Wanna do something scary? Imagine the Yankees without Judge and Soto

Lately, there's been talk - angry, furious, tongue-lashings - that the '24 Yanks are fundamentally flawed, that they cannot rally, they cannot close, and they will not be around on Columbus Day.  

At times we have taken part in such rage-filled conversations. 

Were this blog a book club, we'd be reading The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. 

That said, let's ignore the shallowness of last night's victory over sad Chicago. We won. That's all that matters, right? Today, let's discuss the one clear path to an October float ride down the Canyon of Heroes. Here's how it happens:

Aaron Judge and Juan Soto go on simultaneous tears, hitting multiple HRs in every game, leading us to double-digit outcomes. We win by scores of 10-9, 12-11, 15-14 - games that run six hours and end with shortstops on the mound. We've seen these games. Whenever our batting order turns around, the other team weeps. And the Yankees win. Usually, anyway.

As Jake Barnes said to Lady Brett, isn't it fun to imagine? The modern era's Ruth & Gehrig, Mantle & Maris, (Winfield & Mattingly?) marching toward Cooperstown. The greatest one-two punch in this millennium. And there they are, right next to each other in the outfield - GASP - waiting for a FUCKING POP FLY IN THE GAP?

That's right. What if the worst happens - a fly ball into CF/RF - both fielders converging at high rates of speed, the kind of collision that totals a Chrysler and - in one eternal moment, sidelines baseball two best hitters... what if they, gulp, crash? 

Okay, before you get angry, I am only saying this as a way of ensuring that it doesn't happen. I mean, what are the odds that I would predict such an event? Impossible, right? Remember, I predicted Jesus Montero would be in Monument Park, and not eating an ice cream sandwich.  

Right now, Judge and Soto would finish 1-2 in the AL MVP vote. Both are legitimate contenders for the Triple Crown, (though, for that to happen, Bobby Witt Jr. must slump.) Yank fans probably view Judge as the rightful MVP - he doesn't have Soto protecting him in the order - but if the Asteroid hits, here is our lineup.

Actually, no. It's this:

Verdugo LF

Stanton DH

Wells C

Torres 2B

Grisham CF

Cabrera 3B

Volpe SS

LeMahieu 1B

The Martian? RF

Yes, they won't even have Jahmai Jones, who left for Tokyo. You are gazing at a team that finishes six games below .500, somewhere between the Tigers and Pirates. And let's face it, if Judge/Soto falls, wouldn't Giancarlo's hamstring be far behind?

The moral of the story? Simple. Some players - you know who they are - must start hitting. Not just a mini-streak. They must be AL Players of the Month. They must hit .350. They must save their seasons. And they must save the '24 Yankees. Because not even the greatest twosome in modern history save float this boat. They need help.

An Above Average Haiku Tuesday ~ "Our Infield! Our BullPen*! Our Manager! Our Team!" Edition

 

Nice try, Yankees, but the Worst Loss of the Season still remains Verdugo's Face Plant.

Let's give this plucky, artistic NY nine credit for perfecting The Art of The Great Loss. 

Last night, they not only fell to the worst MLB team in recent history, they were blown out - humiliated, embarrassed, pilloried as a steaming lump of sporting incompetence. For sheer fiasco cred, you've got the Spanish Armada, Napoleon's drive into Russia, Yahoo Serious... and now, a looming series loss to the fabled '24 White Sox. 

Still, I'm sorry, Yankee sprayers of dismay... 

Last night's disaster cannot top the loss to Baltimore on All Star Break Eve - our leader in the clubhouse, still the gold standard for mortification. On that bleak afternoon, we bundled two errors with a closer meltdown to gift 1st place to the O's, punctuating the event with Alex Verdugo's immortal face-plant, while chasing a routine fly. 

I have a feeling that Verdugo's flop will haunt him - and this franchise - for years to come - a dark symbol of Steinbrennerian malfeasance, and - perhaps - the precise moment when Brian Cashman's seat atop the Yankee tower of shit began to shift. 

Still, let's celebrate an incredible collapse. Last night was truly awful, amplified by a dreadful outing from the recent trade "acquisition," Enyel "Yerry" de los Santos. If you remember correctly - (I don't blame you if you blotted it out) - "Yerry" was supposed to bolster our crumbling bullpen. Last night, he gave up 7 earned runs, 5 before recording an out. His ERA is now 5.79. 

