We here at Baseball Prospectus are generally not in the business of Hot Takes, and justifiably so. BP prides itself on level-headed analysis and occasional jokes on the proficiency of Mark Reynolds’ vision. With the season being decidedly over, however, and the manner in which it was declared over being met with such strong reaction, it seems that now is the perfect moment to ruminate on the meaning of fandom and what exactly happened on Tuesday night.
What happened, of course, is that Dallas Keuchel went out and did Dallas Keuchel things to the Yankees. He made them look positively feeble. This was not unexpected in the least considering he made them look positively feeble the two other times he threw down with the Yankees this year and that he’s probably going to win the AL Cy Young award. It was the first time he had ever pitched on three days’ rest and that’s probably the reason his outing didn’t extend beyond a mercifully short 87 pitches. Nonetheless, Keuchel being tasked with dismantling the following lineup probably wasn’t the most challenging thing he’s ever done.
- Brett Gardner (left-handed, hasn’t hit well in a while, prone to swinging at junk when in bad stretches)
- Chris Young (professional lefty killer)
- Carlos Beltran (elderly playoff god, emphasis on elderly)
- Alex Rodriguez (still good, but 40 and playing the end of the season on two bad hips)
- Brian McCann (left-handed, lowest batting average in AL in the second half)
- Chase Headley ( ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )
- Greg Bird (left-handed, didn’t figure to be a major part of big-league roster before season, arguably too passive at the plate)
- Rob Refsnyder (.761 OPS in Triple-A this year, marked 17th big=league game of career)
- Didi Gregorius (left-handed, is Didi Gregorius)
When you also consider that Masahiro Tanaka would be unstoppable if not for the laws of physics and a propensity to give up the longball, it was pretty much set to be a long night before the game began.
None of that mattered to the fans at Yankee Stadium. Nor should it have mattered. This was a kill-or-be-killed game, a game to play for the right to all the marbles. This game was high-stakes poker and Russian Roulette played with a full magazine on national television, and the Yankees immediately had the deck stacked against them. Rodriguez named his team the underdog before the game. He was right. Being familiar with the sensation of draining hope and the New York sports world explains why Yankee Stadium went from cheering for every strike in the first inning to booing Gardner and Rodriguez at the end of the game. It doesn’t make it right.
Yankees fans are roundly regarded as some of the worst in all of sports. That’s an inevitable outcome to decades of sustained success and an ownership group that nearly prints money. Unlike, say, Cardinals fans, who are often derided for their hubris and quickness to turn on their own, Yankees fans can tend to be incredibly fatalistic when interacting amongst themselves. Perhaps this is a characteristic of the base model New York sports fan in general. Any cursory tune-in to WFAN will reveal a picture of New York sports rooted in anger and fatalism. It’s not just Yankees fans who seek any opportunity to complain about their team of choice. Mets fans display this quality too, as do Knicks fans, Giants fans, Jets fans, Islanders fans, and to some extent, Rangers fans. Yet we all know that the Mets have a wonderful propensity to devolve into bumbling nincompoops when the urge strikes them, that the Knicks are practically experts at making fools of themselves, and the Jets are, well, the Jets. It’s understandable that fans of these franchises are constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop. The other shoe has been dropping early and often for quite some time.
In fact, it’s rather easy to conclude that this is a symptom of sports no matter where the lens is turned. For some reason, rooting for laundry causes us to fetishize anger and dissatisfaction. Perhaps this came about as a result of the rise of the Skip Bayless school of sports media. The Hot Take is a near-omnipresent factor in the way the public at large digests their sports media. It has risen out of the comments section and onto the radio, and from there onto SportsCenter. It glares at you, inflames you, and then thanks you for your clicks. When a dialogue becomes the prevailing attitude in any arena it becomes gospel. So it is with the Hot Take and the sports fan. And so it was at Yankee Stadium on Tuesday night.
