An empty Yankee Stadium rushed by an angry mob of fans.
The 4-train subway stop hastily and sloppily vandalized in the dead of night.
Stan’s Sports Bar, Yankee Tavern, and Billy’s torn apart and reduced to nothing but interior rubble, with only Dugout and her Taco Bell to-go window being spared. Angry fans gotta eat too, I suppose.
Granted, none of this actually happened on Monday night following the Yankees’ stunning 12-2 loss to the MLB-worst Chicago White Sox. Yet, go on #YankeesTwitter (Sorry, Elon, X isn’t a thing in this writer’s book). and you would think the Bronx was burning at 1977 levels.
New York’s bats couldn’t capitalize despite multiple runners in scoring position. Luis Gil never had control of his fastball or slider, and the swing-happy ChiSox rolled from there. Cue being a half-game behind first-place Baltimore (again).
Guess what, dear readers? Even the best championship teams have bad days against league-worst opponents. Take last year’s Oakland A’s, for example. They lost 112 games, played the eventual World Series champion Texas Rangers 13 times, and yet managed to steal four wins in the season series.
And because Yankees fans have short memories, they quickly forget this has happened to their beloved Bronx Bombers. Several times, in fact, and even during championship seasons!
Let’s take a closer look.
1961: Yankees struggle to solve Senators. The Washington Senators were longtime lovable losers before becoming the Minnesota Twins and a second incarnation the Texas Rangers. You’d never know it based on 1961, when Washington lost 100 games and still played hard enough to go 7-11 against the eventual champion Yankees.
How did it happen? The Yankees were in the midst of Roger Maris’ historic season en route to 109 total wins. The Senators, meanwhile, were made up of a bunch of journeymen with no true stars on the team. And yet, they gave the Yankees fits all year, including a tight 2-1 win in April and not one but two 12-2 drubbings.
The Yankees overcame these losses and injuries to Mickey Mantle to win both the AL Pennant and World Series.
1996: Tigers steal a series win. By the mid-1990s, the Detroit Tigers were at a bottom. They were so young and directionless that it was almost a miracle they only lost 109 games. Despite that, the Yankees could not solve them during a weekend at Tiger Stadium in June.
On Friday, Detroit came from behind before Curtis Pride scored from first on a bloop single in the bottom of ninth inning. Saturday saw the Tigers outslug the Yankees 9-7 before New York finally eked out a 3-2 win on Sunday to avoid the sweep. And yet, the Bronx Bombers later won their first World Series in almost two decades.
2000: Those pesky Minnesota Twins. Fans will recall that the turn of the century was not kind to the Twins. They’d wallowed near the bottom of the standings for years, including finishing last and losing an AL-worst 93 games. To add insult to injury, there was even talk of contracting the team outright.
The Yankees missed that memo and only managed to split the ten-game regular season series.
What went wrong? Well, a little of everything. Minnesota took two of three in the Bronx in April and outscored New York 13-6. Both teams split a four-game set at the Metrodome in July before the Yankees finally won a series in the Bronx in September.
The Yankees were not dealing with a ton of injuries. Their only real struggle was filling some holes in the middle of the lineup. In other words, the only reason for their struggles can be attributed to “That’s baseball, Suzyn.”
2001: Tripping at the Trop. Everyone’s tired at the end of a long 162-game season, so this example should be taken with a grain of salt. The Yankees visited the Tampa Bay then-Devil Rays at Tropicana Field to close out the season and lost three of four games. Whether it was fatigue or the Yankees taking their foot off the gas, Tampa Bay outscored them 17-8.
It doesn’t matter that New York won the pennant, or that their losing the World Series in ’01 doesn’t match our previous examples. Tampa Bay still lost 100 games, the Yankees were the better team on paper, and they should have played better. Plain and simple.
2009: Yankees can’t nip Nats. The 2009 was a weird season by championship standards. New York didn’t take over first place in the AL East for good until July and inconsistency was becoming a problem. A key example happened in June when the Washington Nationals visited and took two out of three, a rare bright spot in their 103-loss season.
Looking back, it’s shocking how close a series it was. The Yankees won the first game after coming from behind, but that was it. Washington took the next two after bad starts from both Chien-Ming Wang and Joba Chamberlain. The Yankees simply had no answer for the eventual last-place Nats.
And yet, nobody remembers it. Only the World Series parade at the end of the year.
It’s a fact of baseball life, dear readers, and Monday’s 12-2 loss in Chicago doesn’t change anything. Sometimes, the worst teams just win.
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