Any other pitcher would be released today. But he was Cashman's last door prize at the deadline, so he'll probably get another shot at throwing gasoline at the dumpster fire.    

This came shortly after Jazz Chisolm Jr. left the game with a sore elbow. Today, he will get an MRI. If you're keeping score, the third Yankee obtained at the trade deadline, Mark Leiter Jr., gave up two HRs the other night. Before that, he had given up just two HRs all season. 

We might go 0-for-3 in trades, though the YES apparatus will assure us that we gave up nobody of consequence. They always do. 

Yes, last night was a grand humiliation, maybe a fulcrum point for 2024. The Yankees either win the next two, or they will lose a series to what is basically a mediocre Triple A club. 

You could say that no MLB team looks like a champion. Last night, Baltimore lost again. They have squandered multiple ops to run away with the division. No team in baseball is on course to win 100 games. (The highest projections: 96.) If any team gets hot, the AL East is theirs for the taking.

But who pitches our 7th, 8th and 9th? Scott Proctor? As our journey continues, considering our bullpen, one troubling thought keeps rising: 

The worst is yet to come.

Happy 49er Day!

 

No, not this guy, or the football players.

This morning's standings show that every single team in the major leagues has now lost at least 49 games. 

Why is this significant? 

It means that no team can possibly surpass the 1998 Greatest Team Ever We Were Alive To See Them Yahoo And This Will Keep Us Warm In Our Old Age Of Otherwise Bitter Fandom Disappointment New York Yankees.

Those Yankees, you will recall, won a record 125 games, regular season and postseason combined. They took 114 games during the campaign, then 11 more in October. 

Nobody has ever done that. Not the 1906 Chicago Cubs—106-46 in the regular season, but only 2-4 in the World Series—or the 2001 Seattle Mariners (116-46 April-September, but only 4-6, in the American League playoffs).

Nope. Once you reach 49 losses, you can only win 113 regular-season games, which means only 124 total, one short of the 1998 GTEWWATSTYATWKUWIOOOOBFDNYY.

(I know, I know: Theoretically, a team could win 113 regular-season games, come in second, third, or even fourth in their division, then win 13 postseason games as a wild card—the way the Texas Rangers did last year. That would give them 126, total. But the odds against that happening—winning 113 and NOT finishing first—are so surpassingly great that I don't want to hear anything from you mathematically inclined hockey pucks.)

Happy 49er day. Raise a toast to the team with the most—especially when it came to the bullpen.

We shall not see their likes again.

The Olympia Beer Ideal

Two weeks of contests in Paris
Of every conceivable style
Athletes honed like hardened steel
Ladecky, Tebogo, Yee, Li, Biles

What focus and determination
To swim, box, dive, run, throw
Pushing their mental endurance
And how far their bodies can go

They remind me of what John Kruk
Once told a hotel lobby hater:
"Lady, I ain't an athlete--
I'm a baseball player."

It's hard - no, impossible? - to picture the Yankees winning anything great with this bullpen

Yesterday, in the 8th - mop-up time - the Death Barge sported a five-run lead over a certified tomato can, at Yankee Stadium, with their top pitching acquisition on the mound, and fans hitting the exits. It shoulda been quick, easy... painless. 

Yeah, right. 

If ever a win felt like one big, angry, hot, spicy - a crap-a-pineapple loss - this was that. 

And if you believe the 2024 Yankees will go the distance, ride down the Canyon of Heroes, and avoid the bellicose deliriums of another early October exit, well, I need whatever you're smoking.

Listen: Braced by an incredible spring - a month of May that feels like a million years ago - the Yankees will almost surely make the 2024 postseason. You can only fall so far, so fast. But try to imagine this Edmund Fitzgerald bullpen taking the team anywhere beyond Oblivion. Do we really think Cardiac Clay Holmes can hold a one-run lead in Houston? Or at Fenway? Or even at home?

In the end, yesterday, Commander Boone called upon Cardiac Clay for a four-out save. In the grand tradition of Aroldis Chapman, the human waterfall, Holmes in the 9th, up by two, gave us P.T.S.D. Here's how it went down.

He overwhelms the first two batters - strikeouts - then up comes - um - the great Wyatt Langford.

Of course, he walks Langford. He has no choice. It's predestined, karma, fate... 

Then comes Nathaniel Lowe. Yes, THE Nathaniel Lowe. Holmes gets ahead, an 0-2 count, then... walks him. OF COURSE HE DOES.

