I thought this season would be different. I really did. Then again, I have thought the last three seasons would be different, and they haven’t been. Once again, these Yankees weren’t good enough to win in the postseason, and I’m not sure they will ever be ready to.

Most people think I’m negative or pessimistic when it comes to the Yankees. I try to tell those people I’m a realist. I’m optimistic when I need to be and pessmistic when I need to be. I write and speak facts about the Yankees and give my opinion on those facts. Most Yankees fans don’t want to read or listen to facts about their favorite team if they don’t toe the party line that the front office and manager have created. To believe every decision Brian Cashman and his team make is the right one and to think every move Aaron Boone makes is the best one, and to trust that neither can do no wrong takes a special kind of idiot. The Yankees have won one championship in the last 20 seasons and haven’t even appeared in the World Series in a decade.

***

When Cashman finally decided to pull the plug on Sonny Gray as a Yankee because Cashman’s pitching department couldn’t tap into the pitcher who David Ortiz referred to in 2015 as “the toughest guy I’ve faced in the last few seasons,” Cashman said the following: “I don’t feel like we can go through the same exercise and expect different results.”

Rather than try to continue what Cashman thought was attempting to jam a square peg into a round hole, Cashman decided to move Gray, who has pitched a 3.07 ERA with 277 strikeouts in 231 1/3 innings since being traded. Cashman traded a former (and now current) front-end starter for a single prospect in Shed Long. He then flipped Long to the Marieners for Josh Stowers. Stowers struck out 123 times in 105 games in Single-A for the Yankees.

The point isn’t that Cashman wrongfully gave up on a guy who still clearly had No. 1 stuff (and got absolutely nothing in return) because his pitching department wasn’t good enough to figure him out, the point is that Cashman got rid of Gray because he didn’t think it would work. A point he has yet to admit with the current Yankees roster he has constructed.

Each time Cashman has had a chance to put the Yankees over the top in the last four seasons, he has failed to do so and ownership has failed to allow him to do so. The Yankees could have had Justin Verlander at the August 2017 deadline, but they didn’t want to take on his salary. So he went to the Astros and single-handedly swung the ALCS with wins in Games 2 and 6.

The 2017 Yankees came within one win of the World Series after not trading for Verlander, and then they decided to cut payroll by $50 million for 2018. The Red Sox and Dodgers greatly outspent them that season, and guess which two teams met in the 2018 World Series?

Cashman tried to bolster the team’s staff for 2019 by trading top pitching prospect Justus Sheffield for the oft-injured James Paxton, who had never thrown more than 160 1/3 innings in a season in his career, a career which had been and still is one long injured-list stint with some innings in between rather than the other way around. In two seasons with the Yankees, Paxton was bad then hurt then good then hurt then bad then hurt again. The 24-year-old, left-handed Sheffield didn’t miss a start for the 2020 Mariners, pitched to a 3.58 ERA and allowed only two home runs in 55 1/3 innings. The Yankees could have used that arm this past week.

For 2020, the Yankees finally had starting pitching depth. Cashman and the Yankees created a rotation of Gerrit Cole, Luis Severino, Paxton, Masahiro Tanaka and J.A. Happ with Jordan Montgomery as insurance. But that was in February and before Severino needed Tommy John surgery and before Paxton underwent back surgery. The Yankees’ inability to properly diagnose Severino’s elbow injury from the previous October and Paxton’s back injury from the previous September had altered their 2020 plans. The Yankees had four months from the time the 2020 season was shut down until it finally started to add to their rotation, and they didn’t. When Tommy Kahnle went down in the first weekend of the shortened season, the Yankees decided not to add to their bullpen. The trade deadline came and went and the Yankees willingly decided to take their chances with a makeshift rotation, the kind of makeshift rotation they always seem have to by the time October rolls around, and three trustworthy bullpen arms.

In February, the Yankees had the best rotation, lineup and bullpen in baseball. But as injuries piled up for the second straight season despite Cashman and the front office’s investigation into the flaws of their training and medical staff from the previous year when they set the all-time record for most players placed on the injured list in a single season, the Yankees didn’t make a single move. Well, they made one move. They gave Deivi Garcia a chance to crack the rotation, and when he proved capable of doing so at age 21, they decided to use him as a one-inning opener in the postseason, giving the majority of the ALDS Game 2 innings to J.A. Happ who spent the 2020 season underperforming like he had in 2019 and openly complaining about his 2021 option through the media. The Yankees need starting pitching for 2021. When Severino returns, he will have made three regular-season and two postseason starts since October 2018. Paxton, Tanaka and Happ are all free agents.

