"It's great to be young and a Yankee."

In the movie "The Natural," there's the requisite turning-the-team around montage, where Roy Hobbes is hitting to a literally impossible excess. It's actually impossible, I think I did the math once, but that isn't saying all too much given my competence with numbers. And it's like you got the funky upbeat 20's swing music going on to indicate Life's good!

Then Memo Paris comes into the picture, and there's the converse montage of Hobbes slumping.This montage has the same funky upbeat 20's swing music going on. Which is kind of mean, but whatever.

(Also, have you ever noticed that every time there's a montage in sports movies, they have to intersperse shots of bat-cracking and sliding into home etc..with shots of newspapers reinforcing the fact that, yes, these scenes are of the positive nature! Just because we didn't show you where the ball landed, let us spell it out for you! It was a homerun and the playoffs are approaching! I mean, give us a little credit. Maybe it's only baseball movie producers that presuppose a lack of understanding about the season's time continuum.)

Anyways, the point is that that is what the Yankees are looking like. Like they got the good montage up and running...and now they've hit the bad montage portion of the movie. Complete with all the newspaper headlines underscoring the slumping once-powerhouse.

It's frustrating. No, I don't think this is serious cause for alarm or anything, but I'm also not saying that it's pshh no big! It kind of is. I mean, a 4 game losing streak is indicative of a lot of things, because it means that pitchers who should be bleeding-plugger-uppers are not doing the plugging up of the bleeding. It also means that each previous loss isn't lighting a fire under their ass to rectify mistakes from the last game.

(George must be turning over in his grave right now, waving an incensed fist, demanding that God do something about the marquee on the stadium. "CHANGE IT TO SOMETHING INSPIRATIONAL. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. IF YOU GET ANY FLAK FOR IT, TELL 'EM THE BOSS SIGNED OFF ON IT. GOT IT?)


So, yeah, the Yankees had a nice little 5 run 1st inning, as seems to be their M.O. this year, which, to be sure, is completely unlike them. The Yankees I know generally act like me at work when they realize they have a project due by EOD and then have to scramble and condense 3 hours with exorbitant amounts of productivity. AKA, the 8th inning of the game.


But nah, this year, they're getting into the office early, knocking off a couple of things on their to-do list, and then taking a 4 hour lunch, only to return to the office and discover everything's gone to hell in a handbasket (zero idea what that expression means, by the way). 


I will break from the metaphor now. The Yankees' 5-run lead lasted about 20 minutes, even though to Chris Tillman it probably lasted 8 hours. (He makes a point to tell us he wasn't feeling well and was on antibiotics. I will return to office metaphor now. If you're gonna show up for work, then work. Don't mitigate your performance with excuses. If you're too sick to work, don't show up.)


And..break again. Then the Orioles came to bat in the 2nd and scored about 829 runs off our boy Ivan Nova. And for the record, he IS still our boy. No one's perfect. I just hope this doesn't take a hit on his confidence. I feel like he's got a little A-Rod in him (pause) in the sense that he may be a little too hard on himself sometimes. Maybe not, though. What the hell do I know.


But if he IS beating himself up over this, he has good reason to. I just learned that apparently this is the first time since 1918 that the Yankees were up by 5 in the 1st and then trailed in the 2nd? Okay, that stat is a little arbitrary though. I mean, it's like when the Yankees were on that streak were they scored at least 3 runs in every game, and then they only scored 2 runs, and the streak was broken! SHOOT!


Ok, so why couldn't they just change the streak delineation to 2 runs? Who makes these rules? Elias Sports Bureau is more powerful than anyone realizes. Which just goes to show you that the world belongs to those who fact check. I just made that maxim up right now, so don't hold me to it. I probably won't depart from that assertion any time soon, but just in case one day I say the world belongs to people who use people's names in direct address, or people who always smell like soap, or people who refuse to abandon the art of hand-written correspondance...well, then don't call me out on this fact-checker lionization.