Maybe 1:00 or 2:00 on Sunday morning. And then everybody gets a nice rest until Tuesday, or whenever it's not raining and the other team hasn't tested positively for Covid. 

Whaddya say, sports fans?

Ernie would be so proud.

As we near the cliff, the Yankee pitching staff is about to get shredded

Crazy Fred Nietzsche once said, "When you gaze into The Abyss, The Abyss gazes back into you."

Comrades, The Abyss is licking its chops.

Three double-headers in five days. Twenty-two games in 19 days. A dead reckoning in Tampa. The trade deadline. 

Yep. The Abyss sees us, and it's rubbing its tummy.

Today, we pitch Gerrit Cole and, I believe, Masahiro Tanaka. Friday, Jordan Montgomery and Whomever. Saturday, it's either JA Happ or the cast of "This Is Us." Sunday, it's John D. and Katherine T. MacArthur, who are working to bring about a more just and verdant world. Monday, we press REPEAT.

Somewhere in between, we might promote Clarke Schmidt and/or Deivi Garcia from the Scranton refugee camp. Or we might sign Dopey Dildox from the Korean Beach League. Monday - the dreaded annual trade deadline - everything culminates with a showdown in Timbuktu - yes, Tampa - a team that recently mocked us in our own stadium. Yes, The Abyss has a knife and fork in hand, a napkin on its lap, and a Nicholas Sandmann smirk. A week from now, the fog will have lifted. 

The next few days will either set us on course toward the playoffs, allowing us to keep our farm system intact. Or it will crush our pitching staff and push Cooperstown Cashman into trading for other teams' mistakes, binding our next few seasons into bloated contracts and aging spare tires. Every year, we go through the same tired exercise, looking for saviors that do not exist. We spend five years nurturing a young prospect, then trade him and assure ourselves that he was never any good.    

This is surely the last site on the Internet to invoke Yankee hyperbole. There is no cooler set of heads in the Yankiverse, no more astute gathering of scientific minds, than those who meet here to empirically discuss our chances. Other sites get nervous. Not here. We maintain that steady hand on the till, never getting rattled, always assessing reality with cool, clear eyes.

That's why it's so critical to recognize that, if we flop this week, we are fucking dead - I mean dish-rag dead, I mean soiled and slurped, done and dug, fling the dirt on us, hit the the "Cremation" button and fling us into the ocean - and I'm talking about the 2020 decade, not this Tom Thumb of a season. 

The next week, folks. Three doubleheaders and a trade deadline. 

The Abyss awaits us.

Virtual Baseball: Splish-Splash, Birds Take a Bath!

The Virtual Yankees managed to hang on for a seven-hour win in the Bronx tonight, once again roughing up the bumbling Birds of Baltimore, 15-10.

It looks like the game would be a breeze at first, with Clarke Schmidt holding a 12-0 lead through five innings, thanks to two home runs by Gleyber Torres and shots from Luke Voit, Gio Urshela, Gary Sanchez, and Aaron Hicks.

But then the rains came, and after an hour-long delay Schmidt hit the showers and the Orioles began to hit in-cessantly.  Off Luis Cessa.  Get it?

In his four innings of work, Cessa threw 130 pitches and gave up ten runs, but the Yankees held on thanks to yet another homer by The Gleyber.  When the soggy marathon finally ended in the wee small hours of the morning, Manager Ma Boone leapt up from his seat in the dugout, exclaiming, "YES!  He did it!"

Boone then collected $200 from every man on the bench, all of whom had wagered that Cessa could not get through the rest of the game.

"Oh, yeah, Laura needs a new pair of shoes!" Boone said, though he admitted after the game that his wife already has, in fact, 400 pairs of shoes.

Ace Gerrit Cole had been scheduled to pitch tonight, but Boone told him to get some more rest, telling the press, "Frankly, I don't want to waste someone as good as Cole on garbage like these Orioles.  No offense!"

