Yankee4Life

Updated to 9-24 ...As another baseball season is coming to a close I don't know whether to be sad that the season will end this week or be relieved that the almost daily torture that the Yankees have put me through will finally and mercifully be coming to an end. I've tried to look at it more positively. Saying that they weren't even supposed to be as good as they were this year, that they were not even supposed to contend for a playoff berth, etc. Fine. But what I can't get past is how terrible they played for over two months starting when they made that west coast trip in June. The way I saw it losing those four straight games in Oakland to a last place team really started it off. Good teams pick themselves up from something like this. These guys didn't. They played the month of July like they were trying to hold on to a life preserver with one hand. Yankee teams in the past I've had faith in. I never had any with this team the entire year. I took out my frustrations on them in the shoutbox, I kicked a football so hard after one of Gary Sanchez' passed balls that I pulled a muscle in my leg, I threw a water bottle at the wall after one of Masahiro Tanaka's starts, not realizing that the bottle was still open and half full and I came within a hair of busting up an expensive pair of headphones after another ball went past Sanchez after he gave a half-assed attempt to catch. This guy gets me so mad that he almost makes me wish Jorge Posada was still around and that's saying something. Next year maybe I will feel different about them. Not now. And now that they are a wild card entry do you see them going far? Cleveland will tear them apart. ...But there were exceptions this year. I loved watching Didi Gregorius play. Now this guy is a shortstop. The range that this guy has! I haven't missed Derek Jeter at all since he retired because Gregorius is doing everything. You can't tell me that ex-Yankee pitchers who played with Jeter are not privately saying to themselves that they'd rather have had Gregorius there. They'll never admit it because it would be a knock on Captain twenty million. But Gregorius has proven he's better on a daily basis. If it wasn't for this guy I'd have had a harder time watching this team. ...Wouldn't you know it with all the destruction that Hurricane Irma caused in Florida that Derek Jeter's estate down there was not damaged at all? Believe me if it had the New York Daily News and the New York Post would have had it plastered on the front page for three days. They'd of made the suffering that the people who were hit by the hurricane the worst seem second rate because Jeter had mailbox knocked over by the high winds. ...All things Red Sox Dept: Instead of creating a bunch of different topics on the dishonest and evil ways of the Boston Red Sox I decided to keep it in one nice and neat little tirade. Easy for everyone concerned and a lot more calming for me because the less I talk about Boston the better it is for me. The city's representative sports franchises continue to prove at every given opportunity that the only way to play a game right is to cheat and, when you are finally caught red-handed, quickly blame someone else just to get the heat off themselves. And that is precisely how the Red Sox got away with using which was first believed an Apple Watch to steal signs but in fact it was a Fitbit product. Like that really mattered. They still stole the signs from the other teams and that's how they were able to have that big comeback against Cleveland in early August and against the Yankees a few weeks later, just to name two games that stood out. Not for one minute were the Red Sox worried about drawing a stiff penalty from Commissioner Manfred because they know they're the Red Sox and things like that don't happen to them. Just to be on the safe side and to make them look like the victim to their fans, who apparently believe anything they are told, they blamed the Yankees for doing something just as bad as they did but if you ask any team around baseball they weren't having any of it. Dustin Pedroia, the team's sneaky second baseman who has been corking his bat since he broke in the major leagues in 2006, was a big part of stealing the signs from the opposition and all he did was laugh and gave any reporter who asked him a what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it smile when pressed for answers. Well, no one did anything. What a surprise. If I were John Farrell I would be very worried about young Rafael Devers. In a recent interview Devers said that Robinson Cano has always been his favorite player because of the way he plays. So when Devers starts jogging down to first base like he's wearing ankle weights and plays like he only got an hour of sleep the night before he'll know why. Finally, I must give credit to where it is due. Fenway Park is a wonderful place to watch a ball game and if you are lucky on some days you can sit out in the sun and work on your tan while watching the game. On the flip side you are practically guaranteed to sit next to a guy who just loves to let black players know what he thinks of them (ask Adam Jones of Baltimore about that) or someone who is keeping the Samuel Adams beer people in business all by himself. Usually if you get one you get the other. Yeah, go Sawx. Just go away. ...The beginning of the NFL season two weeks ago brought a lot of mixed feelings for me. I was glad to see the Raiders back even though they went winless during the pre-season but as they like to tell you it doesn't matter if they win or lose, the teams just want to see their new draft picks get some playing time, give the veterans some time on the field and avoid injuries. This is one of the few things that the NFL tells their fans