Hal Steinbrenner Can't Figure Out Why We're Upset

Why does it feel like even though the Yankees won their series with the Mariners, it felt like they lost it? Hey, maybe that’s just me, your favorite curmudgeon, but that debacle Thursday night pretty much wiped out any good feelings that were conjured by the wins on Tuesday and Wednesday. Again, maybe it’s just me, but I get the feeling I’m not alone on that.

So, how about Hal Steinbrenner?

Before the Yankees defeated the disappointing Mariners in a series for the second time in less than a month, Steinbrenner said something during an appearance on Michael Kay’s radio show in New York that pissed me off even more than their embarrassing performance in the 10-2 series finale loss.

He was asked by Kay if he has heard the ever-growing disenchantment of the fan base regarding the state of this year’s team, and this is what the tone deaf Steinbrenner said: “They are upset. I’m a little confused, this year, being the third week of June, why they’re so upset, but they’re upset and that’s gonna get my attention, of course.”

I hope what he was watching Thursday night got his attention, and I sure hope he was at Yankee Stadium to hear more than 41,000 fans booing his team mercilessly.

He can’t be confused after that shit show, can he? Like seriously, he’s not sure why the fan base is upset over the fact that the 41-34 Yankees are one of the worst hitting teams in all of baseball, are trailing the Rays by 9.5 games in the AL East (in June, mind you), and the lineup is carrying more weighty and expensive baggage than a Boeing 747?

If you want to watch the four-minute clip on Twitter, just click on the image below and it’ll take you to a new screen.

I’m gonna guess the players are a little upset by how this season has gone, at least they better be. And I think Aaron Boone and Brian Cashman are upset, but with those two you never know. Obviously, Yankee Nation is furious by the product we’re watching on a nightly basis, especially since Aaron Judge got hurt nearly three weeks ago.

But somehow Steinbrenner - who just keeps raking in his millions as the owner of not only the richest team in MLB but one of the richest teams in any sport around the world - is nonplussed by his team’s lackluster look and the outrage it caused in the fan base. He doesn’t seem the least bit bothered by the fact that he’s forking out around $300 million in payroll this season for a team that probably has zero chance of ending its 14-year World Series drought and, in fact, is more likely to miss the playoffs entirely.

“Nobody is on the hot seat right now. Let’s get through the season. Let’s see what happens,” Steinbrenner added. “I would say that if we can march into the playoffs with 90 percent of our intended team that we expected to be on the field every day, 90 percent, and we don’t perform well in the playoffs, I’m going to start asking the questions even then.”

Dude, start asking questions now because the rest of us have plenty.

One of the biggest Yankees fans anywhere is actor Nick Turturro. For you NYPD Blue fans, he played young detective Martinez and he’s been in several movies and TV shows since then. I’ve communicated once in a while with Nick on Twitter and he is one of the greatest follows on Twitter there is because his meltdowns are legendary. He makes me seem like the calmest guy in the room. Here’s what he said after listening to the Kay show.

“I was listening to Hal Steinbrenner on the Michael Kay show and it’s just crazy how out of touch he is with the fan base and why are Yankee fans upset with this franchise the last 10 years or so because nothing has changed with philosophy. Home run or bust doesn't work and hasn't worked!” Incredibly, Nick didn’t rip off any of his patented F-bombs. This was as tame as he’s ever been.

Of course, he’s dead on. This owner has poured money into the team; no one will argue that. The problem is that for years and years he has spent it on the same type of players without ever learning his lesson: Big-name guys who were once great but no longer are, and he compounds the problem by giving them outlandish contracts that clog up the roster and the payroll.

And I’m telling you right now, the latest is the Judge contract. A few years from now, we’re going to be bemoaning that one just like we are the Giancarlo Stanton and DJ LeMahieu deals because you can’t convince me that a 6–foot-7, 282-pound baseball player is going to age well.

It’s a never-ending cycle of poor decisions and unless the Yankees’ farm system starts producing position players who can hit better than .200, nothing is changing. Oh, by the way, I watched the Yankees’ Triple-A team a few times last week and outside of Oswald Peraza - who is still a pretty big maybe - there’s no help coming from Scranton in the near future.

The Yankees have almost always had terrific pitching staffs and that’s why they’ve been consistent postseason participants, but their offense almost always fails in October because they’re all a bunch of one-trick ponies. Forget October, this year it’s failing in June, and really, does anyone see things improving?

If Steinbrenner thinks this team can roll into the playoffs with this group, he’s nuts.

Here are my observations on the three games against the Mariners.

June 20: Yankees 3, Mariners 1

➤ Gerrit Cole did what an ace is supposed to do. First and foremost, pitch great, but also to do so when the team really needed him to be the stopper. That’s what Cole did as he stopped the Yankees’ four-game losing streak by pitching into the eighth inning and giving up just one run on four hits and a walk with eight strikeouts. So far in June he’s made four starts and in 25.1 innings his ERA is 1.78, opponents are batting .209, and he has 27 strikeouts compared to just four walks.