Yankee Aaron "The Glass Gavel" Judge also volunteered to play, having now sat out all the days required under MLB's Otherworldly Twister Injury Protocol.  But Boone waved him off, as well.

"Get hurt against a real team," he told the fragile giant.  "Just sayin'."

Is, gulp, Jordy Mercer our next shortstop?

Normally, I'd cheer the acquisition of another Mercer, a great Yankee name, regardless of the spelling. But yesterday's news that Cooperstown Cashman signed the 34-year old SS grows the fever pit in my gut. Here we go again, spackling over our woes with another beyond-his-sell-date veteran, and - by the way - shortstop is a dangerous place for late-stage experiments. I'm not sure Trump's FDA would approve this trial, and they're on the verge of shaking beads.

Don't get me wrong: Mercer - having played nearly 900 games over a nine-year career - could be a valuable infield piece, in a Luis Sojo kinda way. He'll cover the right base and make the routine plays. Can he bunt over a runner? We sure can use such a guy. There might also be some contractual voodoo at work: Mercer, who was waived by the Tigers last week and elected free agency, is a pure transaction. Once Gleyber Torres and DJ LeMahieu return - (assuming that they will; remember the words of Al Franken: When you assume, you make an "ass " out of Uma Thurman) - Mercer can disappear, no strings attached, no hard feelings. Sometimes, that's a nice way to go.

But the Yankees have two young shortstops - Tyler Wade and Thairo Estrada - both with special talents. Wade can run. Estrada can hit HRs. Both have unexplored ceilings. Both need a chance. And here is the question: In the eyes of the Yankees, are neither better than Mercer? 

Listen: Mercer is no slouch. Last year, in 74 games with Detroit, he hit .274 with 9 HRs. On the Yankees, that would have been a godsend. But last year was Mercer's best season since 2013, when he hit .285 for Pittsburgh. This year, he had appeared in three games, sentenced to back-up duty on a team going nowhere. So they waived him. Mercy killing.

Mercer hits RH. That pits him especially against Estrada. Considering the epidemic of injuries faced by the Yankees, they can use every warm body they can find. In that regard, Cashman was smart to sign Mercer. 

Still, if we see him at SS, it will be hard to dispel the mounting dread that this year - as different as it has been - is turning out to be like all the others. And it will probably end that way, too. 

Virtual Baseball Off-Day: Yanks Rest. But Where Is Giancarlo?

The Virtual Yankees, two games behind Tampa Bay, got a much-needed off-day following four knockdown, drag-out contests against Toronto.

But the questions remains:  where is Giancarlo Stanton, the Yankee man of knowledge?

In what is fast becoming the nation's fastest growing new superfast conspiracy theory, many speculate that Stanton has somehow fallen prey to a Deep State plot, or perhaps been eaten by some QAnon predators.  Others continue to hold that he has gone over to the Children of the Corn or—more diabolical yet—the Red Sox.

"Where is Giancarlo?" asked even some signs at President Trump's triumphant Republican convention in Charlotte.

"The question is really whether Giancarlo ever existed at all, or if he is just more of a concept," speculated Prof. Janosz Poha of Hudson University.  "After all, he is said to be a baseball player on the New York Yankees team.  But do we ever see him play baseball?  Is he ever in any games?  The answer is no."

"I thought even in the playoffs last year, that the best analogy to Stanton is Schrodinger's cat," interposed Prof. Poha's colleague, Dr. Peter Venkman.  "He was on the roster, but he was not able to play.  Was he dead?  Was he alive?  Was he...Giancarlo?"

Others, such as Dr. Raymond Stantz, hold that the entire idea of a "Giancarlo Stanton" was all a mass delusion in the first place,"like UFO sightings, or the Lawrence Welk Show.  I think it has to do in good part with the end of the Cold War, and the need Americans have for some new, lurking, unseen menace."