that I have no trouble believing. But as I was listening to the game on the radio I was continuously reminded that the team was leaving Oakland again and this time I am afraid there won't be a return ticket. Love them or hate them football fans must admit -sometimes grudgingly- that the Raider fans are among the most loyal you will ever find. Look at what they did last week. They sold out the stadium in their home opener against the Jets even though they knew there isn't many home openers left for them. Mark Davis may have been given a $750 million dollar stadium in Las Vegas plus a carload full of incentives including unlimited credit for every casino in town but once they get to Nevada it is never going to be the same for the Raiders again and when that happens I just don't know if I am going to be able to watch football again. ...It wasn't just Oakland that I felt bad for. The people in San Diego don't have their Chargers to root for anymore because they refused to give money to the billionaire owner of the team to build his stadium for him. They voted to pay for schools and other necessities that they decided were more important than keeping a rich owner happy. So Dean Spanos took his team and his football and moved ninety miles up the coast to Los Angeles, a city by the way that never wanted the Chargers but there they are anyway. And they can't even sell out the smallest stadium in the league. As rich as this guy is that's how dumb he is too. ...Highway robbery with a puck, Dept: It's no secret that the city of Detroit has fallen on hard times. Putting it mildly, they're broke. But that did not stop the Detroit Red Wings owners from going there and somehow coming away with $250 million dollars to build a new hockey rink. What's even worse is that $13 million of that is coming directly out of Detroit school taxes. They are already hurting as it is and now it's going to be next to impossible to get a decent education there. Their schools are going to be so hard up now that three kids are going to have to share one desk. I don't understand why they did this and why they are so desperate to keep the Red Wings owners happy here. The only possible reason I can come up with is that the Red Wings are one of the original six National Hockey League teams and there is no way the Motor City wants them going anywhere. But it came at a high cost to keep these people happy. Detroit can not already properly fund their public schools so this cutback of thirteen million dollars is really going to make parents even happier. The real estate prices are among the lowest in the United States because people are moving out of Detroit at a steady pace and to top it off there is a huge police shortage where it is not uncommon to place a 911 call and wait up to an hour for a response. So a mugger can take your wallet, go to lunch and come back and mug you again just so he can be sure he didn't miss anything the first time and still get out of there in plenty of time before the cops arrive. But sure, give the hockey team 250 million. Great move. ...Have you ever noticed how many articles that are written on the internet about a waitress posting a receipt that she got from a customer and the sob story behind it? Last week I finished reading three of them but this one here stands out from the rest on its stupidity alone. Our heroine the waitress was serving two girls their meals and everything was going well until it was time to pay the bill. It seems that both girls did not like the makeup that the waitress had on and instead of leaving a few dollars for a tip they gave her another kind of tip when they wrote on the receipt that "contour is supposed to blend." (Don't ask me what that is supposed to mean. I don't even know what contour is but I know that the waitress would have taken money over that not-so-friendly tip.) Now here is the eye-rolling part. After the woman read what they wrote she said that it "didn't phase her at all." Sure it didn't, not at all. She just needed to take it straight to social media and the internet as fast as she could to let everyone know about how much it "didn't phase her." Yeah it sucks that they did that to you but the only reason why you ran to Facebook and Twitter was to see how many people were going to feel sorry for you. Some people are like that. That's how they get through the day. All you did was give them more attention for their actions. ...It's too bad a lot of you did not get to see ESPN during the 1980s when they spent their time broadcasting and covering sports instead of what they do best these days which is making headlines that make you question the sanity of the people that run the place. Jemele Hill, a female African-American reporter called Donald Trump a "white supremacist " and also “an unfit, bigoted, incompetent moron” and finally wrapping it up by saying that he was “unqualified and unfit to be president.” Well at least she covered everything. ESPN tried to take her off the 6 p.m. SportsCenter show she hosts because Trump wanted her fired but were unable to because of the protests of the other black hosts at the network so they forced her into issuing a public apology. For what? For posting her thoughts on social media. Isn’t that what Twitter is for? Trump does it multiple times a day and he's said much worse about other people than what Hill said about him. Just ask Mika Brzezinski. Want more? Remember what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia last month when all hell broke loose during a white nationalist rally because some people were protesting the plans to remove a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee? Shortly after that happened the University of Virginia had their football home opener and ESPN was going to be