Right now, the Yankees’ 2020 rotation is Cole, Montgomery, Garcia and Clarke Schmidt. Montgomery was used in this ALDS because the Yankees ran out of options. Garcia has made six career starts and was inexplicably not used as a starter this postseason. Schmidt has made one career start. I guess the other rotation spot would go to noted scumbag Domingo German, who it’s now impossible to root for, the same way it’s impossible to feel anything other than awful to need to also root for noted scumbag Aroldis Chapman to close out games for the Yankees. Unfortuantely for Hal Steinbrenner, I haven’t forgotten that either is a scumbag, the way he hoped Yankees fans would when he allowed the Yankees to trade for Chapman and then gave him a five-year deal and said, “Look, he admitted he messed up. He paid the penalty. Sooner or later, we forget, right?” I haven’t forgotten, and I certaintly didn’t forget when for the second straight season the highest-paid reliever of all time gave up a home run to end the Yankees’ season.

There’s a good chance a year from now I will be writing similar words after the Yankees’ lineup beats up on back-end starters and atrocious bullpens all regular season long only to perform its annual disappearing act against front-end starters and elite relievers come October. The Yankees built a lineup full of right-handed power hitters who are exceptionally prone to the strikeout. They have no left-handed balance, making it extremely easy for a team like the Rays to trot out right-handed relievers of varying ability to shut them down. The only true contact hitter and unshiftable presence in the Yankees’ lineup is DJ LeMahieu, and he’s now a free agent, and who knows what the Yankees will do when it comes to their league-leading payroll after the pandemic-shortened season. The Hal Steinbrenner Yankees have tried to save a penny any chance they have had, and lost 2020 revenue from the pandemic and 2021 season revenue which is impossible to project is the perfect excuse for ownership to stand pat again and pretend they’re suddenly poor.

Cashman has done a lot of great things as Yankees general manager. The Yankees have won four championships in his 23 seasons with the job title. He got ownership to buy in to a rebuild at the 2016 deadline and 14 months later the Yankees were in the ALCS. He has done amazing things recently via trade like turning Chasen Shreve and Giovanny Gallegos into Luke Voit and John Ryan Murphy into Aaron Hicks. He was able to acquire Giancarlo Stanton for Starlin Castro and got the Marlins to take on part of Stanton’s contract to boot. He purchased Gio Urshela’s contract from the Blue Jays for nothing and he signed international free agents in Tanaka, Luis Severino and Gary Sanchez. Cashman isn’t the problem, and isn’t even a problem. Yes, he had to ulitimately sign off on the foolish Game 2 pitching strategy, created by someone he hired and employs, but even so, Cashman has done far more good than bad as Yankees general manger, especially of late. With the exception of one thing.

***

I often think about how much better my life would be if Tim Wakefield had struck out Boone. I definitely wouldn’t be sitting here right now waiting for a tweet to show up on my Twitter feed reading, “Source: Yankees not expected to offer Aaron Boone a new contract.” Without that home run and that moment, there’s no way the Yankees name some random third baseman they traded for at the 2003 trade deadline as their manager after moving on from Joe Girardi. There’s no way they hand over the keys to a team in a championship window to someone with no coaching experience, let alone managerial experience.

I don’t know how Cashman or the front office could have watched these seven Yankees postseason games and still believe Boone is the right man to continue to manage this team. Whether or not Boone creates the lineup or fills out the lineup card or determines scheduled days off for players in the regular season doesn’t matter. Neither does his ability to communicate with the players or the media. The goal is to win baseball games and that’s done on the field, not from playing cards on the plane on a West Coast trip or being candid with reporters before each game. Boone’s in-game management is ultimately what matters and what wins games, and in turn championships, and he’s horrible at it.

Boone was extremely bad in the 2018 regular season, his first as a manager at any level of baseball. That season was made worse when his ALDS Game 3 starter didn’t know what time the game started, and when his ALDS Game 3 bullpen management altered the series. After defending his unfathomable decision to let Luis Severino pitch a third inning in that Game 3 and allow him to load the bases with no outs before going to the bullpen and then going to Lance Lynn rather than any one of the four strikeout specialists the Yankees had in their bullpen, Boone followed it up with a Game 4 for the ages. He let CC Sabathia face the entire Red Sox’ lineup a second time because he claimed he liked the matchup of Sabathia against the Red Sox’ No. 9 hitter Jackie Bradley. That’s right, Boone let Sabathia face the first eight Red Sox hitters in their lineup to get to a favorable matchup with the 9-hitter, a hitter so bad he’s only in the majors because of his glove, and a hitter so bad anyone in the Yankees’ bullpen could get out and likely a few position players could get out as well. The Yankees’ season ended without Rookie of the Year runner-up Miguel Andujar having a chance to swing the bat in the Yankees’ final game.