For all of the certainty in the Yankees organization that the slugger is no more, residents of Dyersville, Iowa, home of the Field of Shattered Dreams, have reported rutabagas mysteriously gone missing from their gardens, and the disappearance of the occasional blueberry pie, left on the windowsill for cooling.

Whew

 The Yankees have got to be a bit worn down aftter a trying weekend.

And MLB, right on top of things, has seen fit to schedule them with a day off today.  How did they know?

Making up missed games this year will be a walk in the park.

So it is good to be rested.

My concern is that some burned-out hurricane will work its way up the east coast and cause more postponements.

At least we didn't drop down to third place and, we think, no one got injured.

With the trade deadline approaching, the growing fear over a decade-defining bad deal

Okay, before we again wail about the injuries - the unfairness of the juju gods -  imagine this lineup...

Tauchman lf  (Our SB threat.)
Judge rf (No-brainer.)
Voit 1b (No-brainer II.)
Urshela 3b (Still hitting.)
Frazier/Ford dh (Can one get hot?)
Hicks/Gardy cf (Both on downward trajectory; fingers crossed?)
Sanchez c (Is he really better than Kratch?)
Wade ss (No other choice.)
Estrada 2b (Ditto.)

The key here is Tauchman at the top. WTF not? Why do we insist that Hicks will suddenly start hitting, as he did for half a season in 2017? And though he's on fire right now, Voit is simply too slow a base-runner to lead off. Let him protect Judge in the order. This season is rapidly aging: If a player has not started hitting by now, should we reasonably think he will?

And then there is Miguel Andujar. Insert sigh here. Frankly, until somebody pops another gonad - probably tomorrow - we have no seat on this bus for the Migster. He can't play 3B. He can't play LF. He isn't hitting enough to DH. With the trade deadline approaching, his value continues to plummet. At this point, he might bring us little more than bullpen lug nut. And if we deal him, he could easily become the Voit/Urshela/Tauchman story for another team, a star player for the next decade. Still, short of an injury to Urshela, he has almost no path to real playing time. What a loss.

Thus, we should fear the worst: Andujar and a prospect for some overpriced inner tube, a Sidney Ponson who will contribute 15 to 25 lackluster innings and then disappear by Thanksgiving. Does the name Sonny Gray strike a familiar note?

We are entering the most terrifying week of this miniature season: The trade deadline - our annual Pearl Harbor. Here is when Cooperstown Cashman traditionally trades our future for someone else's past. Even if it seems like a good deal at the time, it generally levels off. In this case, no matter who we obtain, we could fall in the playoffs' first round, because there is no truth in a three-game set. There is only summary judgment, swift and final. 

One possible advantage: Right now, we should get back LeMahieu, Gleyber, Stanton and Paxton, or at least some of them. (You cannot trust what the Yankees say; they simply lie, and I seriously doubt Paxton will return.) Meanwhile, we need either Frazier, Ford, Hicks, Gardner or Sanchez to heat up. One or two might. That would make a huge difference. 

But be afraid. Cashman is working the phones. Be very afraid.

Virtual Baseball: The Killer D.Gs! Domingo, Deivi Hold Back Jays, as Yanks Split Series.

In Virtual Baseball this afternoon, the Yankees managed to salvage a split of their four-game set with the Toronto Virtual Blue Virtual Jays, 6-4.

Surprise starter Domingo German and pick-up man Deivi Garcia managed to (pretty much) stop the constant barrage of Toronto hits and home runs today at the Stadium.  German allowed three runs in his five innings of work, and Garcia gave up just one more, giving the bullpen a much-needed breather.

Sunday starters Mike Ford, Tyler Wade, and Kyle Higashioka all homered for the Yanks, with Higgy's two-run, opposite-field fly off the foul pole, again reliever Wilmer "Helvetica" Font deciding the issue.

Teoscar Hernandez and Randal Grichuk homered for the Bleu Jays.  But in the ninth, it all came down to Garcia trying to get the final out against Joe Panik, with the bases loaded.  With the sold-out Stadium crowd stamping and clapping, Deivi managed to push Panik's button by telling him his shoes were untied, then striking him out with a perfect, off-speed curve.

