Yankee4Life

And if it goes extra innings that means things will be kind of rushed when the game is done?

6 out of 10, 85 seconds. These were some of the most difficult baseball ones I have had to answer in awhile.

I'm glad you did give your complete backstory here because it was a good one and a good read for me. I'm very happy for you and I am also happy that you are appreciated there since you got that promotion. There is one thing that I have to wonder about and I guess it is something you can't even answer. You said in 2013 you aced an interview with them and that everyone was impressed. Now when that happened you must have figured that you were going to get that job, right? What was their excuse for not hiring you? But at least they kept you in mind for the next one. I'm glad you got it and that you are doing well there.

10 out of 10, 42 seconds. 42 seconds? I can't explain it at all. Now I'll sit back and watch all of you fly past that. Wave as you go by. 🙂

This is a very good article that I wanted to post in here even though it did not have anything to do with Yankee news. I watched this World Series game Mike Vaccaro is talking about here and I was exhausted the next day when I went to school. Unfortunately I must admit I have not watched all the endings of the World Series games since 1975 because I refused to watch the ones when the Red Sox were in it. Other than that I think I got the rest covered. The World Series viewing decision that changed my sports life at 8 years old — and is worth passing on by Mike Vaccaro, New York Post. Boston Red Sox' catcher Carlton Fisk #27 runs to home and is met by his teammates after hitting a home run against the Cincinnati Reds in the 12th inning of game Six of the World Series at Fenway park on October 21, 1975. I’m not a parent. If I were, I’d like to think I would have done for my child what my father did for me late in the evening of Oct. 21, 1975 (actually, early in the morning of Oct. 22). Are you a parent? Do you do this? Does anyone anymore? I was 8 years old. I was in the third grade. And I have long maintained that baseball never means quite so much to us as it does when we are 8 years old. I know that was the case for me. It was when I was 8 that baseball stopped being something I watched because my father did and instead became something I immersed myself in. Completely. (TRUE STORY: The proudest my father may have ever been when it came to his only son happened the previous spring. I’d made my First Communion on May 17. My parents asked how I wanted to celebrate. There was only one answer: Yankees-A’s, Shea Stadium that night. And off we went. In the fifth inning they had a baseball quiz. Alvin Dark was managing the A’s. The year before he’d become the third manager to win pennants in both leagues. Who were the first two? My dad asked if I knew. I did: Yogi Berra and Joe McCarthy. Behind us, a couple of middle-aged guys with their bottles hidden in paper bags started giving me a hard time. “Joe McCarthy, kid? No way!” “I guarantee it,” he said, and my old man bet him a dollar I was right. He accepted. I was right. The guy laughed and handed my pop the bill. “Hey kid, what kind of school do you go to, baseball school?” My father lived for another 28 years, 1 month and 23 days. I believe he may have retold that story to somebody on every one of those days that followed.) Former Mets manager Yogi Berra. So, as I say: Baseball mattered a lot to 8-year-old me. We’d made our first trip as a family to Cooperstown a week earlier. And I was obsessed with the Reds-Red Sox World Series, which the Reds led, three games to two, that evening of Oct. 21, 1975 — exactly 50 years ago Tuesday. The game started at 8:30, which also happened to be my bedtime. A series of intense negotiations followed, and the resulting compromise was this: I could stay up to watch the first inning. If it looked like the Reds were going to win the game, he’d wake me up. We shook on it. The Sox scored three in the bottom of the first. I went to bed, figuring I was done for the night. And was stunned three hours later when he came to get me. “The Reds are up 6-3, bottom eight,” he said. “You still want to watch?” I was out of bed and in the living room in a flash — in just enough time to watch Bernie Carbo hit a game-tying three-run homer off Rawly Eastwick. My father looked at me, as wide awake as if it were noon. He realized there was no going back to bed. So we settled in: through the ninth, through the 10th, through the 11th. Finally as the Reds went down in the top of the 12th, he warned that this was it. He had to be up in about three hours. And, well, you probably know what happened then. You’ve seen Carlton Fisk wave his walk-off home run fair 100,000 times. So have I. But I also saw it live. I saw it on TV, 3 ¹/₂ hours after I was supposed to be fast asleep. My father wanted me to see the final out of the World Series for the first time, and instead we got so much more. Do you do this? Does anyone anymore? I never had a child to roust. But I know for a fact that this year, for the 50th straight year, I’ll make sure I watch the last out of the World Series. You can enjoy that at 58 every bit as much as at 8. Trust me.

