Winter Begins Early......Again

Alas another Yankee season has come to a bitter and disappointing end. This has been the case since 2000 so fans should be getting used to it right? Wrong. The free world knows what fans and Steinbrenner expect every year and without which the season is an outright failure. Pay Rod went to sleep after the Boston series and Gourmet Sheff was a mere shadow of his former self. When you score 3 runs 2 games in a row, you can't expect to win both games, let alone one. It's a shame how the Yanks bumbled away Game 2 and, with all due respect to the relentless Angel approach to playing baseball, then went out of their way to beat themselves during the rest of the series.

From the nuts and bolts department here are some observations from an innocuous fan. Don't swing at the first pitch every at bat! And could you please not wait until Game 5 to actually try to steal bases? The home run ball was non-existent for New York the whole series. It seemed like they all of a sudden had a different approach at the plate. You should have done what got you here, which in a batting sense was all of the above including home runs. It seemed like the Yankee hitters were tight and trying to hit that perfect single every time. And could someone please teach Giambino how to hit to the left side? That's what he should be doing all winter. Another winter must is to have Robinson Cano field a minimum 500 ground balls and 500 pop flies daily in addition to reviewing every bit of Willie Mays footage available to perfect the over the top basket catch.

So now we come to the most flammable and dangerous entity in Yankeeland. King George. Whose head will he call for? Will he make Torre a scapegoat? There is no reason to fire Torre by the way, he's not the one who couldn't hit and he guided them to the playoffs following an abysmal start, which I suppose he could be blamed for.

An interesting little tidbit came out of Pay Rod's post game comments. He observed that the Angels play a similar agressive style to the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. After having his quotes to listen to for the past 2 years I know that every word he says is rehearsed and measured. Hmm. A-Rod mentions Tampa Bay, the Yankees did not play aggressively enough, Sweet Lou, A-Rod's former manager, just LEFT Tampa Bay, Hmm....makes you wonder what Big Stein may end up doing. It's not out of the realm of possibility that players know what's happening in the front office. Speaking of which, Cashman should be kept. But the dice will roll in Tampa soon enough at the Yankee meetings where the Boss gathers his deputies and issues his orders. Stay tuned for yet another entertaining off-season.