Just like last time the Red Sox swept the Yankees, some journalist is going to publish something ridiculous about how terrible the Yankees are. The offender this time is Gordon Edes.
(Look, I hate the Yankees, and am loving the Sox 8 - 0 record vs. them, but I can't deny that they're a good team. That's what makes the rivalry fun. There's no joy in winning 8 games against, say, the Washington Nationals, because you're supposed to win all 8 of them.)
Brace yourself for this one.
BOSTON – A regular bunch of pinstriped artists, these Yankees. They can’t beat the Red Sox, so all they want to do is draw the big picture for you. Joe Girardi talked about the big picture. So did CC Sabathia, Nick Swisher, Derek Jeter and Johnny Damon. At any moment, you expected the Yankee clubhouse guys to start passing out sketch pads and brushes.
That was a terrible joke, and I know something about terrible jokes, given how many I've made in the short lifespan of this blog. I would also like to point out that one does not use "sketch pads" to paint. (Like the name suggests, one uses them to sketch.) YOU SIR FAIL AT EVERYTHING.
“It hasn’t been fun for us against the Red Sox,” Girardi said after the New York Yankees fell to 0-8 against the Red Sox this season following a 4-3 collapse Thursday in which they couldn’t hold a two-run lead in the eighth with their best pitcher, Sabathia, on the mound. “But the big picture is, there is a long way to go.”
Well, we’re here to paint a different picture for you, one that doesn’t employ the don’t-worry, there-are-over-100-games-left broad strokes offered in defeat by the Bombers.
Oh, breaking out your sketch pad, are you? I eagerly await your I-Am-Going-To-Say-Somtehing-Totally-Retarded pointillism masterpiece. Seurat himself will no doubt rise from the grave and salute you. (Or maybe just Bob Ross. Incidentally, I think Zombie Bob Ross would totally beat Zombie Seurat in a fight.)
Anyways, I'm going to take the middle road between Edes and Girardi, because I think they've both got valid points. Picking eight isolated games in which a team loses all 8 of the games is not a good barometer to said team's merits because of the small sample size. I will say, however, that all 8 of these losses are to Yankees' main rival in the division, so they do count for more than Girardi wants to admit. If the team fails to win the division this year, I think the 8 losses to the Red Sox to open the season series will be very significant.
Many fans know enough hardball history to recall that as recently as last season, the Tampa Bay Rays spent the summer unable to beat the Red Sox in Fenway Park, then turned it around with a huge series win in September and won the ALCS against Boston in October. Some New Yorkers with longer memories will recall that the powerhouse Mets in 1988 won 10 of 11 regular-season games from the Dodgers, holding them to a grand total of 18 runs in those games, only to lose the NLCS in seven games to L.A.
But these Yankees haven’t yet earned the right to take the long view, not when they’ve been a portrait of shocking imperfection against the Red Sox, displaying flaws that could well mean Steinbrenner & Sons will once again be questioning their investments come October. You pony up over $423 million for three players, like the Yankees did last winter, and you expect masterpieces, not something you’d be embarrassed to hang in your basement.
Okay, let's break this down: Team A sucks miserably against Team B, then finally does something good against Team B in the playoffs. So the Yankees could easily be Team A and the Red Sox could easily be Team B this season. Except this can't be true because the Yankees just finished losing 8 games in a row to the Red Sox meaning they are a terrible team and therefore cannot possibly do something good late in the season. The only way this is logic is if you're a dadaist.
I'm also ashamed to hang Edes' metaphors in my basement, mostly because I fear someone would catch me and wonder why I was trying to nail an imaginary concept to a wall.
Maybe that’s the real reason for all those empty front-row seats in the new Yankee Stadium. Why pay top dollar to see a team that, whenever their archrival shows up, reminds their fans that the grandeur of their new surroundings can’t by itself restore a balance of power that has shifted since 2004 from the Bronx to the Back Bay? Yankees president Randy Levine would disagree, but you might as well spend your bucks on soccer instead.
I'll agree with this, considering that this series WAS IN BOSTON. Anyone that bothered to show up to Yankee Stadium for the last three games probably wouldn't have enjoyed themselves much. Trivial factual accuracy aside, the I'm-Going-To-Say-Something-Completely-Retarded pointillism masterpiece just arrived. Yankees fans don't go to other games against other teams because of the team's woes vs. the Red Sox. Zombie Seurat is disappointed to discover that he cannot eat your non-existent brain, Gordon Edes. (Zombie Bob Ross, on the other hand, is muttering something about happy trees.)