Meanwhile, joyous Republican delegates piled into Charlotte, North Carolina, for the start of their party's convention tomorrow.

Giddy with the fact that the Dow Jones average has remained near 60,000 despite ongoing revelations about secretly owned Russian finance companies—the latest, Izsheet.com, was exposed today—and that President Trump is still drawing at least 55 percent of the vote in most polls, the delegates were expecting a four-day loveliest, with all that loving enhanced by copious amounts of liquor and barbecue.

Ho-Hum....

The Yankees have a few more days off.

Maybe more than a few.

At some point.....something might happen. 

Wake me when it does. 

Thanks.

This is it.

 The ultimate hedonistic mansion for the Jeff Bezos of chipmunks.  

If the season ended today...

 Luke Voit is the AL MVP.

We are the fourth seed in the AL.

And we have one reliable starting pitcher.

So it goes...

Virtual Baseball: Tanaka Falls, Yanks Fall Two Back. Can Hell Be Far Behind?

Your Virtual New York Yankees took a second straight shellacking at the hands of the Toronto Blue Jays today, falling to the Canadian Birds by 13-6.

Starter Masahiro Tanaka, insisting on taking the mound despite the visibly bulging thrombosis in his pitching arm, surrendered a bases-clearing, three-run triple to Billy McKinney, just returned from the DL, in the first.

Later, the Jays would add home runs by, as usual, Vlad, Jr., Bo "The Real" Bichette, and Lourdes "The Cure" Gurriel, Jr., piling on against the usual parade of anonymous Yankees relievers.

Walkie Tauchman, Thairo Estrada, and Luke Voit all homered for the American side, but that was not enough to keep Tanner Roark from gutting out a workmanlike win, with some sturdy relief work from Jacob Waguespack.

"Let's face it:  we're a names team.  We got names like nobody's business," B.J. manager Charlie Montoyo said afterwards.  "If people can't even pronounce 'em, I don't see how they beat 'em."

In other virtual Yankees news today, general manager Brian Cashman filed a $400 million claim with Suckers Lloyd's of London, asserting that Giancarlo Stanton, Yankees man of knowledge, must have surely expired in the sharknado that devastated The Field of Dreams after the Yankees win there nine days ago.

Asked if the claim was not premature, Cashman replied, "What, nine days?  You think any body goes undetected that long?  The stink alone would tell you where it is.  No, no, Stanton was probably ripped into tiny little pieces and scattered over half the Plains states.  No offense to his family, we hope he turns up okay.  But business is business."

Cheer up, Duque!

Congratulations to Clint Frazier for being voted the @MontefioreNYC Doing More Player of the Week. pic.twitter.com/8U9wPdxwTC

— YES Network (@YESNetwork) August 22, 2020

Jordy Mercer to the Rescue

Yep, that is the brilliant, Brian Cashman answer to the latest wave of injuries:  signing a completely anonymous, 33-year-old middle infielder who has recently been dumped by Pittsburgh and Detroit.

Boy, Kyle Holder must feel good about himself.

I just want to supplement our Peerless Leader's take on how of course Yankees get injured in droves in the Brian Cashman years, because that's all too often the sorts of players he is acquiring:  overaged guys trying to hang on.

That's certainly true.  But what's also remarkable are the number of guys who AREN'T all that old who now get hurt.

Stanton wasn't that old, but he was a guy with a long history of injuries.  Made no nevermind to our Brian.  James Paxton, in 6 major-league seasons as a starter, had averaged fewer than 100 innings a year.  Bring him on board!

Even worse are the number of downright young, budding stars who now get hurt.

Once upon a time, I would've heard about The Gleyber's injury, for instance, and told myself, Phew! So THAT explains why he's been sucking so badly:  he's been playing hurt.  Well, all we have to do is wait for him to get well, and I'm sure he'll be a star again.