Tying runners on base. He goes to a 3-1 count against Adolis Garcia, is forced to throw a strike - and, of course, gives up a hit.

Tying run at third. Up comes Leody Taveras, who goes to a full-count before hitting a grounder to 2B, where - considering Gleyber's recent past, there is no such thing as a sure out. Gleyber almost bobbles it, but makes the play. 

Inning over. Ballgame over. Yankees win. The Yankees win. 

But it sure doesn't feel that way.

And if you're looking for a feel-good getaway game before facing Chicago, the worst team in baseball... yikes. I dunno. Our bullpen is shot. No lead is safe. How far can a team go that way? We're about to find out. 

Runk blog ending today

 Weren't we in first place before this started?

WTF?

My head hurts. 

Could it be.....YES! Another Doubleheader !!!

 

Runk blog continues: Debbie does Dannemora

Rain.

That's all it did yesterday.

And smash in our picture window. 

Today, two. Which means a split. Which means we'll have to win tomorrow, or we'll lose our second straight series, which means we'll start looking over our shoulder at Boston...

Is the booze affecting my normal joyous hope? 

Why We Stink: How Nepo Babies and Wealthfare Cheats Wrecked New York Sports, Part IX.

 ...and don't worry, the Grande Finale! (There's only so much moaning and groaning even I can do!) But here it is:

Once it became possible to make a fortune in the sports business with no known capabilities in either sports or business, the quality of ownership inevitably declined. Nowhere is this more inescapable than in New York.

No need to have a financial wizard like Charlie Dolan in charge of the Knicks, the Rangers, and Madison Square Garden anymore; a superannuated adolescent like James Dolan, living out his fantasy of fronting for the Eagles, will do just fine. 

No need for a George Steinbrenner, with his Barnum-like instincts for showmanship and a maniacal desire to win; pleasant, distracted Hal Steinbrenner can do the job from Tampa. John Mara is a long way from his roguish grandfather, Tim Mara, a teenaged newsie-turned-bookie, who supposedly won the Giants in a hand of poker. 

Robert Wood Johnson IV, heir to Johnson & Johnson, owns the Jets with his younger brother, who will likely succeed him. Jeff Wilpon would likely have succeeded his father as principal owner of the Mets, save that he was so inept that even his fellow nepo babies rebelled, and insisted that Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz sell the team before he wrecked it.

 

Our other owners are all venture capitalists by trade, most of whom seem more interested in real estate and finance than sports (or any other real business). Hence Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov buys and flips the Nets, and Steve Cohen launches an effort to get a casino in Flushing, immediately after buying the Mets.

Sports has become simply another pillaging opportunity for such magnates of today’s paper capitalism. They make this abundantly clear at the ballpark, where all save the Yankees—for obvious reasons—have sold naming rights to faceless corporations. Where ads are stuck on the players’ jerseys, and more ads dinned into the ears of fans at brain-splitting decibel levels, blasting away any remaining chance of quiet or conversation.

These are owners who, with a few exceptions, have only the faintest, passing interest in the sports their clubs actually play. They look, instead, at expanding their footprint into similar “entertainments,” that can be synergistically leveraged to create bigger killings in real estate and finance.

(Just take a look at these amazing, power faces...

...the visages of men who built inherited empires!

And, to be fair, some who actually are first-class grifters in their own right!)

Hence Cohen’s lust for a casino—and hence the Yankees, after failing for years to develop the “Soccer City” complex they wanted to build at the Bronx’s Harlem River Yards for the NYCFC soccer team they partly own…are putting up a 25,000-seat stadium in Willetts Point. It is expected to cost the city $516 million in tax abatements over the next 50 years.

(Please note, too, how different the finished products of these Wonder Stadiums and their surrounding neighborhoods look from the bait-and-switch "models" on which they are sold.)

Harrison, New Jersey, has already built a “soccer-specific” stadium for the Red Bulls—who do pay taxes—after a bitter court fight. Soon, no doubt, we will begin to hear that a separate facilities are needed for the NJ/NY Gotham FC team in the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL), or the New York Liberty, in the WNBA. 

The possibilities are almost endless. Climate change will doubtless lead to demands for new stadiums and arenas that are sturdier, elevated, domed—and climate-controlled. The next round of construction will begin in a few years, with the heirs of heirs of heirs of our sports owners demanding and getting what could be the last buildings left standing in this coastal city.

