How far shall our local baseball teams carry us?

Mike Lupica has nothing to say about it:

"And now we wait to see what kind of run the Mets and the Yankees will give us. Football training camps are still a month away. It is baseball that carries us now.

The question is this: How far?"

That's always the question.

Before I read the rest of the article, I can guarantee that Mike Lupica does not provide an answer.

"Maybe the Yankees are set to mash again, as baseballs spin less than they were spinning even a month ago, and balls are starting to fly out of the park again. But they didn’t get a home run at Fenway on this night. And they were all righty hitters in the ninth with the game on the line against the Red Sox righty closer, Barnes."

Maybe lots of things, I guess.

"Of course the summer is still full of possibilities. We still have Jacob deGrom, if he can stay healthy. We have Gerrit Cole, if he can figure out how to pitch without being Spider (Tack) Man, or whatever it was he was using. The hope, still, is that the best part of our baseball season is just beginning, in the baseball boroughs of Queens and the Bronx."

 

Very insightful.

"Seriously: I want anybody who watched Gerrit Cole’s last start to tell me they think he’s the same guy we saw before all the hooptedoodle about a new kind of juicing with the baseballs."

 

Everybody agrees with you.

 

Cole was using Spider Tack and it's why he was dominant over the past, say, 2 1/2 seasons. He cashed in and now the Yankees have a long-term contract with a pitcher who will be almost certainly be slightly less dominant.

It's the same old story: Cheating works and GMs who sign players to long-term contracts ought to be aware of the smoke and mirrors.

 

With the crackdown (aka "hooptedoodle," apparently), Cole's ERA will go up, and hopefully the tradeoff for the 2021 Yankees will be an extra two runs per game for their horrific offense.