How did you get the job that you have? Have you told the baseball fans that you work with about the mod that you made? Because you should be very proud of it. I know I would be.

Sad Sam Jones For a player so significant in Red Sox history, surprisingly little is known about Samuel Pond “Sad Sam” Jones. Despite his incredible contributions to the Red Sox World Series victory in 1918, the most often discussed thing about Jones is his curious nickname. Born July 26, 1892, to Delbert and Margaret Clingan Jones, in Woodsfield, Ohio, about 20 miles west of the West Virginia Panhandle, Sam developed his arm on his grandfather’s farm by throwing potatoes across a field to his brother Robert. He pitched well in high school, but quit ball to take a full-time job at Schumacher’s grocery store. Though he intimated to family that he preferred basketball, and would have played it professionally had there been a league at the time, he kept pitching in pickup games, and in 1913, he was asked to try out for Zanesville of the Inter-State League. That was where he first broke into professional baseball, winning two games and losing seven but also getting good experience — including pitching in a June exhibition game against the New York Giants. However, Jones was only 20 years old and very homesick, so when he was forced to take a pay cut, he refused, and when he saw his manager, Marty Hogan, on the street the following day, the young hurler demanded to be released immediately. In what Sam’s son, Paul, would later call “probably the craziest release in baseball history,” Hogan obliged, writing Jones’ release in pencil on the inside of a chewing tobacco packet. Sam was not home for long. Just three days after he returned to Woodsfield, he was offered a contract by Lee Fohl, the manager of the Columbus team in the same league as Zanesville. Ironically, Sam ended up taking a pay cut from his Zanesville wage anyway, and when the league folded on July 15, Sam went home to work as a clerk in the grocery store. During the offseason, Jones played semipro basketball, a sport he claimed to be better at than baseball, but in the spring of 1914, he returned to baseball, spending some time at the Bill Doyle baseball school in Portsmouth, Ohio. Later that summer, Jones left the school to sign with the Portsmouth team in the Ohio State League, where he posted another losing record (5-6) but showed some potential when it mattered. One day, with Cleveland Indians scout Bill Reedy watching the game, Jones pitched well enough to earn a victory and hit a triple and home run to help his own cause. Reedy was impressed and signed Jones for the Indians later that year. He spent most of the year pitching for Cleveland’s American Association team (10-4 in 23 games, with a 2.44 ERA), earning a promotion to the big-league Cleveland club for one game in the middle of the year. Jones debuted with the Indians on June 13, 1914. After starter Rip Hageman gave up nine runs to Philadelphia, Jones threw the final three and one-third innings, allowing two hits and one run, while going 1-for-2 at the plate. Though that was his only appearance of 1914, in 1915 he became a regular — his second of 22 seasons pitching for six of the eight American League clubs. In his only full year with the Indians, Jones was 4-9 (3.65 ERA) and walked more (63) than he struck out (42). Jones batted .156 for the Indians — his career batting average was .197 in 1,243 at-bats. In the book The Glory of Their Times, Jones told Lawrence Ritter that he “loved” playing with the Indians–probably because it was so close to where his sister lived. On April 9, 1916, the Indians traded Jones to the Red Sox with minor leaguer Fred Thomas and $55,000 for future Hall of Famer Tris Speaker. The Joseph Lannin-owned Red Sox were dumping Speaker and his high salary, to the distress