The Yankees are No Longer a Serious Baseball TEam (Game 3 Recap)
Another year, another mortifying playoff series loss brought to you by the New York Yankees. At this point, you can argue that this team being eliminated from postseason contention is more synonymous with the month of October than Halloween. While both are widely celebrated, if you don’t have kids, you eventually tone down the costuming in your late 20s. Meanwhile, as my 33rd birthday approaches, the Yankees are showing no signs of slowing down and look to continue devastating this great fanbase for the foreseeable future.
Anyone who watched Games 1 and 2 should have gotten all of the sadness and mourning out of their system. Nothing about this team had changed, and they had no chance of winning this series. My expectations couldn’t have been lower, the final result couldn’t have been any more predictable, yet I had no choice but to sit and endure the last nine innings of my baseball season. Three-plus hours and no escape from the monstrosities occurring in front of me — now I know how Dua Lipa must’ve felt with Creepy-Ass Marlins Man showing her memes and sniffing her hair all night.
While Game 3 was the best the Yankees have looked all series (basically by default), there was never a moment when you felt this team would pull out the victory needed to salvage its last remaining ounce of dignity. Max Fried almost missed the birth of his child just to provide us with yet another mediocre ALDS start, firmly supplanting himself on the Yanks’ ever-growing list of playoff no-shows. You’d think that having a front-row seat to watch this atrocious offense the past two games would have locked Max in when they managed to tie the game on two separate occasions. Yet both times, Fried instantly responded by giving up a pair of homers to right, the second of which still hasn’t landed.
Credit to Anthony Volpe. While the regular-season bar is extremely low, he is one of the only players on the team who actually improves his play come October. I knew immediately that the jabroni had reached over the fence and his game-tying homer was getting called back, but I was still proud of the kid and am more than willing to give him a fair shake at winning the second-base job next season.
He doesn’t exactly have the biggest shoes to fill, as hopefully Jazz spends the rest of his career playing baseball in Oakland, Colorado, or Mars for all I care. Boone pinch-hitting this moron in the seventh as his “do-or-die” move signaled to anyone watching that it was indeed time for this team to die. Boone’s Stantonian Hail Mary was then easily intercepted by Kevin Cash, who saw the move coming a mile away and had a side-arming righty patiently waiting to dismantle Big G.
Of all the managerial mishaps, nothing was more egregious than batting Trent Grisham leadoff. The only thing that worked all series was batting Ben Rice first. The guy was in the midst of an all-time postseason, and instead of having him bat in the ninth, we let Trent Grisham notch his fifth out of the game while Rice was forced to watch the season end from the on-deck circle.
I don’t know the next time we’ll get to see this team play baseball, but whenever that day comes, things need to be drastically different. Aaron Boone inherited a team full of young, promising players who had just gone to a Game 7 with the eventual World Series champs — who were actively cheating at the time. We’ve since injected this roster with a litany of MVPs, All-Stars, and exorbitant contracts, and the results have gradually shifted in the opposite direction.
Trust me, I’m not one of those “Fire the coach!”-after-every-loss guys. This decision should be based on the nine seasons of playoff losses that seemingly get more and more embarrassing by the year. Axing Boone isn’t going to solve everything, but it is the first necessary step in signifying that real change is coming — not only to the fans, but to the players in that locker room.
The fielding errors, mental mishaps, and general coddling of these players need to stop. What the fuck would Jeter have done if Jazz trotted out to second with a lollipop in his mouth, or if Devin Williams didn’t like how he looked clean-shaven? We used to be a serious baseball team and have slowly devolved into this collection of overpaid, entitled pansies who fail time and time again.
With a lengthy lockout expected in the coming months, we have nothing but time to make the necessary changes. We’ve clearly lost our way, and if we don’t get back to being the Yankees of old, who knows what type of support or interest this team will garner upon baseball’s eventual return?
