Baseball Postmortem
In which the Yankees play like my 13-year-old's travel team
It’s not exactly a coincidence that The Pip’s final travel baseball game of the season and the Yankees’ ignominious World Series loss came at the same time. There’s a shared causal factor in the timing of both of those things, after all, that being the climate at middle latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere. Sunday’s final home game for the 13U Blue Jays started with frost on the grass of the outfield— it’s time to be done with baseball for a while.
As noted in a previous post, The Pip and I have been avidly-if-nervously following the Yankees, who made it to the World Series for the first time in 15 years. They lost the first three games of the season before winning big on Tuesday, and in the early innings last night, it was looking like “done with baseball” was going to have to wait a bit. Then they decided to devote the fifth inning to a tribute to 13U travel baseball, giving up a five-run lead en route to losing 7-5 and letting the Dodgers clinch the title in Yankee Stadium. This was not what we were hoping for.
It was, alas, not wholly unexpected, though. I mean, I wasn’t expecting a Fall Classic meltdown quite as spectacular as what we got, but at the same time, the series was pretty much the 2024 Yankees Experience in microcosm. They lost games one and five because of sloppy play in the field and Aaron Boone trying to be a little too cute with the pitching (Nestor Cortes? Tommy Kahnle?), and lost games two and three because they were inexplicably incapable of hitting a baseball. The offense at least came back for game four and the start of game five— Aaron Judge played like Aaron Judge in the final game— but the lack of focus in the field killed them all season long, so it wasn’t surprising that it bit them in the ass in the final game.
They’ve got some obvious moves to make in the offseason— offer Juan Soto a billion dollars to stay a Yankee forever, let Alex Verdugo move on to whoever wants to pay him— and some that are much less clear. The lack of fundamental discipline— sloppy fielding, and their tendency to “run the bases like drunks” in the words of legendary radio announcer John Sterling— really ought to cost Aaron Boone his manager position, but it won’t, and what to do about mercurial second baseman Gleyber Torres and their bullpen is not obvious to me. Or maybe a better way to put it is that there are at least as many “obvious” courses of action for the team as there are people who know the number for WFAN’s call-in shows.
I fully expect them to basically run it back next year— keep Boone, pay Soto, re-sign Torres, pick up some cast-off pitchers from other teams and otherwise stay the course. I doubt the results will be dramatically better, but maybe with another year under their belts young guys like Austin Wells and Anthony Volpe won’t completely collapse in the final months, and maybe with more regular playing time Jasson Dominguez will be a decent outfielder. I guess we’ll see.
As for The Pip’s team, well, they had some similarity to the Yankees, in that they tended to have at least one inning a game where they completely forgot how to play baseball— dropping easy catches, winging balls all over the field and allowing runners to score, running into silly outs on the bases. Their ace pitchers from last season got knocked around with some regularity, and their bullpen was thin at best. They built leads in a few games only to see them slip away, Yankee-style, through bad fielding and shaky pitching, and came into the final game of the season winless.
On an individual level, the Pip had brutally bad luck at the plate for the whole season— making decent contact with the ball, just hitting it straight at kids on the other team, time and again. He reached base more times from being hit by pitches than from swinging the bat. He was, at least, his usual steady self at first base, reliably catching even some pretty sketchy throws from the other fielders. Still, a rough year.
On the last day of the season, though, it all turned around for a brief, glorious moment. Not immediately— they gave up a bunch of runs early— but in the middle innings they settled in and started to claw back. The Pip worked a walk and hit a double past the shortstop into the gap, and the rest of the team pushed some runs across. More importantly, the defense tightened up, including a great sequence with a runner on third where the batter grounded to the pitcher, who threw to The Pip at first for the force-out; The Pip, in turn, fired the ball home to the catcher, who got it in plenty of time to make the tag. The runner never stood a chance— it looked like actual baseball.
(I was standing by the third-base fence, and when the ball was hit I heard the opposing coach say to the runner “If he throws to first, you’re going home,” and that’s exactly what they did. The kid was super bummed to be thrown out, but as both parents and coaches told him, it was just a great defensive play.)
They came into the bottom of the last inning down two runs with the top of the order due up; the first couple of batters walked, then scored on wild pitches and a single leaving a runner on third with The Pip coming up as the clean-up batter. He worked the count full, with at least one strike called on a low-and-outside pitch that only that day’s umpire thought was a strike. The kid came back with that pitch one more time, and he went down and golfed it over the second baseman for a walk-off single.
For one morning, at least, everything was all right in the baseball world. Which is, of coruse, how they keep you coming back for the next season…
So, yeah, that’s where we are with America’s National Pastime. If you want more of this, here’s a button you can click on and wait for spring:
And if you feel so moved, the comments will be open:
I must admire your completely objective reporting with respect to the Pip and his team.
;)