of Red Sox fans. Thomas was the man Lannin wanted; Jones himself was an afterthought at best. The 1916 Red Sox pitching staff was essentially the same one that had won the 1915 World Series; Vean Gregg who got most of the work the sore-armed Smoky Joe Wood had previously handled, while Jones threw only 27 innings, all in relief, losing his only decision. Jones was used even less in 1917, reprising his 0-1 record. The loss came in his only start of the year, in Cleveland on August 19. He was hammered for two runs in the first and two in the fourth; the Boston Globe said that when it was over, “he looked like a crazyquilt.” At the start of his tenure with the Red Sox, Jones hardly seemed a big part of the ballclub. The Boston Herald and Journal reported that Jones “wasn’t even sent a contract [in 1918] by the Hub Hose. The team was at Hot Springs when owner Harry Frazee got a letter from Sam along these lines: ‘Forgotten me altogether? I’m not worth a contract of any sort? If I am through, let me in on it.’ ” Red Sox executives told the Globe that they thought he was at Camp Sherman in the Army and had placed him on the voluntarily retired list in error. [Globe, March 27, 1918] They wired Jones to come quickly, and told the newspaper they expected him to get a fair amount of work. Fortunately for Jones, the Red Sox were right. The new manager for 1918, Ed Barrow, saw that Jones had a “most baffling delivery” and nurtured him into a pitcher who delivered 16 victories against only five losses (2.25 ERA). Though Barrow would later say that he was equally as proud of turning Babe Ruth into an outfielder as he was of turning Jones into a great pitcher, Jones and his manager had a contentious relationship at best. In his interview with Laurence Ritter for The Glory of Their Times, Jones admitted that he was a bit hard to handle as a ballplayer in his younger years, something that would become a semi-serious problem in his years with the Washington Senators. On May 23, 1918, Jones had his first start of the season and pitched extremely well against Cleveland–though he was on the short end of a 1-0 decision. Jones’s next two starts were brilliant. He outpitched Walter Johnson on May 29, winning a 3-0, five-hit shutout, and followed that with a 1-0 shutout of Cleveland on June 6, again allowing just five hits, but this time in 10 innings. (The June 6 game was interesting in that pitcher Babe Ruth played left field for Boston and pitcher Joe Wood played left field for Cleveland.) After allowing just one run in three starts, Sam Jones had cemented himself in as part of the starting rotation. In the first three starts he threw against his former ballclub, Jones allowed Cleveland just one run. After he beat the Indians on August 19, the very player he had been traded for, Tris Speaker, told the Boston Herald and Journal: “Sam Jones is the best pitcher Boston has… Those two years Sam sat on the bench made him. He simply absorbed everything that went on in the games. He’s smart and learns rapidly. That slow ball of his simply floats up there and you swing your head off, and then he has a fast one that is on top of you before you realize it. In addition, he has as good a curve ball as anyone in the league. Yes, I believe he’s the best pitcher on the team.” A baffling delivery might be one thing, and it seemed to take him a while to harness his pitches (he walked more than he struck out in each of his first three full seasons in the majors), but Jones maintained that during a five-year stretch he only once threw over to first base to hold back a runner, believing that “there are only so many throws in an arm,” something future Hall of Famer Eddie Plank had told him. When Ernie Shore left for the Navy, Dutch Leonard took a shipyard job, and Babe Ruth cut back a bit on pitching, Joe Bush and Sam Jones got