We're All Trying to Find the Guy Who Did This

On Elimination Day, some thoughts on the latest New York Yankees failure

“The Yankees were entitled,” The Ringer host John Jastremski said on his podcast in the immediate aftermath of Tuesday night’s Wild Card game loss to the Boston Red Sox. Jastremski is great at his job. Since he joined The Ringer from WFAN earlier this year, I’ve listened to his show multiple times per week. Jastremski just gets talk radio in a way few if any hosts raised on Mike and the Mad Dog seem to understand. He’s colorful, funny, and smart enough to know when he needs to play dumb with a guest or caller to squeeze entertainment value out of a routine conversation. (His weekly chats with former WFAN legend Joe Benigno, as well as Ringer boss Bill Simmons, are great examples of this technique.)

But Jastremski is a Yankees fan. Four years younger than even Jeffrey Maier, if Wikipedia is right, he was raised during the Yankees dynasty. And so, despite my infatuation and respect for Jastremski, he’s still got that cocky Yankees fan ego running through his soul. Nobody’s perfect. Some of my best friends are Yankees fans. But when you come of age with four World Series titles in five years — including a Subway Series pounding of the New York Mets — your DNA is altered forever.

I enjoyed Jastremski’s show this summer when the Yankees were scuffling and bad: This team sucked, and he knew it. How could he not? As constructed by Brian Cashman — perhaps the only general manager in MLB history with a lifetime contract it seems — the Yankees were always a failed experiment. The lineup was brutal, stacked with .200 hitters and Aaron Judge. The pitching staff was held together with Spider Tack and a prayer, and once Major League Baseball decided to crack down on the sticky stuff, Gerrit Cole was never the same. His second-half ERA was 4.14.

But then the Yankees, somehow, started winning. After acquiring “True Yankee” Anthony Rizzo and Joey Gallo at the trading deadline, the team ripped off 13 consecutive wins, the longest streak by any Yankees club since 1961. Even after they got beat up by the ascendant Toronto Blue Jays and corpse of the New York Mets in September, they won some more: they swept Boston in Fenway Park during a must-win weekend series and then stuck it to those same Blue Jays. Worse, Giancarlo Stanton, whose terrible contact remains terrible, absolutely exploded — and so did his smugness levels. (Stanton has a face for the Yankees dynasty; I haven’t hated a good Yankees player this much since Paul O’Neill.) It felt like this Yankees team, despite its flaws and one of the worst managers in baseball (but only the second-worst manager in New York), was ready to make my life miserable again.

The fans could sense this, too. If you listened to Jastremski’s show over the last few weeks, the callers were chirping. Jastremski was too. The realistic view of the Yankees he had on his show earlier in the season was replaced by all-caps excitement and blindness to the massive holes: a still-bad lineup, a patched-together bullpen with huge issues in the late-inning roles, and Cole, a shell of his former unhittable self. But I can’t blame him. When you’re raised to be a Yankees fan, arrogance is part of the personality. To expect anything else from a Yankees fan would be insanity.

So consider my glee when the Yankees just ate shit on Tuesday night in Boston. Cole, whose terrible contract was always terrible, pitched two innings in a knock-out game — just what Cashman must have expected when he decided to pay a starter $324 million over nine years, seven of which remain (Cole is 31 years old). Stanton continued to explode, but the Green Monster ate two of his potential three home runs. The rest of the lineup did nothing. Chad Green coughed up runs in a big spot late in the game. Aaron Boone was lost throughout, even after the final out in the 6-2 drubbing. During the post-game press conference, Boone said without a lick of self-awareness, “The league has closed the gap on us.” The Yankees have won exactly one (1) World Series title in literally 20 years. The Kansas City Royals have just as many. The only gap is between his ears.

After the game, Jastremski hosted his show from Fenway Park and took call after call from Yankees fans trashing the team, bemoaning the loss, and urging the front office to make wholesale changes. Numerous callers, as well as Jastremski, took Boone to task for his clueless comment. At one point, Jastremski blasted the Yankees for thinking they’re much better than they are. It felt like a true Hot Dog Costume Guy moment. For weeks, Yankees fans have been as delusional as Boone was last night. Someday, maybe they’ll all find the guy who did this.