May 20 - Fall of the Yankees

You can hear it in their voices, shakier now than ever. The growing uncertainty, the crumbling
confidence, the delightful despair. Yes indeed, the sweet music of the Yankees fan who not even so
deep down, knows what is plainly obvious now. Their team stinks!

Ah, sweet music.

Still, the blind and brainwashed will tell anyone who’ll listen that their heroes are going to turn it
around any day now. They’ve done this before, the pinheads of pinstripe say, and any at bat now, it’s
all going to be back to normal.

“They’re going to turn this thing around starting tomorrow,” one irrational Yankees fan told me
Saturday, about an hour after his team lost its second straight to the Mets, emphasizing it with the
time-honored, “You heard it here first.”

Dude, just who are you trying to convince?

It’s so obviously over for this team, that even the inane rabble who swear their loyalty know, they are
trying to convince themselves.

How can our inalienable right to win be denied? Can’t we call someone?

Maybe try to wake up those impotent bats, maybe try to oil those gloves which are entertaining us all
with their Bad News Bears-like defense. You’d think with all the money in that dugout they could afford
some good stuff to break in those misfit mitts.

Or maybe call the Boston Red Sox, who are so far ahead they can’t even see you in their rear view
mirror.

Seriously, speaking for everyone outside of their capitalist clique of holier-than-thou ministers of
manifest destiny, it’s about time you got your comeuppance. The Yankees can’t lose enough. And we’
ll all be sitting here laughing.

Go spend some more money, bring in more mercenary pitchers, keep redefining the world’s oldest
profession with your elitist fans and personnel and egregiously error-prone broadcasters who quite
frankly are nothing more than caricatures of marionettes.

This is the year it’s not happening, this is the year the Yankees finally stink. And the very best part –
it's pungent enough that even they smell it.

* * * * * *
Of course, the Yanks could go 0 for the rest of the season and still not be as bad as the NBA. Look,
say what you will about the phenomenal athletes playing pro ball. No question, they are individually
more talented than ever before. Heaven forbid one of them should set a pick, or make a pass, or not
shoot the second they get the ball, or play as a team.

The big issue obviously was the whole Robert Horry thing, and to be fair, both sides of the argument
have a point. Sure, rules need to be upheld but come on. Be real, please? That judgment was as
rigid as a Republican candidate denying evolution.

The Spurs should be wearing hockey jerseys now. Horry’s move and the subsequent fallout was no
different from a hockey coach sending out his goon to rough up the other team’s star, cause a brawl
and get a bunch of guys thrown out? (NOTE: This was not an accusation of the Spurs’ coach, it was
simply an analogy between two sports).

Hey NBA, have fun with those ratings for Jazz-Spurs. Gripping stuff, let’s all tune in.

But still, this wasn’t as bad as Game 6 of the Nets-Cavs series. Yes, the one in which one team (New
Jersey) scored one basket in the fourth quarter of a playoff series – and won the game. Sad.

In some cruel twist of a joke, the person whose voice you are reading somehow ended up in Jersey,
at the arena, for Game 6 (it was out of obligation, I swear). Now maybe it was just the Nets crowd, and
this shouldn’t be a blanket statement for all NBA cities, but man was it awful in there. And not just
because the Nets couldn’t score.

The very, very uneducated basketball crowd was very, very late filing in. And the very, very brainless
basketball crowd spent all their time clapping those horrid thundersticks together. At all times. No
matter what was happening on the court. The arena P.A. system was pumping out some sort of
sound effect or music throughout the game. Why? Why couldn’t people be allowed to just watch?

You want to know why? Because they didn’t want to watch. No, not because the home team wasn’t
good. They didn’t want to watch because they couldn’t understand it anyway. Give them thundersticks,
give them grannies dancing (yes, that was one of the timeout entertainment bits), give them trendy
songs – anything but good quality basketball.

Oh wait, they couldn’t. The NBA doesn’t have good, quality basketball.

P.U.
Joshua Sipkin
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