the opportunity to pitch in 1918. Bush won 15, Jones won 16, and Carl Mays won 21. It was a terrific year, and Jones led the league in winning percentage as the Red Sox advanced to the World Series against the Chicago Cubs. Though Jones lost his start in Game Five, 3-0, the Sox won the Series–it would be their last world championship for 86 years. The next year, 1919, wasn’t as kind to Jones as 1918, and Sad Sam finished the season 12-20 with an inflated 3.75 ERA. The team itself had a losing record, and several headlines mentioned Jones’s wildness and wobbling. Jones got more work than anyone else on the staff, but others pitched better. He did dominate Washington, throwing three shutouts in a row before losing in the last matchup. In 1920, Jones’s workload increased to 274 innings but he again had a losing record (13-16, with an ERA that grew to 3.94.) He often pitched very well indeed, but was inconsistent and also often suffered from poor run support — though he perhaps single-handedly denied the pennant to the White Sox. Chicago finished two games behind the Indians, and Jones beat them six times. Only once in the first five of those wins did Jones give up as many as two runs. There were, though, the losses: On June 12, he gave up six runs to the St. Louis Browns in the first inning, left the game, and lost. Trying again the very next day, he was left in to pitch the full game and lost again, 11-5. It took until 1921 for Jones to turn it around again. Even though the team again had a losing record (as it did throughout the 1920s), Jones became a 20-game winner (23-16, 3.22 ERA), making himself an attractive target for the acquisitive New York Yankees. Five days before Christmas 1921, Harry Frazee traded Jones, and Bullet Joe Bush (between them, the two pitchers had accounted for 39 of Boston’s 75 wins in 1921) and threw in eight-year veteran Everett Scott, for four New York players–Roger Peckinpaugh, Rip Collins, Bill Piercy, and Jack Quinn–plus $100,000. Sam was 13-13 with the Yankees his first year, but went to the World Series again. Jones threw two late innings against the New York Giants without giving up a run, but the Giants swept the Series in four games (not counting a Game Two tie). It was back to the Series again in 1923, Sam’s 21-8 and Herb Pennock’s 19-6 pacing the Yankees during the season. In what he later called one of his proudest moments in baseball, Jones pitched a no-hitter on September 4, beating the Philadelphia Athletics, 2-0, without striking out a single batter. In the Series, he started and lost Game Three, but it was a 1-0 loss, a four-hitter spoiled only by Casey Stengel’s home run for the Giants. Jones took his World Series record pretty seriously; he would later grumble to the press that he got “no run support,” a fair assertion. Jones entered 1924 with a sore right elbow that lasted two months and contributed to a disappointing 9-6 record. In 1925, he pitched a full year again but the Yankees collapsed all the way to seventh place. Jones was 15-21, and his ERA increased one full run from 3.63 to 4.63. The earned run average bumped up again to 4.98 in 1926, and his 9-8 record was mediocre on a team that featured 58 wins from Pennock, Urban Shocker, and Waite Hoyt, and took the World Series to Game Seven before losing to the Cardinals. Jones pitched just the ninth inning in Game Two, giving up the final run in a 6-2 loss. Jones spent five years pitching in New York, but it didn’t change him as a man. Jones was, according to those who knew him, a homebody. He hated leaving his Woodsfield hometown for spring training, and minutes after the season ended, he would hustle his belongings, his wife, Edith, and their sons, George and Paul, into their LaSalle automobile and drive straight to Woodsfield. In early February 1927, Sam was swapped to the St. Louis