 

But hey, when it's all over, we will have proved that wildly subsidized sports teams and their billionaire owners can con us here, just as much as they can con them anywhere!

Runk blog continues: Nasty Nestor needs new nastiness

How do you lose a series against 

a) the fucking Los Angeles Angels
b) the fucking Los Angeles Angels without their best player
c) the fucking Los Angeles Angels without their best player, at home.
d) the fucking Los Angeles Angels, without their best player, at home, in the middle of a pennant race.

How? One answer is Nasty Nestor Cortes. He is now 5-10 with an ERA of 4.42. That's not nasty. That's nice. He's Nice Nestor. He's awfully nice.

Last year, his ERA was 4.97. He's been Nice Nestor for two seasons now. He's becoming Naughty Nestor.

Frankly, we have no starter who is a sure thing, and some - Nestor and Stroman - are crapping the beds.

This is trouble.

 

The Angels. The fucking Angels, man. 

Good thing we didn't get another starter.

Nestor should be sacked from the rotation and used as a bullpen lugnut only in laughers, in or not in our favor. Where ther hell is Schmidt?

I hope Rufus is okay. Fredonia can be a rough place.

The O's lost, too, as they play good teams and we play little old ladies from Contadina.

You win some, you lose some.

You win a lot, you lose a lot.

You win once in a while, you lose a lot anyway.

Did we really need Soto to be this shitty? 

The Rufus T. Firefly Memorial Game Thread, Game Thread (we may never know why he took his down)

 

Why We Stink: How Nepo Babies and Wealthfare Cheats Wrecked New York Sports, Part VIII.

It’s incredible how many stadiums and arenas were built around New York during that “first generation” of 1964-1984—and how quickly they were demolished. 

Yankee Stadium II, Shea Stadium, Giants Stadium, the Brendan Byrne Arena, the Nassau Coliseum—nearly all gone and forgotten now, despite the roughly $384 million dollars in public money (over $2.1 billion in today’s money), expended on them.

(All have been demolished, save for the Nassau Coliseum, the home of minor-league basketball, and the Byrne Arena, now the Izod Center, home of television rehearsal stages. But we’re still paying them off!)

But it didn't end there. We kept going, of course—on to the second generation of publicly subsidized sports stadiums. Wealthfare for all!

Charlie Dolan never did get a (wholly new) Madison Square Garden. But George Steinbrenner got a third Yankee Stadium, the Mets got Citi Field, the Nets got Barclays Center, the Islanders, the UBS Arena. 

It didn’t matter how many other needs there might be in places where these teams played. The city of Newark even paid out nearly $275 million to build the Prudential Center and bring in the Devils. Just what Newark needed—a hockey team! 

Despite this immense “second round” of subsidies—now well into the billions—public authorities neither requested nor received any concessions over how local teams would run their businesses. Prices went up—and up—and ballparks started shrinking. 

 

In 2008, the New York Yankees and the Mets drew a combined 8,340,700 fans—over 2.7 more than all three New York baseball teams had drawn at the height of their popularity, in the “Golden Age” year of 1947. 

 

Barring some completely unforeseen change in, well, everything, their attendance will never reach approach these heights again.

 

Both the Mets and the Yankees made a deliberate decision to sacrifice affordable seats available to the general public, for more luxury boxes and other restricted, elite sections. Today, Yankee Stadium’s capacity has been reduced to just 46,537 for baseball, from its all-time high of 82,000 in 1927.

In other words, almost an entire Fenway Park’s equivalent of fans had been shut out of New York’s most popular ballpark. 

What’s more, at all local, major-league sports facilities in the New York area, legal tender…is no longer legal tender. In a policy of dubious legality, the nine New York teams all insist on “cashless” transactions, which they depict as some sort of consumer-friendly service, instead of the exploitive effort to harvest fans’ data that it is.

 

For that matter, New York and New Jersey have made absolutely no effort to keep prices down on your screens away from the ballpark. Nor have our public officials ever challenged, in any way, pro sports’ new, noncompetitive arrangements, which have systematically erased the city’s market advantages.

 

While New York fans are charged prices higher than almost anywhere else on the continent, much of the money they provide is siphoned off to other cities and other teams, to ensure “competitive balance.”

Revenue sharing, luxury taxes, and salary caps leveled the playing field in all the big leagues—while individual teams were still allowed to move to new cities if they got a better offer. That is, teams were allowed to freely compete with each other…only in extorting cities for enormous payouts. 