there broadcasting the game but as coincidence would have it the guy who was scheduled to announce the game was named Robert Lee. ESPN was overwrought with worry here. They didn't want any incidents out on the field by the fans. If they wanted to start fights in the parking lot that was another thing. They didn't have to show that on network television. Now give ESPN credit here. They weren't fooled a bit. After many meetings with a bunch of stuffed-shirt executives in attendance they decided to remove Robert Lee from calling the game in Virginia. That's because one sharp, young junior executive spotted something in Robert Lee's name. All Lee did he pointed out was drop the E from his name so he could go incognito. The big shots were admittedly puzzled as how he turned into an Asian guy but when it they were reminded that it had to be a similar procedure that turned Bruce Jenner into a woman, they shook their heads and accepted that it was possible. Never mind the fact that the real Robert E. Lee has been dead all these 147 years these guys were happy with their decision that only made sense to them. That's why Lee, an Asian man who probably doesn't give a damn about the famous man in history that shares his name was transferred up to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to do the Youngstown/Pitt game. That made the suits very happy because now Lee was surrounded by a bunch of Yankees and he wouldn't dare make a move then. ...Now that I got my mind on Charlottesville it reminds me of something that I kept on hearing from some of the people on the TV news and from various articles on the internet that to me, if they had really thought about it, would not have asked the question at all. "How could this happen in 2017 ?" some people were wondering, as if demonstrations of this kind should have a different end result just because it's 2017. Or not even take place at all. The sad fact is that no matter how much progress is made (and in fact there is, just compare the present day to how things were fifty or sixty years ago) there are still and always will be a large group of people that will resist any and all change that they determine to be a threat to the "white way of life." Let me explain what I mean. The guy responsible for that car-ramming incident that killed that woman was all of twenty-years-old. Just a kid. Someone or more likely a group of people had to teach him how to think like that in that short period of time. They had to twist his mind to make him believe their way was the right way and the only way, just as someone before them taught them to think like that. These principles are either picked up or passed from generation to generation and what we saw and learned from that August night is the latest example of it. Fifty years from now if something like this happens again the same thing will be said. How can this happen now? The more things change the more they stay the same. Only the names change. ...Finally, well, I really don't know what to make out of this or really where to start. I expect I should just dive right in. Last week firefighters from a town in Germany called Worms were called to the hospital to assist in cutting off a 2.6 kg weight (which is a little over 5 1/2 pounds) off of a man's you-know-what. I know a lot of you are having a hard time believing this so to help you save time from googling this you can check it out for yourself by clicking on this link right here. Ok, let's go on. The firefighters spent quite a bit of time removing the weight from the guy using a a grinder and hydraulic cutter to get it off. When you think about it what else could they have used? One little slip up and....well you know. What I want to know is what was this guy thinking of when he decided to do this? It had to be torture trying to stand up let alone trying to walk around. And if he had to take a piss? Forget it. Maybe this was the closest weight around. Can you picture instead of this five pound weight grabbing a twenty pound one instead? A do-it-yourself hernia. Those firefighters would still be working on him now.

ENGLISH on this website thank you.

Updated to 7-23 ...I was going to have an update in this thread at the end of April but as the saying goes, life happened. I'll provide the abridged version here so I can move on to other more important things. Back in 2009 I had a hernia operation and a mesh had to be put in me because of that surgery. Over time I recovered from that surgery and everything was fine for these past eight years. Then on the 27th of April I started having some problems and I was told I had to go to emergency and they ended up admitting me and I did not feel fresh air on my face until two weeks later when I was discharged. A CAT scan showed that I had a fistula and to clear that up I had to have surgery. Since I had no choice in the matter I said it was a great idea. The surgery took a lot out of me because when I was sent home I was very tired all the time. Partly it was because I could not get any sleep in the hospital and partly it was from the severity of the operation. I am getting stronger now and that is clear to me because I never would've been able to write this a month ago without having to take a break. So, now that that's out of the way on with Random Thoughts. ...As if I needed another reason to hate Red Sox fans, one of them provided me with one during Boston's recent trip to Houston. Here's what happened. George Springer of the Astros hit a ball just barely fair over the third base bag and the ball bounced into foul territory as it headed towards the wall in left. When it reached the wall a fan reached down and made contact with the ball which ruled the play dead. When Boston's Xander Bogaerts came over to retrieve the ball