Browns for Cedric Durst and Joe Giard. In his one season with St. Louis, Jones was 8-14 with a 4.32 ERA. Right after baseball wrapped up postseason play, St. Louis sent Sam and Milt Gaston to Washington for Dick Coffman and Earl McNeely. Sad Sam pitched four years for Washington, rebounding nicely with a 17-7 (2.84) in 1928, despite the Senators finishing 26 games out of first place. His hopes for another strong season in 1929 were dashed when he sprained his back on May 22. He returned to Woodsfield for a month and next started in early July. He finished the season with a 9-9 mark and a 3.92 ERA. Owner Clark Griffith signed him again for 1930, but to a “bonus contract” based on incentives. Right as the season began, Jones ran afoul of manager Walter Johnson. Accused of “speaking out of turn” (New York Times) and displaying what Johnson termed “not the proper attitude” (Washington Post), Johnson sent Jones back to Washington while the Senators traveled from Boston to Philadelphia. The rift didn’t last long, though, and Jones was back in a few days. Jones was what we could call a “difficult sign” during his years in D.C., but in this case it was perhaps Johnson who “possibly may have been a little harsh” in the words of Post correspondent Frank H Young. Perhaps the bonus clause worked; he won 15 and lost seven (with a 4.07 ERA). In 1931, Jones was 9-10, and in December the Senators traded him and Irving “Bump” Hadley to the White Sox for Carl Reynolds, Jackie Hayes and Johnny Kerr. The Washington Post said that Jones “undoubtedly is nearing the end of his career.” He would turn 40 during the summer of 1932. Sam Jones won 10 games for the White Sox in 1932 and again in 1933, but was under .500 each year. Chicago was competing with the Red Sox for last place in those years and in his four seasons with the White Sox Jones’s won-loss percentage was higher than his team’s. In 1934, he celebrated his 42nd birthday with a six-hit, 9-0 shutout of Washington. In November 1935, after he had posted a winning 8-7 record, the White Sox gave Sam Jones his unconditional release at age 43. His 22-year career was finally over. He had a 229 - 217 career mark with a 3.84 ERA and struck out 1, 223 hitters. He kept busy, teaching kids in Woodsfield how to play ball (and securing donations of major-league equipment from some of his old teammates), according to his friend, Ronald Turner; one of those children, from nearby Stewartsville, Ohio, was another Sam Jones, nicknamed “Toothpick Sam,” who would go on to play 12 years in the major leagues. Jones’s last season as a professional came in 1940, after four years out of the game. He appeared in eight games for the Toronto Maple Leafs, for a total of 12 innings, with a winning 1-0 record and a somewhat meaningless 2.25 ERA. Soon after his 48th birthday he was released by the Maple Leafs. In his final appearance, he’d thrown one inning without giving up a hit or a run. The Associated Press obituary explained the origin of his nickname, “Sad Sam, the Cemetery Man,” as emanating from “a new sportswriter whose only acquaintance with the pitcher was watching him from the press box. The dour features of the pitcher at that distance completely hid the twinkle in his eye.” The story deemed him a “whimsical and quietly humorous man, brimful of quips and backwoods humor.” Sam Jones, throughout a lengthy baseball career that took him from Cleveland to Washington, Boston to Chicago, and many places in between, was a small-town man at heart; he was a local institution in Woodsfield when he lived, just as much a part of the village as the County Library or the abandoned railroad. A marker detailing his career in baseball stands on Creamery Street in Woodsfield, ensuring that the village remembers the man who cherished it more than any other place until the day he died in 1966.