No more.  Now the injuries and the failures seem to me to be one and the same, because they come from the same place.

The Gleyber, if you'll recall, tore up his arm sliding home in a big Scranton Railroaders game, an injury that might well have cost our boys in pinstripes a ring in 2017.

Not to worry.  Just a freak injury, right?  Then came some 20 games missed in 2018, another 18 in 2019—significant absences for such a young player.  And now this.

It has been the same with so many others:  The Sanchise, Sevvy, Andujar, Judge.

Pretty much a whole dynasty worth of young stars, who constantly get injured, and whose game starts to slide at the same time.  Chicken, egg?  Or chicken and egg salad—who cares, it is still an unsightly mishmash.

I don't know what it is, precisely:  The lost playing time?  PEDs?  Overtraining?  Over-compensation?

But it's always the same.  Players—even YOUNG, star players—come up to the Yankees, get hurt, and get worse.  Or they get worse and they get hurt.  It doesn't make a dime's worth of difference.

Training and instruction, top to bottom, needs to scrapped and rebuilt in this organization, starting with its constantly self-serving, self-promoting head of baseball operations.

And while I quite agree with El Duque about hating tanking, this would be a great moment to do a one-time only tank and start over—first and foremost with front office personnel.

The Mortimer Opening

 

The Yankees have shown what they can do when all their pieces are on the board.

We have also recently experienced some clear mis-moves leading to a sweeping failure. 

And it should by now be obvious that we can never keep all these pieces on the board. 

Time to trap the AL East in a different way.  An unsuspecting way.

Time to make dramatic moves using unknown and, more importantly, unexpected players.

Some might say:  "out with the old, in with the new."  I say; lay the damn trap.

This is the time of year ( Aug 31 trade deadline ) when we have to fear Cashman.  He always exposes our Queen either short-term or long term.   This year he needs to "shock and awe" by trading unforeseen players for unforeseen players.  Lure the opposition into lethargy.

Get rid of Chapman; Hicks; Sanchez ;Paxton: Stanton; Happ and a few other of the "done and dusted. "  Take youth and speed. 

Attack with a new army.  Entice the enemy into blurry overconfidence, then surround and pierce the King. 

This is the moment for radical change. 

If not, it is going to be a frustrating and awful year.  Again.

Questions for the viral "All-Star break"

Around the midway mark of every season, baseball traditionally takes a few days off for the all-star game, the home run derby, and serious, morning-to-night drinking. 

This year, thanks to the doorknob-licking Mets - (in a pandemic, are strip clubs really worth it?) - the Death Star has a weekend to ponder several existential questions about life and society. Where the hell is Martin Buber when we need him? So, anyway, just wondering...

1. Why, why, WHY... WHY THE FUCK are we once again being carpet-bombed by injuries? Last winter, we changed trainers. We might as well have changed deodorants. For the last two years, we've seen rolling waves of players - like California blackouts - overwhelm the injured list. We thought it was a statistical aberration, the roll of cosmic dice, a practical joke played upon us by the juju gods. We thought it would end, you know, just go away one day, like a miracle, right? 

Well, Aurec Goldfinger wouldn't think so. As he told Bond: Once is happenstance, twice coincidence and three times, enemy action. This, my friends, is enemy action. So, you ask... who is the enemy? 

We are.  

I suggest this Picketts' Charge of injuries stems from the types of players the Yankees love to collect: Vets who were once all-stars, who have big contracts, and who are pushing their bodies to achieve skill levels that no longer exist. 

Some players extend their careers by redefining themselves, either by adding new pitches or adjusting their swings. And some players just try to throw harder or swing harder. And they hurt themselves. 

Jason Giambi once the New York experience to rock star status. He had one great year as a Yankee and then began to wilt. At the end, he was a dead pull swinger barely capable of hitting his weight - nothing like the power-to-all-fields slugger he'd been eight years earlier. Nobody ever accused him of not trying. His body simply couldn't do what it once had done.  

