For everyone who’s ever said the Yankees are the worst, today is your day.
After getting clubbed at home by the Rays, 8-2, New York has the worst record in the American League. The Yankees had as many hits on Friday night as errors — three — and opener Nick Nelson, who gave up two runs in his lone inning of work, revealed that even though the Yankees were off on Thursday, he didn’t find out until Thursday night that he would be on the mound to start the game.
The Yankees are an early-season mess, with a .666 OPS (hail Satan) as a team, and when they actually manage to get baserunners, they’ve grounded into an American League-high 16 double plays, not to mention the 21 strikeouts compared to 19 hits in 83 at-bats with runners in scoring position.
The pitching staff’s bugaboo has been giving up 17 home runs, which belies New York’s .231 opponents’ batting average, solid 3.46 staff ERA, and major league-best 4.32 strikeout-to-walk ratio.
The most embarrassing thing for the Yankees? Their fans, who decided in the eighth inning to start throwing baseballs on the field, prompting an announcement to please stop doing that… which they did not immediately do.
Joez Mcfly of Jomboy Media was in the stands and summed it up pretty well, saying as the situation unfolded: “it just makes us look like shit.”
What’s weird is that the barrage of baseballs didn’t seem to be prompted by anything. Clint Frazier was at the plate with a 2-0 count in the eighth inning when it happened. There wasn’t a bad call or an egregious play that anyone was reacting to. Just idiots having a temper tantrum.
All of this is just in time for the Yankees to make their Amazon Prime streaming debut on Sunday. That particular arrangement stems from Amazon’s partial ownership of the YES Network, which will handle the broadcast as usual, except for disseminating it.
Ridiculously, thanks to Major League Baseball’s arcane broadcast rules, the Amazon stream will only be available to viewers in the usual Yankees broadcast area. So, all that it will accomplish is confusing a lot of people who want to tune in on Sunday afternoon for Gerrit Cole, who’s just about the only watchable Yankee at this point. And most of those confused people will wind up just seeing the game on WPIX anyway, because in addition to the streaming, Sunday afternoon will be an over-the-air broadcast on the famous Channel 11.
Maybe George Costanza was right. Maybe the Yankees do need to class up this place and reach a strata of society that might not watch Channel 11. Or at least people who don’t throw crap on the field.