8 out of 10, 42 seconds. Not a good outing because I missed this question. Which of these M.L.B. Hall of Fame pitchers had the most hits in his major league baseball career? For some crazy reason I picked Bob Gibson and the correct answer was Walter Johnson with 547. I should have known this because I read a book about Johnson earlier this year.

This is not the same team I grew up with.

The Yankees are the embodiment of baseball insanity By Joel Sherman, New York Post Yankees GM Brian Cashman speaking to the media at a press conference. All of the folks who have brought you the Red Zone Yankees are coming back. You know the Red Zone Yankees? The organization good enough to get close to the goal line, without ever actually crossing it. The franchise that insists it is championship or bust annually, but has become all too familiar with bust. The team that can tease with title proximity, but completes each season with Brian Cashman and Aaron Boone sitting at a table at Yankee Stadium explaining again why they are close, yet not good enough. The indicators are that all the same folks and philosophies that have brought you the Red Zone Yankees will be returning. So far we have the equivalent of changing dish towels at a mansion with the revelation that the bullpen coach, first base coach and third hitting coach were not asked back, which should have all the impact on the 2026 Yankees of firing George Costanza as assistant to the traveling secretary. Hal Steinbrenner continues to believe in Cashman, who in turn believes in all of his key lieutenants, including Boone. And they all continue to believe in — among others — Anthony Volpe, even if they can’t agree on how much his terrible season was caused by the torn labrum in his left shoulder. Boone doesn’t believe the injury was a factor in Volpe’s performance, Cashman does, but the surgery Volpe underwent on Tuesday will keep him out until at least mid-April. Shortstop will be kept warm for him nevertheless. “Hopefully next year, we’ll find a way,” Cashman said of the overall group. What is that definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting to do better than reaching the red zone? Boone offered an “I don’t know” when asked what would make folks believe that the Yankees as currently constituted, from owner down, can ever be the last team standing. That is not exactly rally-the-troops inspiring. He added: “I think we have a lot of really good people here; a lot of really good players, a lot of really good staff members and a lot of great front office [people] that are working our tails off to put us in the best position to take our shot every year … to get to October baseball and play for it. So, I can’t answer that because I haven’t got this team to the top of the mountain. So all I can tell you is I’m confident in my ability to lead this team. I’m confident in our organization to build the team that gives us a chance to win, but ultimately I can’t tell you anything to make you feel good. Ultimately, it’s about us winning No. 28 [overall championship] and all I can tell you is I’m working my butt off to try and be a part of helping us bring that back.” If there is any alchemy to not being Sisyphean in October — to actually reaching the mountaintop of which Boone spoke — it has eluded the Yankees. Yes, you have to hit the magic brew of health and playing well across all phases in a small window — as both Cashman and Boone stressed. But it is always a Yankees opponent at this time of year who has that formula down. Is that just about hitting it right eventually with enough tries? After all, no team has repeated as champions since the 1998-2000 Yankees three-peated. The Dodgers may repeat this year, but they first went from 1989-2019 without a title, which included seven straight years making the playoffs (2013-2019) before winning the COVID 60-game title in 2020 and then losing in the postseason three more straight years before beating the mistake-addicted Yankees in the World Series last October. Is it about changing the head of baseball operations? But to whom? A year ago all 30 teams would have loved the idea of David Stearns. Do Mets fans still feel that awesome? You can change the manager/coach, but you can end up with an Aaron like Glenn, too. Padres head of baseball operations A.J. Preller is about to name a fifth manager in the past decade after firing Bud Black during the 2015 season and having first Dave Roberts and then Pat Murphy as the interims — or the two lauded NLCS managers. In other words, would you know the right guy even if he were in front of you? You could talk about finding more contact hitters after watching the high-average, low-strikeout Blue Jays eliminate the Yankees in the division series. Except Toronto has been part of the overall trend this postseason in which you better homer to win — playoff teams that had outhomered the opponent were 20-4 (.833 winning percentage) through Wednesday and 115-24 (.827) since 2021 (thanks to MLB Network research). In other words, it is tough to get the right people to drive the right philosophy and have it all work well enough to get to the postseason and then rise in that tiny October window. But some team does manage it annually. And year after year, for a long time now, it has not been the Yankees. Maybe they just need more tries with all the same folks doing the same thing. Or is that red zone insanity?

You guys are just showing off! 😅👍

10 out of 10, 34 seconds. I slipped up on one of the questions. The time does look decent but when you guys are done today it really won't.

6 out of 10, 46 seconds. Thank God tomorrow is Friday.

8 out of 10, 62 seconds. Baseball card questions always get me!

7 out of 10, 48 seconds. I consider this a minor victory even though you two passed me up today. The next time he does that tell him to hold on and that you are doing something important. He'll understand. 😄

When January arrives you will have been here two years and that is long enough for you to know the rules around here. I am now talking about rule nine section seven: Bumping threads with posts that simply say "bump". You may not always get an answer straight away, so please be patient before bumping a thread; a couple of hours may not be long enough for someone with the right knowledge to come along and answer your question. Bumping a thread that has not been posted in for some time may be tolerated so long as you are making a meaningful contribution to the discussion that is relevant to the original topic. Bumping old threads simply for the sake of posting however will not be tolerated. Don't bump this thread again. Thank you.