The Yankees keep collecting stars like Giambi. Their attempts to win every year are commendable. I hate franchises who purposely tank, who try to finish last, and who then congratulate themselves for rebuilding. But at some point, the Yankees must stop absorbing players in the twilight of their careers. You know their names: Stanton, Paxton, Chapman, Britton, etc., maybe Gardy, though he's a special case. 

At some point, the Yankees must do what every other team does: Trade aging players for youth.

Frankly, I was dismayed last winter when they re-signed Aroldis Chapman. I don't oppose Hal Steinbrenner spending money. But wouldn't we be better off finding and developing a young closer? Isn't it a sure thing that, in two years, Chapman will be regularly failing?

Next winter, a perfect place to start changing our ways: Gary Sanchez. 

2. Where, where, WHERE THE FUCK would we be without last year's scrap heap pickups: Luke Voit, Gio Urshela and Mike Tauchman? 

Right now, the 2020 Yankees are their team. Our vaunted depth has dwindled down to Tyler Wade and Thairo Estrada - two guys who deserve a month to show their stuff. But will they get a shot? Or will the Yankees - see above - trade for a veteran? 

Finding useful position players has been Cooperstown Cashman's greatest success. Unfortunately, this year, Yankee scouts cannot comb the minor leagues for spare parts. We need to find replacements on the taxi squad in Scranton. Do we have them?

3. Will these games even matter? The cancelled Mets series reminds us how fragile this season remains. As schools reopen across America, will the virus explode into a second wave? And if so, are the playoffs fundamentally doomed?

Obviously, we don't know the answers. But this we do know: The Yankees almost surely will qualify for the post season. They have too good a team to fall completely out of the race, which will probably allow a few sub-.500 teams to reach the post-season. 

Thus, come October, the Yankees will face a best-of-three playoff round. Repeat after me: "Ugh." And without fans in the seats, aside from the chance to sleep in their own beds, their home field advantage will be almost nothing.  

Anything can happen in a best-of-three. We can go in with baseball's best record and go out with 18 innings of hapless, free-swinging strikeouts and two bombed relievers. What happened in August won't matter. Best of three. Ugh.  

If players like LeMahieu and Gleyber can return with enough time to hone their bats, these games - and maybe these injuries - don't matter. 

Soon, we'll hit the point where a hamstring ends a player's season. We're not there yet, but it's coming. And if these injuries don't start disappearing, we're dead. We just don't know it yet. So... what was on the list for this weekend? Heavy, morning-to-night drinking? Sign me up.

Virtual Baseball: Happ Slapped By Vicious Birds Again, Yanks Fall Out of First!

It was Strong Blood Lines Night in the virtual Boogie-Down virtual Bronx tonight, as a host of genetically blessed Blue Jays plastered starter J.A. Happ, 15-7.

Happ was hit and hit hard, from the very beginning of the night, by the sons of sporting greats gone by.  Vlad Guerrero, Jr., Bo "The Right Bichette, Brian" Bichette, and Cavan Biggio all launched rockets blasts in the opening innings, to build an early, 11-1 lead for the Birds in Bleu.

(Brandon Drury, grandnephew of "Advise and Consent" author Allen Drury, fared less well, going 0-4 on the night, but did entertain reporters with his political prognostications before the game.)

Matt Shoemaker, the Blue Jays starter and grandson of the great jockey, Willie Shoemaker, baffled Yankees hitters at first, throwing knee-high strikes with impunity, thanks to a frame that matches his granddaddy's 4-foot-10, 91-pound physique.

But after the Yanks adjusted and Miguel Andujar, Gio Urshela, and Clint Frazier golfed balls out of the yard, Shoemaker was replaced by former Yank A.J. Cole.  In the end, A.J. got the win over J.A., the teammate of G. Cole, though he did surrender a solo homer to D.J. LeMahieu.  Got that?

