You’ve fought as hard as you can, but the weight of the evidence begins to hit your hips, knees, and ankles in a series of small electrical spasms. You tried to explain it away as “Well, the league is weird this year”, and even if you’re right, no matter what league you’re referring to, the disorientation is still there and getting worse.
The Tampa Bay Rays appear poised to win their American League Division Series, but that’s not what makes you nickname your persistent migraine like it’s a mischievous nephew. It’s that they’re making the New York Yankees look like the Los Angeles Angels, which is not just mocking the power of branding, but mocking a city that already has to support the Mets.
The Rays chew through a game like hyperactive beavers, avoiding homers (except for Junior Caminero) and embracing the boring little things that modern baseball once disdained: speed, defense and even the occasional bunt. The Yankees struggled with things like catching the ball or throwing it in a useful direction, which have always been in vogue. That’s how Game 2 played out, a 5-2 Rays win Monday night. The Yankees’ four errors were spectacular, the second-most committed by the team in its 448 postseason games all-time, highlighted but by no means concluded by Jazz Chisholm Jr.’s complete destruction of a pivotal double play in the Rays’ third at-bat of the game. Without Ben Rice’s two solo homers, the Yankees would have looked completely angelic in all the worst ways.
The Yankees’ heel turn was as remarkable as it was rapid. They beat Boston twice, 9-0 and 9-2, to scratch a traditional itch, but after traveling to Florida to face the ultra-modest and scrupulously error-averse Rays, they returned to a deeply dark place. They were completely routed by Drew Rasmussen in eight innings in a 1-0 loss in Game 1, and blew Game 2 in just one inning; they suddenly seem light years worse than a Rays team that only won five more games than them in the regular season.
Logically, it should be close. So far, that really hasn’t been the case. Visually, the Yankees appear to be beginning a rebuild – unfinished, unpolished and ominously scented. Most of the time they looked confused. Their worldview in this series can be summed up by Spencer Jones staring stunned at the podium as he hit with a fly ball that was caught for an out. The ball would have been removed anyway judging by the body language of center fielder Jonny DeLuca, who waited for the ball to return before reporting to the local facility. The fact that this became farcical because Tampa plays in a glorified ball pit doesn’t change the fact that an out became just a slightly different out. The most important thing is that it amounted to nothing.
It must be said here that our well-developed sense of glorified perversity demands that we get not only an ALCS involving Tampa and the second Chicago team, but also a potential World Series between those teams and the Milwaukee Brewers. Anything that helps undermine the owners’ argument for a salary cap is objectively admirable and desirable, so there you go. But beyond that targeted billionaire schadenfreude, the Yankees have been abject in this series, playing like a team either ready to go on vacation or already on vacation. They were considerably less competitive in Game 2 than in a game in which they had almost no hits. Even after warning about the small sample size, the Yankees are slashing .086/.145/.224, which is less angelic than sub-cherubic.
Worse, New York saw more players make an error than players had a hit Monday night, the first time that’s happened since Roy Halladay went no-hit for the Reds in 2010. You have to believe on an inordinate level in the power of history and the weight of Yankee Stadium to see a long-term escape here for them. The Rays were better for six months, and they’re better now.
This may of course turn into a short series, but the Yankees have been put in a position where they have to respond to the Rays, rather than the other way around. They may not massacre a night of entertainment like they did last night, but if they want to get back on the show, they’ll have to do it in the toughest way possible, without any legacy swagger. The Rays and Brewers, optimized and transparent as they are, currently feel like the future of a game that pretends not to have one, and the first two plays of this series – the grounder to short, Lombard catches it, and the throw to first SAILS INTO THE SEATS, and that will score two runs – have been proof that this is so.
Gn sports