9 out of 10, 64 seconds. No complaints with the score because the one I missed I deserved to.

10 out of 10, 33 seconds. I had a mouse issue that cost precious time.

4 out of 10, 88 seconds. These questions were brutal today.

Ok KC I get the Dominguez part. But what I really want to find out is the part you said about Lupica.

10 out of 10, 26 seconds. All this time I could not get under thirty seconds and I was lucky enough to do it again. Then again when you get a question that asks what position Goose Gossage played you can not help but get it right.

Excellent and well thought out post. First I want to start off with what you said right here. What do you think exactly is Lupica addressing and just as important why can't he or other New York sports media say it out loud? THIS RIGHT HERE out of everything you wrote got me really upset because where you wrote that "every October feels the same" I said out loud "hell yeah!" Because you know why KC and everyone else reading this? Because it's true!!! Last year falling apart in the World Series, 2022 folding up against Houston, 2021 losing to Boston 1 - 0 in the Wild card game, 2020 they lose to the Rays in five games and in game two they had Deivi Garcia pitch one inning and then they yanked him. That still bugs me. Anyway it is the same movie but with different actors. Profitable but elite mediocrity. What a way to put it. To put it in other words there is no rush or desire to improve on what they currently are throwing out each year because they know the team will somehow make the playoffs and they will continue to throw the team's glorious history in the fan's faces because that somehow distracts them. This here is on the fans 100%. I love reading about Yankee history and will talk about it with anyone but I refuse to use anything that I read or know as a distraction that the team did to what is going on here and now. During the season for me what is going on now is more important than anything that I have been reading about in the past. That's true. They have mistaken consistency for greatness but they are overlooking the fact that consistency is a lot better when it works with greatness and not as a substitute for greatness. Let me explain. The 90's Yankees? Consistent and great at the same time. A perfect mixture. All successful teams have had this. The 70's Athletics and Reds. The late 70's Yankees. And many people can think of others too. In other words these teams were tough to beat. There is no way on God's green earth you can say this about Boone's teams when it really mattered because they always ended up falling apart when it counted the most. Yes, I can promise we will be reading about that beginning next month. I fully agree this is not a one player problem. You can change the cast of characters but the ending is always the same. And before I go, just a few things. 1. NO, Juan Soto would not have changed the outcome of these playoffs if he was here. 2. Jasson Dominguez is the last can't miss Yankee who seems to have in my view, missed. Before he got here they built him up to be the greatest thing to come along in years and when he is finally here they won't let him put a glove on or even let him attempt to play his natural position in center field. Naturally analytics can explain it. And I hate that word. 3. This won't happen but someone needs to sit Volpe down and tell him that he is not Aaron Judge. He's just his teammate. And no, I won't miss him if he is gone. I've had it with him.