Boone was able to navigate the Yankees to 103 wins in 2019 despite leading the league in injuries. He was given the credit for the Yankees’ replacement players’ success rather than the actual players themselves. (Oddly enough, when those same players didn’t perform in 2020, Boone didn’t get any of the blame for replacement players playing like replacement players.) Boone opened the 2019 postseason with Brett Gardner as his No. 3 hitter. Yes, that happened. Eventually, Boone realized Gleyber Torres should bat third and the Yankees’ young star single-handedly beat the Astros in the first game of the ALCS. But as the ALCS went on, Boone let J.A. Happ, a starter by trade in his career, lose Game 2 on a walk-off home run, and then decided the Yankees would be better suited to have Gardner back in the 3-hole, while Torres continued to be the only hitter other than DJ LeMahieu to hit in the series. The Yankees’ offense was so putrid in the 2019 ALCS that it didn’t allow Boone to really get his hands on any of the games the way he would have liked.

Boone’s in-game managing flaws reared their ugly head once again in this postseason. He single-handedly tried to lose Game 2 to the Indians and force a winner-take-all Game 3, and then against Tampa, his bullpen and pinch-hitting moves were comically bad. Boone knows the substantial amount of priase Kevin Cash gets for the job he does with a household-name less roster and a team with a total payroll equaling the salaries of the Yankees’ two top starting pitchers, and he desperately craves that praise and admiration. It’s why he tries to get his hands on any game as early as he can as often as he can. It’s why he does first-guessed, nonsensical things like pitching Jonathan Loaisiga in high-leverage situations, using Adam Ottavino with a one-run deficit, but Chad Green with a three-run deficit, or using Mike Ford as a pinch hitter with the season on the line instead of Clint Frazier or Sanchez and then citing an ability to get on base for using Ford even though Ford posted a .226. on-base percentage this season and wasn’t good enough to be a Yankee in September. Boone has spoken about how the Yankees as an organization don’t believe in “hot” or “being hot” or “hot streaks” and then he and the organization decide to start Gardner over Frazier when the postseason begins. And then after starting Frazier against Tyler Glasnow in Game 2 of the ALDS because of Frazier’s ability to catch up to Glasnow’s triple-digit velocity, it’s Gardner who starts against Glasnow in Game 5 despite being unable to catch up to that kind of heat, because Gardner had a good Game 4 against lesser pitching. Boone’s entire job as manager is to put his players in the best possible position to succeed and he rarely accomplishes that.

After the Game 5 loss, the Yankees tried to say all the right things as the Rays were busy celebrating on the Petco Park field using Frank Sinatra and “New York, New York” as their victory song, serving as the second team in three seasons to beat the Yankees and then use the Yankee Stadium victory anthem to rub their face in it, a right they earned by winning.

“(Aaron Boone) told us he was proud of us for continuing to battle down to the last out, and to continue to keep working,” Aaron Judge said. “There’s a lot of work that still needs to be done with this team, with each individual. Just continue to work and don’t forget that feeling.”

Boone is proud of his team for their third straight early postseason exit and second ALDS exit with him at the helm. Boone being proud of this group perfectly sums up his friend-first, manager-second, relaxed Southern California personality that has made the Yankees feel comfortable with losing since he took over. Go back and look up the postgame comments following any Yankees loss in an important game from this season or any of the two prior and you will find a quote (I have written about most of them) in which a Yankees player or pitcher talks about how they will just have come back and be better tomorrow. These Yankees believe there is always a tomorrow because their manager preaches about “tomorrow” to the media and all too often manages as if there’s always a tomorrow.

There shouldn’t be “a lot of work that still needs to done” when a team is in a championship window. You get inside a championship window by not having a lot of work to do. You’re in a championship window because you’re ready to win a championship. The Blue Jays? They have a lot of work to do. The White Sox? Same. The Yankees with their highest payroll in baseball? There shouldn’t be any work left to be done.

“In what’s been a real year of peaks and valleys for us on the field,” Boone said, “I feel like in a lot of ways we’re playing our best baseball right now,” Boone said after the season-ending loss.”

It’s ironic that on a night the Yankees’ season ended, Boone thought his team played their best baseball. Yes, he thinks their best baseball is losing three out of the last four games of the ALDS, the same way the Yankees lost four of the last five games of the 2019 ALCS, and the same way they lost the last two games of the 2018 ALDS by getting run out of their own building in embarrassing fashion. Boone thinks the Yankees’ best baseball is being eliminated in the ALDS. He’s not wrong, as a five-game series loss to the Rays is as good as it gets for the 2020 Yankees, who went 4-11 against the Rays, who were the much better and more complete team all season.

