Okay, it's official: The Yankees are the most hapless, inept and infuriating team in baseball.
While they're not technically at the bottom of the AL standings (Thank you, Kansas City!), they're easily the worst team in either league with a bazillion dollar payroll. And what are the players doing for their money?
A-Rod, of course, is cheating on his wife, and arguably, cheating on the field. Derek Jeter fields like a seven-year-old. Kei Igawa, Bobby Abreu, Johnny Damon--sucks, sucks and sucks. With his best pitchers on the disabled list (which seems to happen to this team a lot), Joe Torre has been starting guys who simply aren't up to it.
Now Roger Clemens, who was supposed to start Monday night, has been sidelined with a groin injury (the first story I read about that described Clemens' groin as "squishy"--ewwww!), to be replaced by Igawa, who, as previously mentioned, sucks.
But what's the point of handing Clemens a twenty-four million dollar contract in the first place? Even if he pitched a shut-out--a big if--that's only half the game. This has long been the problem in the Steinbrenner era, throwing money at superstar individuals (like A-Rod) while failing to build a team that functions as a team. The decision to bring in Clemens, which felt like a disaster from the get-go, is the first major bone-headed decision since Steinbrenner ceded at least some of his power to his sons, which suggests things might only get worse.
As for the players themselves, I don't necessarily think it's true, as many members of Yankee Nation apparently do, that team members are happy to just collect their extravagant paychecks and half-ass the job. (And no, I haven't just spent an hour and a half plowing through angry comments at the Yankees blog at The New York Times. Why do you ask?) Jeter, for one, seems to be genuinely angry at himself, but the more he resolves to do better, the worse he gets. The whole team is in that mode--they feel the embarrassment, and are powerless to stop it.
