THE LAST STRAW?

The injury to Joba will be widely seen as finishing off the Yankees this season. But the truth is their major problems have persisted even through the post All Star game surge, which ground to a dramatic halt over the last 11 games (4-7). They are still wildly inconsistent on offense, padding their statistics in routs only to surrender games without firing a shot. They still can't seem to beat the Baltimore Orioles. And of course they still leave too many men stranded, wasting chance after chance, even when they win.

In the absence of clueless Joe, two culprits have risen to the fore, Brian Cahsman for assembling this collection of losers and AROD for being the only man in recent baseball history that one could classify as both a superstar and a loser. ut I really have to give Cashboy props for his performance at the deadline. The Nady-Marte trade was brilliant. Whatever Karstens' success in Pittsburgh, he was never going to be given another chance to fail in New York and Nady is just the sort of hitter this lineup needs. As long as Giardi restricts Marte to the lefthanded specialist role--as he failed to do on Monday--he will be an unqualified boon. The Pudge trade wasn't bad either. An improved Farnsworth still wasn't all that dependable and with Bruney back he was also quite expendable. On the other side, the bill of indictments against AROD is getting longer all the time. His 3 homers since the break have all been meaningless; he has taken to hitting into rally killing double plays--one last night and one tonight (which could have been prevented had he bothered to run hard)--and he consistently founders in the late innings unless the Yanks are comfortably ahead. I saw where one wag noted that AROD should be lifted in the seventh for offensive purposes. One at bat really summed up AROD's chokiness for me. In the last game at Fenway the Yankees were down 7-0 in the middle innings, when suddenly they mounted a threat, loading the bases with noone out. Jeter got an infield hit, driving in one run and then a clearly laboring Jon Lester walked Abreu on four pitches. AROD strode to the plate and took the fifth and sixth straight balls from Lester, whose pitch count for the inning was now over 25. The situation clearly called for AROD to take a pitch, unless he got one in his zone. Lester threw a fasball borderline high and in, not the kind of pitch AROD typically drives for his meaningless roundtrippers, but he jumps at it here and hits a soft liner to third for the first out, advancing noone. It is the business of a Mays, a Williams, an Aaron, a Mantle, all the names that AROD is mentioned alongside of, to deliver in just that sort of a situation. It is the habit of AROD to fail, miserably, which makes one wonder why he is placed in their company. They had the nerves; he just has the nervousness.

Actually, AROD has been far worse in the clutch this year than last, when he was receiving such grief from the fans. While his woes have been remarked in print, they no longer prompt outrage at the park, where the faithful seems numbed into resignation or cowed by trhe pundits into accepting empty statistics as the genuine article. Either way the decision, be it Hank's or Cashman's, to sign this guy on for ten years at price that dwarfs the GDP of small nations is the single most destructive error committed by Yankee management in their storied history. Not the stupidest, but the most destructive. The decision may well condemn the Yankees to the longest and most expensive championship drought they have ever experienced. I said AROD did them a huge favor when he opted out and he has done nothing since to prove me wrong. If only they had accepted the gift he was offering them.