Yankees remain champions of being good, but not good enough By Mike Lupica, New York Daily News Aaron Judge did everything he could to carry the Yankees, but ultimately Bombers fall to a better team in the Blue Jays in the ALDS. The lasting October image for another Brian Cashman/Aaron Boone Yankee team was Aaron Judge stranded on the bases as Cody Bellinger became the Blue Jays’ 10th strikeout victim in Game 4. Judge is one of the great Yankees of all time and the best hitter of his time. But this was another October about to end the way all the others have for him, with him stranded short of the Canyon of Heroes, about to watch another team celebrate on the field at Yankee Stadium that he honors so mightily. That is the real rite of fall now at the Stadium, where winning the Series once was. Just not since 2009. It makes this the second longest championship drought in the team’s history, the grand history that began with Babe Ruth, the Judge of his time in baseball. But then this has become a time when Yankee fans are told they should feel truly blessed because their team has had three decades of winning seasons. Maybe they should start raising banners above Monument Park for those. “I want to go back out there right now,” a somber Judge said Wednesday night after his team had only managed six hits against eight Blue Jays relievers, an “opener” night for them that closed out another lost October for the Yankees. We always hear, after the Yankees have all been stopped short of the Canyon of Heroes how random postseason baseball is. How much of a crapshoot it is. Even the classy Boone wasn’t buying that as a defense Wednesday night. “That’s the beauty of it,” he said. But even he can’t be surprised at how this ended, because these endings, these celebrations for the other team, have become as inevitable as the tide for the Yankees. We just don’t know in what round of the playoffs they’ll occur. It was Bill Parcells, famously, who said you are what your record says you are in sports. So here is the October record for the Brian/Boone Yankees: They have now played 12 postseason series over the eight seasons since Cashman got rid of Joe Girardi after the Yankees lost Games 6 and 7 to the Astros in the American League Championship Series of 2017. Their record in those series is 6-6. Their won-loss record in those games is 25-27. They have played two one-game Wild Card series, and split those. They have absolutely put together an historic streak of winning seasons, and no one suggested that’s nothing. But not once in the Brian/Boone era have they been the best team in series that finished them. In three of the past four seasons — they missed the playoffs in 2023 when they nearly did throw in a losing season — they have played 13 games in series that ended their season: Once against the Astros in the ALCS, once against the Dodgers in the World Series, now in a division series against the Jays. Their record in those series is 2-11. “Crapshoot” is, by definition, is a risky and uncertain matter. The October numbers for these Yankees say otherwise, and you know how much they love their numbers. Have they gotten back up in October after getting knocked down in the Brian/Boone era? They have. They at least fought their way out of a sweep against the Dodgers last year. They came back from losing the first game of their Wild Card series against the Red Sox just last week. And the whole world saw them come back from 1-6 down in Game 3 on Tuesday night, Judge carrying them again with a home run off the foul pole that made you feel as if you were watching Robert Redford — as Roy Hobbs — hit one off the light tower in “The Natural. But once again the Yankees were about to lose another playoff series as a lower seed, even if they were a lower seed just barely to the Jays, both of them ending with 94 regular-season wins. Other than the postseason of 2020 — the October games played on neutral fields during the pandemic — they have never won series like that in the Brian/Boone era. And in those three season-ending series over the past four years, the Yankees have never won a single road game. Their record in those is 0-6. And so they have now watched the Blue Jays celebrate on their field the way the Dodgers did a year ago, and the Astros did in 2022, and the Red Sox back in 2018. If the kid, Cam Schlittler, didn’t pitch the game of his young life against the Red Sox last week, who knows, the Sox might have done it to the Yankees again. When it was all on the line against the Jays, they were once again a baseball team called Judge, as All Rise rose once again. He hit .600 against the Blue Jays, had nine hits, six RBI, scored five runs, produced that unforgettable Game 3 home run to tie things at 6-all. Everybody else hit around .200. Even in the bottom of the season Wednesday, Judge plated one last run as he refused to make the last out. The only time Judge let them down in this division series was when he struck out with bases loaded, nobody out in Game 1, when that was still a game. After that the Yankees were lucky the roof at Rogers Centre was closed, because it would have come crashing down on them in the late innings that day. The bottom line here is that the Blue Jays were better against the Yankees same as they were in the regular season; the way other teams with winning records were (the Yankees were 31-36 against them this year). Did the Yankees fight? They did. But who they were against the Blue Jays this week is who they inevitably are at this time of year. Another Yankee team with a really good record wasn’t good enough. They remain the champions of that.

9 out of 10, 62 seconds. The "general" questions today had no soccer questions and that helped me dodge a bullet.

9 out of 10, 70 seconds. I got the first nine right and messed up question ten.