Yesterday's Yankee game was one for the books.According to today's Times, the Yanks have never before surrendered 14 runs in a single inning. But they did yesterday. And ended up with possibly the most humiliating final score I've ever seen (22 to 4).
Throughout yesterday's game, I kept calling my father up and saying, "I can't believe what just happened. I just can't believe it!" (I called him so many times that he insisted I stop.)
Let's make it official, Yankee fans: You're in for a very long and painful season.
Of course, a part of me secretly delighted in how badly the Yanks lost it yesterday; it had the kind of morbid fascination of a train wreck. And I think that a good sportswriter should start shopping around a book, "2009: the Year the Yankees Fell Apart." (Heck, I'd buy it.)
It's not just the fact that the current Yankee roster is (Jeter and Posada aside) pathetic. It's not just that Girardi appears to have no idea how to lead this team. It's not that they have serious pitching problems. (The most immediate question: What to do with Chein-Ming Wang? I think the answer is pretty obvious: Send him down to the minors. Who the fuck cares if another team picks him up if he's pitching this badly?)
I think that this opening week at the new stadium bodes extremely badly for the franchise's future prospects.
One of the things I always detested about the Yankee's business model was the fact that they essentially bought their success.
Unlike a scrappy team like, say, the Oakland A's, who had limited budgets and would sift through the second run players to find the schlubby, but undervalued players, the Yankees never really had to do that. Alex Rodriguez is hitting 50 homers a season? Steinbrenner could afford the $275 million price tag.
But if you look at the Post's blog item I posted above, after the discussion of what to do with Wang, there's a photo of all the empty luxury boxes. My father went to the game on Friday and he said that there were a lot of empty seats. For the second game in the brand new stadium that's a very troubling sign.
Given how bad the economy is, I thin the Yankees are going to lose money hand over fist if their team sucks, too. And how are they going to buy their next winning team if they have no money?
The Yankee thread unravels...
