The Yankees Humiliated. The….YANKEES…HUMILIATED!!!!!!

A few wrap-up notes on a gratifying outcome I, at least, didn’t foresee:

• I don’t actually agree with Rob about Torre’s apparently imminent firing. I’ll argue about this again if/when it’s official, but Torre was not so much a great manager as a manager who was perfectly situated to win in New York, and non-great managers are rarely successful for the kind of tenure Torre has had. Batting A-Rod 8th is the kind of counterproductive flailing that made him such a disaster in his pre-Yankee gigs, and he also had a terrible series in the historical collapse of 2004. I would make the change if I were Steinbrenner. Pinella has his faults, but he does a lot of things well and he’s well-suited for short-term success with a veteran team.
• For those who say that managers don’t make much difference, I give you this year’s Tigers. Think they win with Trammell still there? (This is also a good lesson in hiring people because they were beloved stars rather than because they have demonstrable talent as managers.)
• Pinella also has a good relationship with Rodriguez. Everyone seems to think he’ll be traded, but I think it’s less than clear that this will be viable. I’ve heard Yankee fans say that they’ll trade him for Cabrera, without explaining why the hell the Marlins would do that–even if the Yankees kick in some money, you think Loria is going cough up millions of dollars a year to replace a 23-year old player with a 30-year old one when the former is coming off a better year? Please. They’re not going to get anything like full value back, and no matter how bad he’s been in the post-season that’s not going to be an easy move to make.
• Another nice thing about the Yankee elimination is that the ALCS figures to be very entertaining; the A’s and Tigers are both fun to watch. More about the A’s later.

I’ll turn it over to Roy for the conclusion:

Well, children, there was once a wonderful comedian named Joe E. Brown, who made the truest statement ever about the Bronx Bombers: “Rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for U.S. Steel.”

But you don’t know who Joe E. Brown was, and you don’t know what U.S. Steel was. Brown had the greatest exit line in the greatest screen comedy ever. And U.S. Steel was a powerful monopoly; we might compare it to Microsoft today, but you probably love Microsoft, because it produces the operating system that powers your Xbox, notwithstanding that it is inferior in every way to the Apple system that Microsoft has managed to squeeze into near-obsolescence by the unfair advantage of its wealthy patronage.

So there is no way to explain my contempt for the Yankees to you. You love and worship power, and by such as yourselves — from the pinstriped and suspendered Yuppie assholes bellowing on their highly-polished barstools midtown to the locals who imagine their own powerlessness momentarily reversed by the bats of Jeter and Giambi — those who, out of fear or ignorance, would never allow themselves to stick up for anyone who has ever been down — no appeal to what was once called soul could possibly be heard.

But to those of us who love what is best in this city…the Yankees will always be the well-fed champions of privilege, pusillanimity, pussification, and everything that anyone with a shred of soul — who is still, in a word, human — is duty-bound to despise.

Indeed.