Hitting a hornet’s nest with a bat.

I posted this on a board recently:

Yankee fans are delusional if they see the World Series repeat in their future. Petitte and Rivera are a year older (really don’t expect more than 10 wins out of Petitte). Vazquez is not going to have an ERA under 4.00 in the AL East. The bullpen aside from Rivera is made up of the following names: Marte (era 7.27), Robertson, Aceves, Ramírez, Albaladejo and Boone Logan (era 5.19). Not names that instill confidence. Gardner hasn’t even appeared in a full season’s worth of games over the prior two years (total to date 150 major league games) and has shown no home run power. Swisher is one year removed from a .219 BA (and he only hit .249 last year). Posada your primary catcher is 38 and his backup is Francisco Cervelli. Nick Johnson winds up on the DL when someone else hiccups. And finally the bench is Jamie Hoffman, Greg Golson, Ramiro Pena, Juan Miranda (and now Randy Winn). An injury or two to a key player and this team will sink like a stone. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the Yankees finish third in the division this year.

Telling a Yankee fan their team isn’t put together well is akin to telling a priest or minister you worship Satan – that’s how extreme the response is. I stand by what I wrote though.

Ironically enough for the world of Yankee fans out there who think I single out their team an dismiss me as one of the legion of Yankee-haters (and admittedly I have my moments when I despise the ballclub from the Bronx), last year round about alte July early August I was talking to someone who I regularly talk baseball with and pointedly said to him the Yankees would go all the way.  The funny thing was the person is a devote Yankee fan, die-hard and wasn’t sure.

What struck me about the Yankees last year was the ‘team’ aspect of the group, the intangible marking championship clubs.

True. Verifiable. Begining of August, I called it.

And if you look back over the course over the half dozen or so years I’ve written the blog there have been more times I’m right on the money when it comes to baseball than I’ve been wrong (see comments regarding Johan Santana).

The Yankees this year are just not that good a team but of course, only time will tell.