Monthly Archives: August 2023

With the Yankees falling to 60-61 after one of the worst roadtrips in recent memory (2-7 in games against Chicago, Miami, and Atlanta), the baseball world has taken notice. Sure, we’ve all been watching, so we know that the Yankees have been struggling for more than a full calendar year, but now suddenly it’s a story.

The fact is, the Yankees have been under .500 for two hundred games now. I know that sounds preposterous — I mean, it is preposterous — but it’s true. On July 7th of last year, Gerrit Cole led the Yankees to a 6-5 win over the Red Sox to improve the team’s record to 60-23. They’d actually win again the next day to reach a high-water mark of 61-23, on pace to win 117 games, and all the talk was of rainbows, shamrocks, and World Series rings.

But then, as you know, the bottom dropped out. They limped home at 39-40, meaning since that win over the Red Sox, the Yankees have gone 99-101. This isn’t even a sample; this is just who they are.

Closer to the end of the season I’ll post a deeper analysis of what’s gone wrong along with my ideas about how to fix things, but for now let’s just hope they can beat the Red Sox. Because that would be nice. It’s always nice to hope.

Just when you thought things couldn’t get stranger for these New York Yankees, that’s exactly what happened.

I guess it wasn’t that much of a surprise when they essentially stood pat at the trade deadline. This team is what it is, and with no significant offensive additions available, it probably made sense not to trade away any prospects for the fool’s gold being peddled out there.

No, that’s not the strange part. Two days ago Anthony Rizzo went on the injured list with concussion-like symptoms, and he reported a few troubling things, including a recent inability to keep track of the number of outs in an inning. As much as fans might criticize Rizzo for his abysmal summer, this seems a bit more important.

Alongside Rizzo in the Life vs. Sport file, we’ve got Domingo Germán. Two days ago the Yankees announced that he will be undergoing treatment for alcoholism and will not appear again this season. When pressed about it that afternoon, all parties declined to give any more information than that, except to say that there was an incident that spurred the ultimate decision. Now we hear reports that Germán appeared to be intoxicated when he arrived at the Stadium and was physically and verbally aggressive when players and staff members attempted to manage him. (Presumably after calling the 1950s for some advice, they apparently locked him into a sauna in an effort to sweat the alcohol out.)

In the wake of all this, it’s difficult to be too concerned about how the Yankees do in this current stretch of games against some of the best teams in the American League, but that’s the nature of the game. The calendar stops for no concussion victim, no alcoholic, no suffering fan. “We play today, we win today. Dat’s it.”