I was just one of the 50,000 fans at Yankee Stadium when Colby Rasmus sent Tanaka’s first pitch into orbit around Alpha Centauri. The air went out of the place so fast that the National Weather Service issued a tornado warning in Yonkers. With it went much of the hope that the night would have a positive ending. The Yankees would manage just five baserunners and struck out for 10 of their 27 outs. Nobody ventured beyond second base. It was the latest and final entry in a string of offensive humiliations.
The chatter among fans in the stands and online proved not to be focused on Keuchel’s utter brilliance or the unsurprising failure of Jacoby Ellsbury to hit after being rushed back from an injury rehab stint that saw him be scratched from the lineup at least twice without any major delay in his timetable. The dialogue was instead focused on the inability of the team to hit in the clutch, Girardi’s failure to properly manage the game, the utter travesty of the Ellsbury signing (and Ellsbury’s perceived lack of caring about the season’s proceedings), Rodriguez’s supposed status as a bad baseball player, and so on. On the subway home, I heard a bonafide “If George [Steinbrenner] was still here!”
It’s perfectly acceptable to be frustrated. In fact, frustration is a natural reaction to what happened on Tuesday night and the preceding skid into the playoffs. To blame it on a lack of good old fashioned Will To Win is foolhardy and arrogant. The sports world is correct when they label Yankees fans as spoiled. There could not possibly be a more apt description. Gardner, an All-Star and the longest tenured Yankee farm product, was booed for having a poor showing against what might have been the most unfair matchup possible for him. Rodriguez, who has been the heart and soul of the team and singlehandedly won back the city with the most improbable comeback in recent memory (AND probably should have been an All-Star too), was booed.
There’s being spoiled, and there’s being petulant. New York sports is all about asking, “What have you done for me lately?” In a way, that’s fair. But when that question is answered by looking at a sample of a few weeks and without consideration for basic outside factors like health and who the pitching savant on the mound is, it leads to ugliness and hypocrisy. Mark Teixeira was a bum until he was the best hitter on the team. Rodriguez was the bane of the team until he carried the team. Ellsbury was a terrible signing until he was a force of nature before his injury, as was Gardner. Gregorius was a terrible ballplayer and the product of a terrible trade until he settled in and became a perfectly fine shortstop. Nathan Eovaldi was a batting practice session until he wrangled his splitter and became the team’s most consistent starter.
This is a team that nobody expected to be near the playoffs. All they did was win 87 games and make it to the playoffs despite injuries and a perceived lackluster winter at the shopping mall and a quiet trade deadline. Yankees fans take Brian Cashman to the cleaners for his quiet deadline, but the fact of the matter is Cashman was hamstrung by the structure of the market and the structure of his team. Our own Kenny Ducey spoke with Cashman on Tuesday, and he detailed exactly why the end of July happened the way it did. He tried to make the bullpen better, but everyone was asking too much. He didn’t want to give up Adam Warren and Refsnyder for three months of Ben Zobrist. Luis Severino was better than any possible starting acquisition short of David Price. They were blocked from doing anything on the waiver wire in August. This is the reality of running a baseball team. It isn’t as simple as pressing the “accept trade” button in a fantasy league. Life sucks and then you die. You build a solid roster and once you lose the chance to add to it, everyone gets hurt and the Blue Jays transform into Babe Ruth.
Some Yankees fans will never be okay with the fact that Girardi wasn’t able to out-manage Keuchel’s slider. That’s a fact of life, as unfortunate as it is. That doesn’t change that there wasn’t a single player on the field last night who deserved to be booed. There wasn’t a single player on the Yankees this year who deserved attacks on their character and effort level when push came to shove. There’s no such thing as “wanting it more.” It’s a parlor trick peddled by talking heads with nothing smart to say. Being upset is perfectly fine. Being hurtful and venomous isn’t. That’s what happened at Yankee Stadium on Tuesday night, and it made the bitter taste of loss that much worse.
(Photo: Adam Hunger-USA Today Sports)