The loss dropped the Yankees one game behind the Tampa Bay Rays, the Joe Biden of baseball.

But most of the public was no doubt distracted by the wild events of this week's Democratic convention in Milwaukee, which culminated when rogue congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard and her Red Surfer Commandos, attempted to storm the convention center and forcibly have her declared the party nominee over Biden.

The coup attempt went awry after the Red Surfer Commandos broke into the convention hall's vodka cabinet and were soon incapacitated, but Gabbard was able to escape in a private jet piloted by James Mason out of Mount Rushmore National Park, and was reportedly on the way to Russian airspace.

After miraculously surviving the violent attack, Biden's popularity skyrocketed to a new high of 19 percent.

"Let Me Tell You How It Will Be."

With apologies to the Fab Four's classic complaint about the burdens of the progressive income tax, which has surely limited their collective wealth to a tad under $536 gazillion.

Gotta go against the usual perspicacity of our Dauntless Leader, Alphonso, for once.  I think the Yanks actually got a break, thanks to the Mets' Covid outbreak (and not that I would wish the disease on anyone).

The Metsies, of course, always treat their annual 4-6 games against our boys like their World Series.  Now, with the Polar Bear just starting to hit again, Jogginson C. obviously in possession of some great new PEDs, and a bullpen of former Yanks Dellin Betances, Justin Wilson, and Chasen Shreve, they were all set up to rout us in at least 4-5 of our scheduled contests in this rump season.

The showdown against the team that Bernie Madoff built was to be 6 of the next 11 contests, with the others against Atlanta and our new nemesis,the Tampa Bay Witness Protection Program.  We were staring at a possible 14 straight losses, which must surely be a Bombers record of some kind.

The Met part of that may all be thrown off now, at least in that they get 3 days to lose their mojo.  When you're bad and hurting, you always want to be the team with days off, as opposed to when you've just finished thrashing those Miami Marlins, as our Flushing friends managed to do.

In any case, though, the last 24 games were against a perfect array of patsies:  the Orioles, the Blue Jays, the Red Sox, and a final 3 against Miami.

Say the Yankees had somehow managed to pull out 4 of the Evil 11 games—which is saying a lot—and then gone 16-8 versus The Collected Hamburger Meats of the World, and we were talking a final record of 36-24.

Good enough to make the playoffs, maybe even good enough to win the division, and CERTAINLY good enough for the collected muddlebrains of the New York sporting press to proclaim again what a genius Brian Cashman is, and moan about all those bad-luck injuries when this team is, inevitably bounced in the first best-of-three series because—surprise, surprise—it has no starting pitching behind Gerrit Cole.

Well, que sera, sera, and that may still well happen depending on time and tide and aerially transmitted disease.  But this is what drives so many of us so crazy:  the insistence, year after year after year, that a team we all KNOW cannot win a World Series still has a genuine chance.

So Who Is Up Next?

 

We were supposed to recover from the Tampa horror by playing the Mets who, ordinarily, are at our level of incompetence. 

Now, Covid has shut that down.  Who went to the strip club and when?

So, instead of " getting right back on the horse " as they say, the Yankees get to stew for days and days over how Tampa has our number.  Gleybar can ice his leg and remember his bad throws  Others can remember striking out with the bases loaded.  Thoughts become nightmares. 

I think it is becoming clear why there is no help coming this year from our minor league system.:

 How is anyone going to get " major league " ready hitting wiffle balls off a tee in a public park down by the river in Scranton?  Seriously, it would be better if our " alternative site were in Japan somewhere. 

I think MLB should be flexible and let the Yanks play the Cardinals  They have about 20 games to catch up and we need the work.

Which reminds me:  in a Covid year is there a required minimum number of games a team must play to qualify for the year end tournament? If a team is 4-1 in mid-September ( best winning % ), do they still get a slot in the playoffs?