Yes, the Yankees lost to a really good team, and one that can win the organization’s first championship. But the Yankees could have won the series. After taking a 1-0 series lead, they had the advantage, and after winning Game 4, they had the advantage. They wasted both advantages.

“We lost to a really good team,” Boone said. “We’re going to get there. I know it. And it’s going to make it all the sweeter.”

The last three postseason debacles won’t make winning a championship anymore sweeter if these Yankees ever do win a championship. It will only make it more frustrating that they wasted so many opportunities along the way. Boone can’t speak to what it takes to win in October because he doesn’t know what it takes to win in October because he has never won in October. Not as a player and certainly not as a manger. The only 2020 Yankee to have ever won anything was Gardner and he hasn’t won anything in a long time.

I’m not sure if these Yankees will ever get past their postseason problems. I’m not sure if they will ever not hold their annual offensive October disappearing act or if they will ever have enough starting pitching to navigate the month-long tournament.

It would be a lot sweeter if Boone weren’t the manager for 2021 and beyond because then at least the front office will finally have done something Boone never has as Yankees manager: put the team in the best possible position to succeed.

***

Subscribe to the Keefe To The City Podcast. New episodes after every game throughout the season.

***

My book The Next Yankees Era: My Transition from the Core Four to the Baby Bombers is now available as an ebook!

I couldn’t envision how the Yankees could possibly win Game 4. They were opting to start Jordan Montgomery, the starting pitcher they view to be the weakest of their five in an elimination game, five weeks after he couldn’t make it out of the first inning against the same Rays at Yankee Stadium. Their right-handed heavy lineup was going to see the Rays’ bullpen for nine innings, a group they have failed to hit against in 13 games in 2020. And the Yankees were going to have to piece together at least 15 outs from a bullpen that has two truly trustworthy relievers and a third who has fallen off of late.

I expected the Yankees to lose. Like I wrote after Game 3, they would need a miracle to save their season and get to a Gerrit Cole start in Game 5 on Friday. And a miracle is what they got.

***

Here is what I wrote in my Game 3 Thoughts:

I hope the offense we saw in the first three postseason games returns and Montgomery is good enough to give the Yankees length and Zack Britton and Aroldis Chapman can close it out. That’s asking for a lot. It’s asking for a miracle. But that’s what the Yankees will need to win this series and avoid wasting another season in their championship window: a miracle.

It was asking for a lot, but it all got answered.

Montgomery pitched four innings of one-run ball in Game 4, working in and out of trouble right from the first batter of the game when Yandy Diaz opened the night with a leadoff single. He put six runners on his outing, but limited the damage the way he has when he has been at his best in his young career.

The offense returned to score five runs in the game and the all-important first run of the game. Leading 2-1 in the sixth, the Yankees did what they did in the ninth inning of Game 1 of the series and something they failed to do all regular season: tack on runs. Gleyber Torres hit a two-run home run to increase the Yankees’ lead to 4-1, and in the eighth inning, Torres stole second with two outs and scored on a single to make it 5-1.

Zack Britton and Aroldis Chapman did close it out. First, it was Chad Green in relief of Montgomery, and Green redeemed himself from his disastrous second inning of work the night before by pitching a perfect fifth and sixth. Then it was Britton who retired all four batters he faced, striking out three to get the Yankees within four outs of a win. Finally, Chapman came in for his first appearance of the series and slammed the door on the Rays and any hope they had of wrapping the series up in four games.

***

Luke Voit decided to join the Yankees in the ALDS as the regular-season MVP candidate hit his first career postseason home run to give the Yankees an early 1-0 lead. I was waiting for Voit, Torres and Aaron Judge to join DJ LeMahieu, Giancarlo Stanton and Aaron Hicks as part of the offense in this series and Voit and Torres did. I’m still waiting on Judge.

After the Game 3 loss, Judge said, “Win or gome. Those are the games I like to play in. That’s what you live for as an athlete. We knew it wasn’t going to be easy.”

It was a weird thing for Judge to say considering he entered Thursday 7-for-35 with 17 strikeouts and a .300 on-base percentage in nine career elimination games. (The Yankees have obviously been eliminated at some point in his three postseasons with the team.) In Game 4, Judge continued his elimination game slump with an 0-for-4 performance, though he did draw a walk. Judge struck out in his first plate appearance, rolled over a ground ball to third on a 2-0 pitch in his second, walked in his third, popped out to the catcher in his fourth and reached on an error in his fifth.