one young Red Sox fan felt he had to let him know that he was not the one who touched the ball because the little bastard must have assumed that was the only thing on Bogaerts' mind. Never mind the game. The kid kept on pointing at the Astros fan who touched the ball and didn't let up until the stadium security people came down and took the guy away. The guy who got thrown out was the one wearing the light brown cap and if looks could kill that kid would have been slumped over instead of pointing at him. That must have been the highlight of the afternoon for him. Forget about the game - he was happier knowing he screwed someone over. With the haircut he had he looked like a reincarnation of the Hitler Youth organization of Nazi Germany. He'd of had a ball turning in terrified Jewish families back then. ...As we all know baseball is a sport ruled by statistics. For instance if you want to know the stat for every Yankee left fielder since 1990 who have hit home runs at home off of left handed pitchers you'll be able to get it. I don't know where you'd find something like that but there must be a place where useless information like that can be dug up. Some people are consumed with stats like this but I'm not one of them. How does knowing something like that help out the 2017 Yankees in any way? It doesn't. That's why I don't understand all the excitement about exit velocity when a batter hits a home run. Does it really matter how fast it takes for a ball to land in the outfield bleachers? The stat guys went nuts when Aaron Judge hit a home run with an exit velocity of 119.4 miles per hour because that was the fastest home run hit since they began keeping track of it starting in 2015. A bloop homerun hit over the left field wall at Fenway may not reach 100 mph in exit velocity but it's still a home run. To me it doesn't matter how fast they go out just as long as Aaron Judge and the rest of the Yankees keep hitting them. ...There will be no Muslim rants here today even though I realize ISIS recently attacked England twice within three weeks. ISIS took credit for them because, well, why the hell not? Even if the men who did this were not actual members of ISIS they made that organization look good by carrying out these cowardly acts. It was what happened in Portland, Oregon not too long ago that made me decide to take a look at things differently. That was when a man started yelling ethnic and religious slurs toward two women who appeared to be Muslim on a train. The man who did this was a white supremacist. If you don't know what that means just try to picture a bunch of beer drinking rednecks. The guy also killed two people who were trying to help the two women and injured another. Understand one thing here. I get why a lot of people are apprehensive about Muslims. They just got done attacking London twice. But there had to be many Muslims at the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester that were only there to listen to her concert and when that van drove into those pedestrians in the Southwark district in London there had to be many Muslims there who along with everyone else were just enjoying a pleasant night with friends or co-workers. Food for thought, at least for me. ...Another good reason why not to watch ESPN is that they hired Mr. Brittle himself, Mark Teixeira, to be a baseball analyst. I seriously would question how much this guy really knows about the game except for grabbing the best seat on the bench during one of his long disabled list stints. ...I'm wondering when Greg Bird finally gets back on the field next year that he's going to have to break in his glove again? ...I had to laugh when I was listening to what some people had to say when it was announced that Derek Jeter was interested in buying the Miami Marlins. Because it was Jeter they all assumed that he would be a great owner because, well you know, he's Jeter. Jokin' Joe Torre said that Jeter would do a fantastic job because of how he conducts himself. Torre's been kissing his behind for over twenty years now so what else was he going to say? But Joe you're talking about how he handled himself on the field and with the press all these years. How do you know how well he will do as an owner? Will he open up his checkbook like Magic Johnson did in Los Angeles or do the opposite? Don Mattingly was happy about it too when he said he would look forward to working with him in Miami. Let's see if he says that if Jeter ends up firing him one day. The MLB Network experts also backed Jeter 100%. Why not? You don't want to get him mad just in case you need to interview him about something in the future. Based on what you read from one day to the next all these praises may not mean anything or they may mean everything because one day he has the money to buy the team and the next he may not have enough. What a shame. It doesn't matter to me if he buys the Marlins or not. I just wanted to hear someone come out and say that they really could have cared less if he bought them. But that was too much to wish for. ...Angel Hernandez is suing Major League Baseball on accusations of racial discrimination because baseball has promoted only one minority umpire as crew chief in the history of the game (newsflash: it wasn't him) and is also complaining that only one non-white umpire has worked a World Series since 2011. Despite his lawsuit Hernandez was still picked to work last week's All-Star game in Miami. If it wasn't for colleagues such as Laz Diaz and C.B. Bucknor this guy would be the worst umpire in the major leagues. With these two around they give him a run for his money. If there is one lawsuit that baseball should not break a sweat about it's this one. Umpires work the World Series games on merit. Only the best of