 

With pro sports cartels sharing and sharing alike, it is possible for teams to skip back and forth around the country, bidding up the publicly subsidies for their luxury-first stadiums. (Looking at you, Oakland-Los Angeles-Oakland-Las Vegas Raiders.

 

And yet because no league has built in spending “floors” to accompany its spending “ceilings,” owners are allowed the option of not really competing at all, but simply pocketing handouts from taxpayers in other cities—whether those taxpayers ever wish to see a game or not.

Over the last few decades, New York and many other big-city markets have allowed all their sports leverage to be wiped away—in exchange for nothing, and long after their economic vitality and wealth had been fully restored, making them more desirable than ever. 

 

Even the expansion of local teams here in New York by over 100 percent from 1960 to-2007—from 4 to 9—has led to no decrease in prices, and no increased competition between teams. 

Where once the city had marvelous, cutthroat rivalries between its ballclubs, now New York is a peaceable kingdom, with no owners or players much bestirred to beat even the other team(s) in town—much less win a championship.

Runk Blog continues... Somebody's fooling himself

 Gary Sanchez... the famous Number 99.

Don't he wish? 

Runk blog continues: A split against the Angels is not a split

 

When you play a crapola team, like the Angels, without their stud best player, like the Angels, and you don't sweep a doubleheader, like what we did with the Angels yesterday, you didn't split. You splattered. 

And the Yankees spatted. I turned it on in the late innings, when we were down 8-2, no hope, crowd thinning, YES team promoting tomorrow - against the frickin Angels - a laugher, a blowout, a big ugly loogy spit splat.

The Redsock fan was snickering. He says they just handled KC, and they'll make the postseason and that, "I like our chances." That's how Redsock fans talk. He thinks they're going to splatter us in October. And why wouldn't he? 

We're one game away from being beaten in a series at home by the Angels, the frickin Angels, without their best player. If that happens, we're right back into the June freefall. I need a drink.  

Notes from the old country

I hear it is possible to win both games of a double header. Obviously, not yesterday.

It's actually amazing over here in Germland. Nobody seems to care about the Yankees. Nobody. It's astounding. I've seen a couple of guys wearing Yankees caps, but it's some kind of fashion statement. Considering the rest of their outfits, it's not a statement worth repeating.

Question: how can we not have enough starters to play a double header with a reasonable chance of winning both games? I like Warren, but he's not exactly ready for the big time. And where the hell is Ron Marinara or Maraschino or however the heck it's spelled? Is he really that bad? He started out great and now...pfft. Ghosted.

Ray Milland was a gamer. Must have had a great sense of humor to do The Man with Two Heads. He was also the bad guy on a Columbo episode. My first exposure to Milland was The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, the flick that Stang mentioned. Which was a decidedly weird movie with a really nasty ending.

His old films are almost uniformly good. He did comedy, drama, sinister bastards, romance--there wasn't much he couldn't do. Kind of like the opposite of Gleyber.

Anyway, since I'm sleeping while most of the games are being played (and missing the unfolding comments until everyone else is sleeping), I just wanted to poke my head up and say Guten Tag to y'all. As others have said, IIH is a balm and a joy in a world that generally sucks, and I miss the real-time game commentary.

Here's a photo of Ray in younger days. Bryan Ferry, eat your heart out.

LOOK! Its a Double Header !!!

 

Runk blog continues... The A's just did us a huge favor...

 They lost to the White Sox, ending Chicago's losing streak at 21.

You knew the White Sox would somehow wake up and sweep the Yankees. You know why we knew this? Because we're Yankee fans, and we were put on this earth to suffer. Oh, the pain!

Runk Blog begins... All-Time Top Ten Yankees Named After a Musical Genre

As stated above...

All time Top Ten Yankees Who Were Named after a Musical Genre

1. Jazz Chisholm.
2. Tim "Rock" Raines.
3. Enos "Country" Slaughter.
4. Umm.
5. Don't tell me, I'll think of someone.
6. Disco Danny Cater?
7. Ron Gospel Guidry?
8. take it away, readers...
9. ......
10.  ....

Two today. This sucks, because we're playing the Angles, without Yacht Rock Trout, and it's hard to sweep a daily double. 

Cracking open some Labatt's Blues, the true beer of upstate NY. In bed by 4 p.m. (Sorry, Genny, but your Cream Ale still haunts. And Utica Club never made the team photo.)