The Yankees need Judge at some point this postseason to put together some consistency. The two-run home run off Shane Bieber in Game 1 of the Wild Card Series and the solo home run off Blake Snell in Game 1 of this series aren’t going to hold up forever. That has sort of been Judge’s history in now four postseasons: starting off with a bang and then fading as October goes on. The Yankees need Judge if they’re going to go to where they want to get to. They might be able to win the final game of the ALDS without him providing any production, but it’s hard to imagine they can win another two series with him hitting like this.

***

Aaron Boone had to make four decisions in the game, and they were all rather easy decisions that anyone could have made, but he still had to make them, and they all worked out. So since I’m in a great mood following the season-saving win and ecstatic that my nights aren’t going to be booked with TV Land re-runs of Everybody Loves Raymond and King of Queens for the foreseeable future until baseball is played in 2021 (whenever that might be), I will give Boone some credit. The first of those moves was going to Green for the fith. The second was staying with Green for the sixth. The third was going to Britton for the seventh. The fourth was going to Chapman with two outs in the eighth. Everything Boone did worked out. (I can’t believe I just wrote that, let alone in the postseason. It really has been a miracle night.)

For a day, Boone is safe from my criticism (until the Game 5 lineup is announced, so not even a full day). I think he’s safe in his position no matter what happens in this series or this postseason after Cashman recently said he hopes Boone has a 10-year run as Yankees manager, considering Cashman is the one who decides if Boone is the Yankees’ manager. The best thing that can happen on Friday night in Game 5 is that Cole and the Yankees’ offense keep Boone in the dugout and away from the game. That’s the game plan every night: don’t let Boone have a say in the outcome of the game.

***

I didn’t expect the Yankees to win Game 4, but I do expect them to win Game 5. Winning Game 4 was the hard part. Now they have the advantage in Game 5.

The Yankees have the Rays exactly where they want them. OK, maybe not exactly where they want them since I’m sure they would rather have Cole on four days rest instead of three, but they will have their No. 1 starter going with a chance to advance to the ALCS for a rematch against the hated Astros. The Rays can’t feel good about their chances after losing Game 4 in which they had a definitive advantage.

A year ago Saturday, Cole pitched against the Rays in the same situation: Game 5 of the ALDS. Cole’s Astros had blown a 2-0 series lead with back-to-back losses in Tampa, and the best pitcher in baseball in 2019 would take the ball with a chance to advance his team to the ALCS. His line from that game:

8 IP, 2 H, 1 R, 1 ER, 2 BB, 10 K, 1 HR.

Can he please do that again in Game 5 on Friday?

***

I do have to temper my expectations though. I remember walking out of the Stadium in 2005 after the Yankees’ comeback win in Game 4 to save their season in the ALDS against the Angels only to lose Game 5 the following night in Anaheim. I remember thinking they would win it all after routing the Tigers in Detroit in Game 4 of the 2011 ALDS in a game started by A.J. Burnett, only to lose because of an inability to hit with runners in scoring position in Game 5 two nights later. The Yankees have the advantage, but nothing is guaranteed, even with Cole pitching. (Though that’s about as close to a guarantee as you can get.)

There is officially at least one more day of Yankees baseball this season. With Cole on the mound in Game 5 on Friday, there should be at least another four days of Yankees baseball next week.

Four down, nine to go.

***

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***

My book The Next Yankees Era: My Transition from the Core Four to the Baby Bombers is now available as an ebook!

I couldn’t watch anymore. I just couldn’t. After Chad Green gave up a two-run home to Michael Perez to put the Yankees down by five runs in Game 3, I knew the game was over. In all honesty, I knew it was over well before that home run.

I knew Game 3 was over when home plate umpire Mark Carlson single-handedly changed the game by calling two should-have-been ball 4s on Luke Voit as strikes 1 and 2 to prevent the Yankees from taking a 2-1 lead. Minutes later, Carlson missed a blatant strike 3 call on Willy Adames, which would have resulted in a strike-him-out, throw-him-out double play. Instead, it gave the Rays runners on first and second with no outs and then Kevin Kiermaier, my most hated Ray, took Masahiro Tanaka deep for a three-run home run to give the Rays a three-run lead. Carlson’s inability to properly identifty balls and strikes changed the game a night after Game 2s home plate umpire CB Bucknor had the worst postseason performance since Robinson Cano’s 2012 ALCS.

Bucknor and Carlson certainly didn’t help the Yankees the last two nights, but ultimately they only served as feul on the fire that is the Yankees’ season going down in flames. The high of the Yankees’ Game 1 win has been replaced by the lowest of lows after back-to-back losses have put them on the brink of elimination. They will now need to win two straight games against a team they haven’t won two straight against all season, a team they are 3-10 against in 2020.