the best get to be on the field when the game's champion is decided and that's why Hernandez is home every year when the series starts. ...When I first heard that Pablo Sandoval was designated for assignment by the Red Sox I immediately guessed (incorrectly I should add) that there were two big winners after this happened. First of course is Sandoval. No matter what he's getting paid 48 million dollars to watch Netflix and Hulu. With all that money he can eat half of Southern California. I originally thought the Giants were the other winners in this because they were the team the got rid of him three years ago and they weren't the ones to sign him to that huge contract. But for reasons that made sense only to them, they resigned Sandoval to a minor league contract and assigned him to Triple-A Sacramento. The Giants are having a terrible year and if there is one team that you should consider to be sellers before the trade deadline it's these guys. They have no where to go except to go home when the season wraps. Signing Sandoval is basically a no-risk move. If he helps, great. If not, thanks for trying. ...What worries me most about Michael Pineda's injury really has nothing to do with Pineda himself. Addition by subtraction as Branch Rickey used to say. In other words getting rid of someone like the Yankees are forced to do with Pineda's upcoming Tommy John surgery will end up making the team better and there is nothing better than getting rid of an inconsistent pitcher. At the same time I am hoping that the Yankees don't trade one of their good young players for a pitcher just to make the playoffs this year. I'm all for keeping these young guys and building for the future. That's why I was happy when Jose Quintana was snatched up by the Cubs. The Yankees probably could have had him but they would've had to overpay. If they don't make the playoffs this year that's fine. Next year is fine by me. I won't feel better until the trading deadline is done. Not with this team. ...Katherine Dettwyler, the University of Delaware professor that was fired for her controversial comments on Otto Warmbier was not entirely wrong. As it happens so often people concentrated on one thing that she said and ignored everything else. Dettwyler started out calling Warmbier a "spoiled, white, rich, clueless American college student." Talk about hitting a bull's-eye. She was right on every count. Warmbier was traveling in China when he decided to go to nearby North Korea for a backpacking tour. That made as much sense as an American walking around Syria waving the Stars and Stripes around because if your name isn't Dennis Rodman you're not going to be welcome there. Warmbier and his friends celebrated the New Year with a drink or two or a lot more than that and they continued drinking when they returned to their hotel later that evening. Sometime during the night Warmbier, armed with courage provided by Mr. Jack Daniels, tried to steal a state propaganda poster. Touching or even looking at posters like that is considered a serious crime in North Korea and the next day when Warmbier was scheduled to leave with his group he was detained and in a trial that Perry Mason or Clarence Darrow had no chance of winning, was sentenced to fifteen years hard labor. Warmbier only served eighteen months of his fifteen-year stint because he was returned to the U.S. last month after suffering a severe neurological injury and he died six days after he returned home. The comment that got this college professor in trouble was when she went on to say that he got "exactly what he deserved." That's when the pitchforks were taken out and the complaints started piling in. As stupid as this guy was I won't go as far to say he deserved to die at such a young age (he was only twenty-two.) Everything else this woman said I agree with. The guy was an idiot to willingly go into that country. He had to have heard of Kenneth Bae and what he went through for over two years. But he still went. I'm sorry the guy died but he put himself in the position to get in trouble. When they have the Running of the Bulls each year people get the hell out of the way when they see one coming at them. What Warmbier did was stand out in front of one and let himself get run over. ...When I take everything in account, I consider myself a pretty lucky person although not lucky enough to win big in the lottery. I usually get good parking spaces when I go to stores, I have a great family and there isn't really anything that I really need to have. So I'm pretty content. Despite all this I seem to be a magnet every time bratty kids are around. Take last Monday for example. It was a beautiful morning and I went to have breakfast with a cousin of mine who is getting married next month. We were there for about twenty minutes catching up with each other when a mother and her two kids and what looked like the grandmother came into the restaurant. The little boy who was with them ran ahead of them and was jumping up and down and making enough noise that for just a second I thought the entire place was going to get up and pay their bill at once just to get out of there. I turned to my cousin and told her that I guaranteed her that these people will be sitting at the table next to us. Sure enough that's what happened and for the next five minutes she laughed so much that she couldn't even drink her coffee. Then my luck was with me once again because the mother calmed down the little demon. I don't know how she did it but he sat down and pouted for a bit until his chocolate milk came and he shut up for good. I don't have kids of my own and I have always been told if I had one I'd have a different outlook but when I see kids like that it makes me want to run in the opposite direction.