Baseball has already passed the date by which I predicted they would have to fold their tents ( 8/15) , so I give them credit. 

But with hot spots still flaring up, I continue to worry.

Once again, as they do every year, the Yankees have fallen into The Abyss

Okay - (sigh) - anybody out there? Can you hear me? If you can hear this, take a deep breath. Breathe in... breathe out. Ahh...

Now, a temperature check: Ninety-nine point two. Close enough. Finger in the Pulse Oximeter: Eighty eight. Hmm. Let's try later. Look, if you're reading this, let's assume you're alive. Okay? Breathe in... breathe out...

In this fart of a season, the Yanks have now played 26 games. 

In a normal year, 26 games puts us into late May. The kids are in school, the trees are budding, and we haven't even bought the beer for Memorial Day. And in a normal year, brace yourself: Because this is when the Yankees always collapse.

Yes, we get humiliated. We are blown out in Fenway, or on the West Coast, or anywhere but Baltimore. This prompts everyone on this blog to proclaim the season over, the Yankees dead, and to scream that Gary Sanchez must be traded for a can of Alpo. (The Sanchez thing is a rather new tradition, but you get the point.) 

But the truth is, in a normal year, the long grind ahead is our best buddy, because by mid-August, every team of over-achievers will be knuckle-dragging, and we'll be catching fire.

Normally, by late August, the Yankees have played 100 games, and the crises of mid-May are laughable, compared to the tough week ahead. By then, the Yankees would have dealt with a wave of injuries - yes, what we're seeing is normalcy - by promoting kids from Scranton or visiting the vast Triple A scrap heap. By now, the Yankees would be enjoying the fruits of a few "once-around-the-league" newcomers. 

But it's not mid-May. It's late August, and - get this: Gio Urshela and Gleyber Torres lead the Yankees with 78 at-bats apiece. Seventy-eight. Yep, not one Yankee has yet come to the plate 100 times. How do you judge anybody on such a small sample size? (Miguel Andujar has three times been kicked back and forth, and he has - gulp - 21 at-bats.)   

Last year, the month of May began an amazing influx of no-name replacements, leading to a great narrative: Players seizing their one shot at glory, on the game's biggest stage. In many ways, we were spoiled.

This year? Well, we're probably fucked. This week brought our annual collapse: Dropping three at home, while losing several stars to injuries. Wanna see kids enjoying their first taste of the bigs? Look to Baltimore or Tampa, or anywhere but the Bronx.  

This year, the Yankees have no rookies, aside from rotating bullpen lug nuts who collectively make up the roster's last man. This year, the Yankees have fielded a veteran team, the kind that could shrug off a May crisis, knowing the long haul was in their favor. But the joke is on us. This year, there will be no 100th game in August. This year, the wheels won't necessarily fall off over-achieving teams. 

From now on, every Yankee injury is a season-killer. And every slump guarantees an off-year.

But if we are mentally in late May, the best part of 2020 might still be coming.

If James Paxton is out, we could soon see Clarke Schmidt, the former first-round pick. And if Schmidt isn't throwing well in Scranton, we might glimpse Deivi Garcia, the new next-Pedro. Will they succeed? Fuck if I know. But Tampa just gave us an old-fashioned whupping, and we never even heard of half their pitchers. Maybe it's time for a little less Ottavino and a little more Schmidt. 

If Gleyber goes down - God forbid - we might see Kyle Holder, reputed for years to be the best fielding SS in our system, and one of the finest in the minors. Could he go a month before pitchers find his flaws? Fuck if I know. But remember: this year, once-around-the-league goes a lonnnng way. 

If - no, when - Aaron Hicks tweaks something, could we see Estevan Florial, the former phenom, before he is dealt for a 30-something salary dump? Could he be a breath of fresh air? Fuck if I know. But it would be fun to see.

After winning, watching rookies has always been the best part of fandom. Maybe, just maybe, this week's collapse will bring some youngsters our way. Because only they can save us from The Abyss.