***

Game 2 exposed the Yankees’ inability as an organization to come up with an intelligent and logical postseason pitching plan after they failed to replace Luis Severino, who the Yankees have known since February would miss the season, or James Paxton, who underwent back surgery before the first edition of spring training in 2020 and whose career has essentially been one long injured-list stint with some pitching in between. The Yankees decided that burning Deivi Garcia for the series, their third-best starter, for a one-inning outing, and allowing J.A. Happ, the team’s worst or second-worst starter to pitch the most in Game 2 would put the team in the best possible position to succeed. The offense scored five runs in Game 2, four off of Tyler Glasnow, and still lost because of their idiotic opener plan and another unfathomable night of bullpen management from Aaron Boone who continues to prove he has no business being a major league manager.

In Game 2, trailing 5-4 with a more-than-rested bullpen Boone decided to stick with Happ. Then he went to Adam Ottavino, who he didn’t trust in a close game last week, and then he went to Jonathan Loaisiga, who has done nothing to prove he belongs in high-leverage situations. The combination extended the Rays’ lead from 5-4 to 7-4, and put the game out of reach.

The following night in Game 3, trailing 4-1, Boone went to Chad Green, the team’s third-best reliever. He was willing to go to Green down three runs in Game 3, but not down by one run in Game 2. It was the latest decision from Boone to make absolutely no sense in what has become a never-ending list of decisions to make absolutely no sense since he became Yankees manager. He doubled down on this decision by keeping Green in the game for a second inning, which any Yankees fan can tell you isn’t wise, and two batters later, Green gave up the home run to Perez which forced me to turn the game off.

***

If Wednesday’s start was Masahiro Tanaka’s last as a Yankee, it wasn’t a good one. It was every bit as bad as his start in Game 2 against the Indians last week. No, Carlson didn’t help him out, but he did receive help from Aaron Judge who saved a run-scoring, extra-base hit with an amazing catch. I expected Tanaka to be good, and he wasn’t. He was awful.

The Yankees have the highest payroll in the majors and somehow once again don’t have a postseason rotation. They have Gerrit Cole then a pitcher who has a four-inning leash (Tanaka), a pitcher they think is best used as an opener (Garcia), a pitcher who they should have cut ties with a long time ago (Happ) and a pitcher they don’t trust (Jordan Montgomery). The Yankees clearly view Montgomery as their weakest starting pitching option since they have yet to use him in five postseason games. But on Thursday night in Game 4, with their season on the line, they will give the ball to the pitcher they consider their weakest option.

Even if Tanaka had been great and Boone didn’t let Green throw a second inning, it’s likely the Yankees still would have lost. Since Giancarlo Stanton’s home run in the fourth inning of Game 2, the Yankees have scored five runs over 14 innings, as the offense is once again performing their annual October disappearing act, led by Aaron Judge, Luke Voit and Gleyber Torres.

***

There’s a reason the Rays are the No. 1 seed in the American League playoffs. They were the best team in the regular season and that has carried over into the postseason. They easily dispatched the Blue Jays in two games last week and have easily rolled over the Yankees the last two nights. They are a much better team than the Yankees at a fraction of the cost. They have the best 1-2-3 rotation in the league with Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow and Charlie Morton to go along with the deepest bullpen in the league. They have a lineup full of pesky hitters, well balanced with righties and lefties, who make enough contact to avoid rally-destroying innings like the Yankees have, and who have enough power to ruin games like they did on Wednesday night.

If you were to construct a team to beat the Yankees, you would use the Rays’ exact roster. The Rays were built to win a championship, and in order to do so, they would have to be built to beat and get by the Yankees, and they are perfectly built to do so.

***

I don’t expect the Yankees to win Game 4 on Thursday night. If they do win, I expect them to win Game 5 with Gerrit Cole pitching, but I just don’t see how they get there. I don’t see how Montgomery is able to navigate his way even one time through the Rays’ lineup, and even if he were able to provide three or four great innings, how are the Yankees getting 18 or 15 outs to save their season? They have two relievers who are capable of getting big outs and at most, those two relievers could give the team 12 outs, and I’m sure that’s two or three outs more than the Yankees would feel comfortable with asking them to get.

Even if you forget about Montgomery, how are the Yankees going to score runs in Game 4? The Rays are going with an opener, a term and strategy they created and revolutionized, and one the Yankees have unsuccessfully tried to use in back-to-back postseasons. That means the Rays are going to trot unhittable reliever after unhittable reliever out of the bullpen for nine innings to try to advance to the ALCS. The Yankees will have to do something they haven’t been able to do the last three nights and weren’t able to do in 10 regular-season games: hit against the Rays’ relievers.