➤ Clay Holmes was great again. What a run he’s on. He got the final five outs in succession on 21 pitches for his ninth save. In his last 20 appearances covering 20.2 innings, his ERA is 0.44 and opponents are hitting .155. In other words, this is the Holmes from the first half of 2022 when he was close to unhittable. Let’s hope we don’t see second half 2022 Holmes this year.

➤ The Yankees offense was mostly putrid again. Anthony Rizzo came out of his coma and had three hits - his first three-hit game since May 23. In fact, the three hits were just one shy of the four he had in his previous 54 plate appearances in June. One was an RBI double in the first inning that came after Gleyber Torres singled. Otherwise, Harrison Bader returned to the lineup and singled in the second and trotted home on Billy McKinney’s two-run homer, but that was it. The Yankees had only three hits in their final six innings of batting.

➤ The Mariners George Kirby, who blanked the Yankees on three hits over eight innings on May 31 in Seattle, is from Rye, New York and he was pitching in front of a huge contingent of family and friends. He struggled in the first two innings as he gave up the three runs on five hits, but really settled in thereafter. Unfortunately for him, his teammates did nothing against Cole with the exception of a sixth-inning RBI double by Jarred Kelenic that was misplayed in left field by McKinney which allowed the run to score from first.

➤ As Cole was leaving the mound after he whiffed Jose Caballero to end the seventh, there was an interesting exchange between Cole and Mariners manager Scott Servais. Jose Caballero appears to be a world-class pain in the ass whose schtick is to try to irritate pitchers by using his one timeout per at bat just before the pitch clock reaches eight seconds. He did it a couple times to Cole, so in the seventh, Cole purposely threw a pitch high off the backstop. Servais didn’t like it, and after Cole struck him out, Servais started chirping and pointing so Cole looked over, made a face and wagged his finger right back. It was pretty amusing. “Their manager had some choice words for me coming off the field, and he was wagging his finger at me, so I wagged my finger at him,” Cole explained.

BOX SCORE

June 21: Yankees 4, Mariners 2

➤ Well, color me surprised. I basically punted this game before it started because Luis Castillo was pitching for the Mariners. If I was a gambling man, I probably would have lost my house. Castillo is one of the best pitchers in MLB and you saw how he absolutely dominated the Yankees last year in three starts (two with Seattle, one with Cincinnati) when he gave up four runs in 21.2 innings with 23 strikeouts. However, he fell short in this one. Three runs on four hits and four walks in five innings, yet still his ERA at night’s end was 2.89.

➤ In other words, this was a damn good win for the Yankees, especially considering they were seemingly sacrificing Jhony Brito to eat this one. Instead, Brito came up from Scranton and did a great imitation of Castillo. He pitched 5.2 scoreless innings allowing just two hits and one walk. The same Brito who I watched pitch for Scranton against Rochester a week ago and give up six runs in five innings. Hey, you can’t predict baseball, Suzyn.

➤ Once again, there was almost no offense. McKinney and Jake Bauers have been the Yankees best hitters lately. Let that sink in. OK, if it has sunk, here’s what happened in this game. Bauers crushed a two-run homer in the third after Anthony Volpe had walked, and then McKinney launched a long solo shot in the fourth to make it 3-0. Beyond that, Volpe hit a solo shot in the seventh. Otherwise, there were only two other hits - singles by McKinney and Willie Calhoun.

➤ Before you celebrate Calhoun’s hit, he hurt his quad and is gone to the injured list. Hey, it’s been what, three or four days since someone got hurt so the Yankees were due. Oswaldo Cabrera was called back up to fill the spot.

➤ The Mariners made this a little sweaty late. Wandy Peralta, who hasn’t been very good lately, gave up a solo homer to Dylan Moore in the eighth. Then in the ninth, Michael King who likewise hasn’t been very good, allowed a single and a walk to start the ninth so with one out, Boone yanked him for Tommy Kahnle, who has been tremendous since coming off the IL, and Kahnle gave up a sacrifice fly before whiffing home run threat Eugenio Suarez to end the game.

BOX SCORE

June 22: Mariners 10, Yankees 2

➤ For once, Boone said something I actually agreed with when he started his press conference after this brutal showing. “Awful day at the park for us,” Boone said. Yeah, that about sums it up. The Yankees embarrassed themselves. One out into the sixth inning they were down 10-0, they had no hits, and had made three errors. I mean, it really can’t get any worse than that folks. You see scorebooks like that in Little League.

➤ Domingo German used to be the second-most effective starter on the team. Now he is the only pitcher in Yankees history to have a two-game span within a season where he allowed at least 17 runs while facing fewer than 40 batters when you combine his meltdown against the Red Sox last week. He gave up 10 runs (eight earned) in 3.1 innings with four of the eight hits he allowed going over the fence. German struck out the first batter of the game, the next five guys reached with four of them eventually scoring, and that was the ballgame. The Yankees hadn’t even batted and with their horrendous offense, this game was already over.

➤ The Yankees now have four pitchers with at least 10 starts and an ERA of 4.60 or higher this season (German, Brito, Nestor Cortes, and Clarke Schmidt). That's the most of any team in MLB.