Also, I'll have to double check this, but I'm pretty sure the worth of a front-row seat at Yankee Stadium is roughly equivalent to the entire net worth of Major League Soccer.
Before arriving on Yawkey Way this week, the Yankees had a built-in excuse for losing their first five games against the Boston Red Sox. They didn’t have A-Rod, who was still recovering from hip surgery.
Plus their pitching sucked.
But this week Rodriguez was back, expensive new bauble Mark Teixeira came into town riding a hot streak of seven home runs in his last 15 games, and the pitching could hardly have been lined up better – new imports A.J. Burnett and Sabathia bookending Chien-Ming Wang, who was supposedly on the comeback trail.
"Hardly have been better"? You have one over-rated pitcher, one very good one, and one who had a 14.46 ERA coming into his start last night.
So what happens? Burnett and Wang couldn’t get out of the third inning in their starts.
I wasn't particularly surprised that Burnett sucked, but my feelings on him are already well-known. Also, scientists apparently have managed to distill optimism into an inject-able form and given Edes a good dose straight into the back of the skull, because there's no other reasonable explanation for his surprise at Wang's performance. HIS ERA IS OVER 14. (Yes, I know, I constantly mention how ERA is a bad way to judge a pitcher, but having an ERA of 14 after throwing over 20 innings is universally horrific. In his *best* start of the season Wang went 4.2 innings and gave up 5 runs. The dude can't pitch.)
Sabathia pitched magnificently but was brought down by a guy he could stuff in his back pocket and still have room for his wallet – Dustin Pedroia, the Red Sox gnat who refused to yield in a 10-pitch at-bat before drawing a walk that galvanized Boston’s winning rally....
Thus the sportswriter fetish for "scrappy" white guys continues. You could easily replace the "Dustin Pedroia" in that sentence with "David Eckstein", "Scott Podsednik", or "Darin Erstad" and find it had been written roughly 47891323409214213 times before. (Though the Erstad ones would also have some mention about how he used to be a punter.)
...“Look, there are more than 100 games to go. Our day is going to come. But we got outplayed these eight games. They played us well. There have been some close games, some we probably should have won. But we’ve made way too many mistakes.”
It began with Rodriguez, who couldn’t get the ball out of his glove for an easy force play Tuesday night. Yankees right fielder Nick Swisher missed a fly ball Wednesday night, then committed an unholy base-running gaffe Thursday, getting doubled off second by left-fielder Jason Bay after a leadoff double in the second inning. “I thought the ball was going halfway up the wall,” Swisher said...
What actually occured was Swisher was too busy drawing a pentagram in the infield dirt to notice Bay had caught the ball. Fortunately for Swisher, his ritual was completed before he was out, and Beezlebub was still summoned. (Nick Green, alas, was promptly killed). The day was saved when Indiana Jones showed up (being pursued by Nazis, of course) and closed up the portal to Hell by...DID YOU PROOFREAD THIS ARTICLE GORDON EDES? Isn't there something called an "editor" who can let you know when you make poor adjective choices? Is this really what journalism has devolved to?
The rest of this article talks about the various ways in which the Yankees lost the game. There's nothing particularly mock-worth (since it's just summary), except for this:
...Pedroia, the next batter, fouled off five straight two-strike pitches, three of which were clocked at 95 miles per hour...
We need to know this because Dustin Pedroia is incapable of hitting any pitch thrown faster than 76.2 miles per hour. (It's like Speed, except without the terrorists and bombs and Keanu Reeves.)
So the Yankees go home to face the Mets, two games behind the Red Sox in the AL East, yet miles behind in how they are perceived.
“I’d like to sit up here and say, ‘It never means more than it means,’” Red Sox manager Terry Francona said. “But it’s hard not to get excited.”
Now, that’s a truer picture.
What Francona is actually saying here is he's trying hard to not excited over a relatively meaningless 3-game sweep (much like the point Girardi was making). So, ultimately, you have just contradicted the entire purpose of your poorly argued article. Bravo, Gordon Edes, bravo.
Now if you'll excuse me, Zombie Bob Ross has filled up my sketch book with paintings of happy trees and is starting to look a wee bit peckish...
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