***

Wednesday night’s Game 2 loss felt a lot like last season’s Game 4 loss to the Astros in the ALCS. Yes, the Yankees’ season is technically still alive, but it doesn’t feel like it is. Wednesday night gave me some time to let it settle in that on Thursday night there might not be Yankees baseball until next spring, and given the state of the country, and the owners’ clear mandate they won’t play a full season of baseball without fans in the stands, who knows when Yankees baseball will actually return after their 2020 season ends?

I hope I’m wrong. I really hope I am. I hope the offense we saw in the first three postseason games returns and Montgomery is good enough to give the Yankees length and Zack Britton and Aroldis Chapman can close it out. That’s asking for a lot. It’s asking for a miracle. But that’s what the Yankees will need to win this series and avoid wasting another season in their championship window: a miracle.

***

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***

My book The Next Yankees Era: My Transition from the Core Four to the Baby Bombers is now available as an ebook!

I was all for Deivi Garcia starting Game 2 of the ALDS. Sure, it was risky, and sure, it was going against the easy logic of letting Masahiro Tanaka, one of the best postseason pitchers of all time start, but if the Yankees could pull it off and win Game 2 without using Tanaka, they would essentially have the series won. They would have Tanaka on extra rest to close out the Rays in Game 3. That plan I was OK with. What actually transpired with I wasn’t OK with. I don’t think there’s a Yankees fan out there who was OK with it.

As Garcia was battling against Austin Meadows in the top of the first, and also battling against home plate umpire CB Bucknor, who had one of the worst postseason games imaginable calling balls and strikes, J.A. Happ began to warm up in the bullpen. Garcia hadn’t even retired the first Rays batter of the game and Happ was throwing in the Yankees bullpen. I assumed it was protection for Garcia if he were to melt down like Luis Severino in the 2017 wild-card game and unable to give the Yankees anything. Then came the bottom of the second with the game tied at 1, and in came Happ.

Happ wasn’t warming up for protection, he was warming up as part of a set plan and “strategy” by the Yankees. The Yankees had gotten the Rays to build a lineup to face Garcia, inserting many left-handed hitters into it. Now with Happ in the game, the Rays would either have to start removing position players for pinch hitters to get right-left matchups or send left-handed hitters to the plate against the left-handed Happ. The Yankees had decided to try to trick the Rays rather than do what was best for their own team in the second game of a best-of-5 series. The same way the Yankees are always worried about their own lineup construction for late-game situations and scenarios that might never present themselves, the Yankees built their pitching plan for Game 2 based on how the Rays would then have to react.

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Have you ever seen a commercial so bad you can’t understand how a group of executives sat around a conference room table and came up with the idea and how many people had to sign off on it to make the bad idea actually come to fruition? That’s what happened with the Yankees in Game 2. Someone employed by the most prestigious organization in major sports said, “What if we name Garcia as our Game 2 starter, so Kevin Cash puts a lot of left-handed bats into the lineup, and then after the first inning, we go to J.A. Happ to start with a clean inning?” Then everyone including Aaron Boone, Brian Cashman, a bunch of unnamed Ivy league graduates who have tried to prove “being hot” and “hot streaks” and “clutch” don’t exist and baseball lifers who have only ever known playing and working in the game agreed on that plan to the point that it came to fruition.

In theory, you could maybe make the case it’s a sound strategy and a good idea, but in that theory, the left-hander coming out of the bullpen is Clayton Kershaw or Blake Snell or someone with actual ability. Not Happ.

I wrote and talked all season about how bad Happ is, and how untrustworthy he is. I called for the Yankees to stop giving him starts completely after his two disgraceful starts to begin the season, and I begged the Yankees to give Garcia or Clarke Schmidt the opportunity to be part of the rotation. I wrote and said all of this as Happ was struggling to get through four innings in his starts, while he was feuding with the Yankees through the media about them working around his $17 million option for 2021. Happ was miraculously able to put together a string of good starts, but those came against horrible teams who weren’t close to sniffing the playoffs in a season in which 16 of the league’s 30 teams reach the playoffs. This fooled some into thinking Happ had turned back into the pitcher the Yankees traded for at the 2018 deadline. It didn’t fool me.

I have said for weeks Happ couldn’t be a part of the postseason plan. He hasn’t been good enough to start a postseason game since the moment before he threw a pitch to J.D. Martinez in the first inning of Game 1 of the 2018 ALDS, which resulted in a three-run home run and ruined that game. Since that inning, Happ has been bad to very bad to being on the brink of being in the majors as a Yankee spanning the entire 2019 regular season, 2019 postseason and 2020 regular season, outside of a few starts when he beat the Orioles, Red Sox and Mets. And now the 2020 postseason can be added to the list as well.

