Jesus Wept

or would have were he a Yankees fan. If anything, this game was still more ignominious than the last one, particularly coming on the heels of the last one. Think about the following inconceivable truths. The Yankees scored not a single meaningful run since Damon's homer in the 4th of Game 2 set them on a path to sweep the series. The Yankees greatest line-up in history managed to go 20 consecutive innings without scoring a run of any kind. The Yankees' 3 meaningless runs in the last couple of frames still came without a hit with RISP, putting their consecutive hitless streak under those conditions with 2 outs at over 20 consecutive bats covering the entire series. AROD finished this series 1-14 after having gone 2-15 in the ALDS last year. In neither series did he drive in a run, let alone homer. This year he had a single, making his slugging average the same as his batting average .073. Even a hit by pitch couldn't get his OPS above the Mendoza line.

Since this is a blog officially dedicated to the inexcusability of Joe Torre as Yankee manager, no post-mortem would be complete without a brief examination of his continued failings. We have long made some distinction between Torre the clubhouse manager, a role invested with such mystery one was inclined to extend him the kind of faith that ignorance makes necessary, and Torre the field tactician, a role in which his errors were so conspicuous as to compel insistent and virulent denunciation of his performance. Well, the field tactician did not go down without leaving still more material for his detractors. For example, he clearly compounded the error of sitting Sheffield against the lefty by playing him against the righty. Having decided AROD's bat was no help--and that's what being dropped to 8 in the order meant--he should have sat him down for a more reliable glove. I could go on about then stupidity of starting Wright, a gopher ball machine, against a team like the Tigers, who are almost as dependent on the homer as the Yankees are. But I think it more important at this point to remark that the sacred Ark of the (Pinstripe) Covenant has been pierced or, if you prefer Mr. Wizard's curtain has been breached and everyone has started paying attention to the man behind it. We may not know the inner workings of the Yankee clubhouse, but we must see at this point that whatever special talents Torre supposedly had at managing players has passed into a fraudulent obsolescence. He is still able to keep the peace and hold their respect. But these are but the means to the end of winning, of getting them to play winning baseball, sustaining that winning performance ove the course of the season and, in the final end of final ends, getting them to heighten their performance in the postseason. The last few years, transfigured by the last few games, have revealed that Torre's continued reputation for operating the means no longer translates into achieving the ends. The Yankees failed the last few years, but in the last few games failure, though assured, was the least of their problems. They quit on themselves, they quit on him, and they quit on their fans. Torre always cost them games with his dunderhead moves, like taking Wang out in game 1, but the devil's bargain was that he reputedly inspired them to play well enough to cover his own incompetence. Now he is not even motivating them to play well enough to provide adequate support for the most brilliant of tacticians. His clubhouse proficiency has, if anything, fallen to a level below his laughably boneheaded field generalship. He has made it incredibly easy on Steinbrenner. For George, the fond memories of the late nineties dynasty are fading even faster than they are for the rest of us. The only dimension of Joda's vaunted leadership George knows is the present dimension: where a once proud, if never bright warrior huddles in the late afternoon October gloaming and tries to keep himself from surrendering to slumber as the troops all too willingly surrender themselves to defeat. HURRY UP PLEASE, IT'S TIME.

JOE MUST GO!

And a number of wanna be Yankees, AROD, Johnson, Mussina, Sheffield, Fahrnsworth, Meyer, along with one didn't wanna be a Yankee, baby Carl Pavano, and at least one true Yankee, Bernie Williams, must follow in its wake.

The problems with the Yankees are so immense even the pundits have noticed. One columnist spoke of "all the Yankees weakneeses being exposed." Well who was pointing out all those weaknesses, we were, while the pundits greeted the ALDS as the second coming of Jesus..err Ruth, Gehrig, Coombs and Muesel. Another pundit--I think it was Lyons, usually the village idiot in that benighted world--spoke of the absence of a figure like O'Neill, who would get in the face of the other veterans if they weren't leaving enough blood on the field. The weakness of the Yankees in other words was twofold, like the weakness of Torre himself. There were the operational shortcomings: mediocre starting pitching, inflammable middle relief, over reliance on the long ball, poor situational hitting, inconsistent to godawful fielding. But there was also an inner softness, a lack of fire, an inability to feel desparate and to act on that desparation. The specter of a season without Matsui and Sheffield produced it briefly, but then it was gone, and what was left in its place was really, in the end, quite ugly--it was the difference between losing and being losers.

And if you don't think there is a difference, remember game 6, 2001, the Yankees are down and for all intents and purposes out. It is the last time, everyone knows, that Paul O'Neill will be getting in anyone's face, including his own, out of his nearly maniacal loathing of failure. And with the Yanks in the field for the last time at the stadium, the cheers went up Paul O'Neill...Pauly...Paul O'Neill. And what the fans were saying in the confession of the loss to come was that these Yankees were not, would never be, for all of that, losers. And so of course they came back to win the damn game, the second in a row they pulled from the ashes. In that performance, by both the fans and the players, one can see a team losing a series, as they did, while remaining the very anti-type of the Yankees that lost the series today. Instead of the last chants for Pauly, we have the execration of AROD, and today's miniaturized superstar not only deserves the abuse as much as that outsized star deserved the encomium, but each man is emblematic of the team going down to defeat: the one indomitably, the other ingloriously.

Lastly, when I said I would do a post-mortem, I meant for this year's blog as well as for the team it celebrates. I want to thank Munson for his kind words in the last comment box, both about his enjoyment of the blog (he certainly contributed to mine) and to his hopes that the blog would return, with full understanding if it wouldn't. I've actually been thinking about that question since the Yankees went down 6-0 last night and the prospect of a sudden October chill grew palpable. And as we went from prospect to reality, it became increasingly apparent to me that I would find it too hard to endure an end to my blogging experience as sudden as the end to our season. So I have decided that while I'll do no more blogging in the immediate aftermath of this weekend, I will post when events of the off-season seem to merit, and as I find most everything interesting, I imagine I'll wind up posting pretty regularly, though by no means daily. When spring training starts, my plan now is to return the blog to the frequency of this season (over 250 posts plus comments since April). I hope I'll have to change everything about the blog, the title (with Torre's exit) and the set of problems we talk about. I hope the names Tyler Clifford and Phillip Hughes and Tabata will all enjoy the currency that AROD had this year. But mostly, I hope you all will return as well and resume the virtual conversation, though, like Munson said of the blog itself, I will understand if you decide not to. I want to thank everyone once more for hanging out with me and I hope you'll be doing it again as your passion for Yankees baseball reasserts itself. Until then, take care of yourselves, and remember as we suffer this disappointment that things, even in the controlled universe of sports, could be so much worse. We could, for example, be chowderheads.