➤ The only highlight came in the ninth inning. Isiah Kiner-Falefa pitched a 1-2-3 top half, even striking out Suarez which finally gave the crowd something to cheer about. And then in the bottom half he hit a two-run homer. Because he was technically a pitcher at the time, he became the first Yankee pitcher to homer since Lindy McDaniel in 1972, the year before the DH came to the American League. So, at least the poor saps who paid to attend this game got to have that moment.

➤ The Yankees made two errors on one play in the third. Josh Donaldson fielded a squibber and as he tried to throw for the force at second he lost control of the ball and as he was chasing it down, Suarez kept going to third. Donaldson got the ball and fired it to German covering, but it went off his glove and Suarez scored a Little League run that made it 7-0. Later, Rizzo just whiffed on a grounder for the third error of the night. Oh, there was a fourth. Things were so bad, the guy who presses the button to play Sinatra at the end lost track of the outs and ol’ blue eyes came on with two outs in the ninth. Man, what a night.

➤ At the plate, Donaldson was his usual useless self, 0-for-3 so he’s now hitting .127. Stanton went 0-for-3 so he’s 5-for-48 since coming off the IL on June 2 and his average is .190. LeMahieu went 0-for-4 so in his last 29 games he’s 19-for-109 and his average is down to .228. For the series, the Yankees scored only nine runs on 18 hits. “We gotta get a few of our guys rolling,” Boone said. “That’s an important thing for us right now.” But hey, Hal’s not worried, and he doesn’t think we should be, either.

BOX SCORE

 ➤ June 21, 2005: After building a 10-2 lead at Yankee Stadium by rocking Randy Johnson for seven runs inside three innings, the Rays probably thought they were on their way to a rare celebration inside the visiting clubhouse at Yankee Stadium, this back in the glorious days when the Rays were one of the worst teams in baseball.

Think again. The Yankees worked themselves back into the game and were trailing just 11-7 going into the bottom of the eighth, and that’s when they erupted for 13 runs to win a laugher, 20-11.

In the eighth, 16 men came to the plate and 12 had hits. Bernie Williams’ three-run triple put the Yankees up 13-11, and then the floodgates really opened. Jorge Posada followed with a two-run homer and after the second out, Gary Sheffield, Alex Rodriguez and Hideki Matsui hit back-to-back-to-back home runs, Sheffield’s a three-run shot which was his second three-run shot of the game. He finished with four hits and seven RBI, Derek Jeter went 5-for-6 and scored five times, Matsui had four hits and Williams had five RBI.

“It was mind-boggling,” Johnson said of the comeback. “It was just a barrage. As long as I've played, I don’t think I’ve seen anything like that in one inning.”

“If there is a turning point in the season, this should be it,” said Williams. It actually wasn’t. At the time, the Yankees were in third place in the AL East, five games behind the Orioles, but they didn’t move into first place until Sept. 21, and then they battled the Red Sox over the final two weeks and the teams finished tied at 95-67. New York won the tiebreaker because it won the season series over Boston 10-9, but then got drummed out three games to two in the divisional series by the Angels.

For the Rays, it was the second time in their brief eight-year franchise history where they were ahead by eight or more runs and lost by nine or more. No other team in MLB history had done that even once.

The Texas Rangers, one of the surprise teams in MLB this season, come into the Bronx for three games starting Friday night, and just know this: Unless the Yankees have a great weekend pitching, they’re gonna need to score some runs to win any of these games.

At 46-28, the Rangers lead the AL West by 5.5 games over the Astros and six over the Angels, and they’re doing it with one of the most prolific offenses in the sport. They rank No. 1 in runs scored with 451, average at .272, and on-base percentage at .341, and they rank third in OPS at .797.

One of their best players is catcher Jonah Heim who is from Buffalo. The 28-year-old is having a breakout season with 10 homers, 54 RBI and an OPS of .792. Outfielder Adolis Garcia is tied for the MLB lead with 58 RBI and leads the team with 16 homers. Shortstop Corey Seager has only played 43 games and if he qualified, his 1.060 OPS would lead MLB. He’s hitting .358 with an on-base of .418. Marcus Semien has 10 homers, 54 RBI and leads the team with 142 total bases. It’s just a relentless offense. The Rangers have eight guys with at least 32 RBI. The Yankees have two - Judge (40) and Rizzo (37).

On the mound, their team ERA of 3.79 is seventh-best and that’s without their big-ticket offseason signing Jacob deGrom who lasted a whole month before seeing his season end because of Tommy John surgery. The Rangers haven’t even blinked because Jon Gray and ex-Yankee Nathan Eovaldi have been great, and Dane Dunning and ex-Yankee Andrew Heaney have been very good. Plus, closer Will Smith has 13 saves.

The pitching matchups aren’t fully set, but from what I know, they look like this: Friday, 7:05 p.m. on YES it’s Schmidt (4.65 ERA) vs. Dunning (2.78); Saturday at 4:05 on YES it’s Luis Severino (6.30) vs. Gray (2.96); and Sunday at 1:35 on YES it’s Cole (2.64) against an undetermined hurler.