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Happ relieved Garcia and my first thought was This better fucking work. The Yankees were removing a 21-year-old kid completely capable of shutting down the Rays’ lineup for four or five or even six innings to bring in a 37-year-old who was last good enough to pitch in the postseason two calendar years ago. The first batter, the left-handed Joey Wendle, singled. Three batters later the Rays had a 3-1 lead after Mike Zunino hit a home run. After Zunino, the left-handed Meadows walked. Happ was supposed to neutralize the left-handed heavy lineup the Rays had constructed to face Garcia, and he had allowed two of the four left-handed bats he had faced to reach base.

The second inning was bad, but the third inning was the nightmare I had expected with Happ pitching in the postseason. Ji-Man Choi (another left-handed bat) walked with one out, and then Manuel Margot hit a two-run home to straightaway center. The Rays now led 5-1, and Happ had allowed as many runs (four) as outs recorded. The left-handed Wendle came up next and singled off Happ for the second time in as many innings and then Willy Adames reached on an error by Happ himself.

In the top of the fourth, the Yankees closed the deficit to one run after Giancarlo Stanton hit his second home run of the game and his third in as many at-bats to make it a 5-4 game. The Yankees would have five innings and 15 outs to tie the game or take the lead, and Boone was now going to have to actually manage and not just go off the script given to him by that front office idiot who had come up with this plan. Boone’s first decision in what was now a one-run game was to stick with Happ, who put two more on base before Boone finally pulled him. Happ needed 69 pitches to get eight outs. In his 2 2/3 innings, he allowed nine baserunners, four earned runs and two home runs, walked three, hit a batter and made an error. He was even worse than I could have ever envisioned him being.

The untrustworthy duo of Adam Ottavino, who can’t throw strikes or hold runners, and Jonathan Loaisiga, who is essentially the Nicaraguan Nathan Eovaldi with his high-90s, but very straight and very hittable fastball, made sure the Yankees didn’t come back by allowing a pair of runs. And the Yankees’ offense didn’t look like they could come back anyway, setting a team record for strikeouts in a postseason game with 18. 18! Jonathan Holder (1 IP, 0 ER, 1 K) and Nick Nelson (1 IP, 0 ER, 2 K) proved to be the two best Yankees pitchers in the game.

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If you had told me yesterday at 8:09 p.m. the Yankees would score four runs off Tyler Glasnow, Stanton would hit two home runs and Glasnow would only last five innings, I would have started worrying about the Astros and an ALCS rematch. Instead, the Yankees’ best-of-5 against the Rays is now a best-of-3.

It was always going to be extremely difficult to beat the Rays in a short series because they are essentially built to beat the Yankees. They hit Gerrit Cole well, they have two hard-throwing right-handed power pitchers in Glasnow and Charlie Morton, and a never-ending stable of trustworthy right-handed relievers who match up perfectly against the right-handed heavy Yankees. The one advantage the Yankees might have had in the series was the mystery and unknown of Garcia, who the Rays had never seen before. But instead of using that mystery, the Yankees chose to let Happ give them one more parting gift on his way out the door as a now impending free agent by taking a giant dump on the Petco Park mound.

Now it’s up to Tanaka to save the Yankees’ season, the same way it was up to him when the Yankees trailed the Indians 2-0 in the 2017 ALDS and when the Yankees trailed the Red Sox 1-0 in the 2018 ALDS after Happ’s memorable start. No, the Yankees aren’t trailing in this series like they were in those two, but they need to play, pitch and mange like they are because Game 3 is a must-win game, considering the Yankees don’t have a Game 4 starter. It’s not that they don’t have a Game 4 starter because they haven’t announced one like they did with Game 2. It’s that they actually don’t have a Game 4 starter.

It’s 100 percent not Happ. It can’t possibly be Jordan Montgomery. It has to be Garcia who only threw 27 pitches on Tuesday, the only 27 pitches he has thrown in 10 days. But maybe the Yankees will try another unconventional strategy. Maybe they will give the ball to Michael King, who they inexplicably let open so many games this season, and he will go three innings and give up his mandatory quota of at least three earned runs, and then they will turn it over to Holder or Nelson or Luis Cessa.

The Yankees now have to win a best-of-3 against a team they are now 3-8 against this season in order to erase the monumentally bad Game 2 pitching decision which was first-guessed when it was made and not second-guessed after the fact. The Yankees will have forever to think about their regrettable decision to not just go the easy route and go with Tanaka or to not commit to Garcia for a real start in Game 2 if they go on to lose this series and their season ends this week and another season of their current championship window is wasted. At least they have the right pitcher going in Game 3 to make sure that doesn’t happen.

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My book The Next Yankees Era: My Transition from the Core Four to the Baby Bombers is now available as an ebook!