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Yankees team up with Walmart. Does anybody else see the deliciousness?

Breaking Happy News: The Yankees and Walmart are hosting a Winter Wonderland, supplying toys for needy children. 

Great. Bravo. Yay.   

The Yankees and Walmart. A perfect team-up, for a worthy cause. 

The Yankees and Walmart. A marriage made from holiday spirit. It's all good! Be proud. I certainly am. Yankees and Walmart! We're doing good. Our favorite baseball team, linking up with our favorite retail outlet. 

Not sure how this will work. My guess: All good Yank fans who work or shop at Walmart will donate money, and the Yankees will co-host a big gala giveaway, and everyone will sing songs, and Santa Hal will make an appearance, and some needy kids will have a happier holiday season than would have happened otherwise, and I have absolutely no problem with this. The Yankees and Walmart. Jolly good show. 

Look, if you think I'm going to be smug or smart-alecky here, you clicked on the wrong website, kiddo. The Yankees! Walmart! Teaming up! As they should! If only K-Mart were around to see this. And who knows what the Dodgers will team up with - Amazon? Nvidia? Saudi Aramco? Doesn't matter. We're with The Wall. Bravo.  

Yankees and Walmart. Mickey Mantle and Mickey Mouse. Stanton and Santa. The Babe and The Babe!  An unstoppable duo. 

Have I mentioned the savings when shopping at Walmart? I'm sure our main elf, Brian Cashman, does, when touting trade packages. Together, the Yankees and Walmart can solve any team's need: Weedwhackers, outdoor grills, shirts, shoes, outfielders, infielders, starters, relievers, everything. At low, low prices.

Yankees and Walmart! I'm raising my glass. Merry Christmas to all! And let the shopping begin! 

The day after Baseball's Convention of Nothingness: Five takeaways

Okay, as the late Mr. Wolf would say, Let's go to the videotape! 

1. Are we being played? The Information Superhighway is ripe with trade rumors that make no sense. Supposedly, the Yankees are in on Colorado's Gold Glove CF Brenton Doyle, and I'm thinking - great, a Ryan McMahon for the outfield. WTF? They already have a logjam. Acquiring Doyle would kill their imaginary chase of Kyle Tucker and/or Cody Bellinger, as well as clobber plans for The Martian and Spencer Jones. This 4-D chess match is giving me a headache. But this we know: Pull one thread on the Yankee sweater, and the varsity letter falls off. I think they're running a massive psyops campaign. They say anything, knowing that across the Yankiverse, all that matters is pitching, pitching, pitching content, content, content.  

2. The Mets will gorge themselves at the free agent buffet. Stevie Cohen has not yet begun to spend, and I imagine him holding two large platters as he goes through the line, loading up on burnt-end cutlets (Bellinger), bang-bang shrimp (Tatsuya Imai) and the prime rib (Bo Bichette). We're going to get the mystery meat leftovers. (Michael King, Jordan Montgomery.) Food Stamps Hal is always looking to collude - remember his talks with Cohen when Aaron Judge went on the market? In today's America, corruption is not just legal, it's preferred. The Mets will spend their money, then leave the store. That's when the Yankees will enter.

3. Are the Yankees really listening to deals for Jazz Chisholm? Or is this just a way of telling players that nobody is safe? This would be a sea change, and it would open a gaping hole at 2B. Chisholm's 31 HRs - and 31 SBs - were nice last year, but he sucked in the postseason, when he tried to hit every ball to Yonkers. Also, I wonder if he can withstand another year of being pummeled at 2B? He's a tough player, and I think the Yankees like him. So, again, in these rumors, are we being played?  

4. There remains a huge void at SS, in the rotation and on the truth. A general rule of Yankee fandom is to never believe their target date for a player's return from injury. Doesn't matter who, or where, or when. If the Yankees say he'll be back in May, he'll be back in June. If so, Anthony Volpe and Carlos Rodon will miss major blocks of the regular season. Also, there's no guarantee for either. Volpe has yet to show any stardom, and they're saying that Rodon, at the end of September, could barely lift his arm, due to the chips floating in his elbow. 

5. Maybe it's wishful thinking, but I cannot shake the feeling that, when the 2027 labor strike ends - maybe in 2028? - Hal will be looking to sell. Massive changes will be coming to MLB's financial structure, and the Yankees are already descending into a mid-upper tier dingus. Meanwhile, the richest men in the world - what comes after trillionaires? - will be coveting cultural versions of penis extensions, and what better way to advertise your manhood than by hanging with celebrities in the owner box? (Something Hal does not do.) Somebody - a Musk, a Bezos, a Trump - will make Hal an insane offer, which he cannot refuse. I'm not sure whether to look forward to this, or to dread it. But the Yankees should be owned by superhuman wealth, with an ego to match. Hal has never filled that role. (Except when performing in the Broadway version of KINKY BOOTS. He was sooo liberated.)   

For $350, you can give Aaron Boone this Christmas

 He's on cameo.com, doing inspirational videos at $350 a pop.

STOP THE PRESSES, WE JUST GOT BRADLEY HANNER!

 Well, if you've been waitin' on Cashman making a big move this winter: here it is, come and get it!

Bradley Hanner (hope I got his name right). Who the hell is he? Right, I'ze thinkin' the exact same thing. Seems he's a career minor leaguer who's bounced around, last year with an ERA of almost 5, and gave up 13 HR in only 49 innings pitched. And that was down in AAA! Cleveland. 

https://www.yardbarker.com/mlb/articles/yankees_make_first_post_winter_meetings_free_agency_move/s1_16754_43191578

Hmmmm. 13 homers in 49 innings pitched. Don't that come to a homer every 4 innings? Which if he was a starter would equate to a whopping 50 homers allowed, if he pitched 200 innings.

Remember those military commercials? "Aim High" 

Seems the Yankees didn't get the message. The motto here seems to be "Aim Low" or at best, "Aim Average". Or maybe they did get it right. Because that'll be a whole lotta "it is HIGH, it is far, it is gone" ... for the other team. We got this sad sack for 800K, courtesy Food Stamps HAL & Cashman Dumpster Diving, Inc.

*P.S. Thanks very much to Stang for showin' me how to put up one of these articles on e-blogger. This is the first one I've ever put up all by me-self. Before that, I had to depend on you guys to put these things up for me. Not exactly a tech genius, me. Guess I shouldn't ever bother applying for a geek squad job at Staples! "Don't call us, we'll call you..."

At some point, the logjam will explode, exposing the shape and substance of the 2026 Yankees. We might not like what we see.

A big fat nothing...

That's what we got this week: A big, fat, humongous zilch, as we wait for... well... something.  

It's like that interstellar spaceship, 31/ATLAS. It's passing us by, heading for Ice Planet Hoth. We prepared ourselves for an all-channels "PEOPLE OF EARTH..." message from Thanos, or Dr. Manhattan, or Ming the Merciless. Somebody. Anybody. Instead, we got the FIFA Peace Prize and astronomy's version of the Epstein files - to be forever sat upon and kicked down the road, a big fat nothing. 

Bombs keep dropping, prices keep rising, bodies keep piling up, and everybody sits around, waiting for... something.

So why would the Yankees be different? Cooperstown Cashman went to the winter meetings in Orlando, kicked a few tires, maybe tried a Hogwarts Blooming Onion in the Harry Potter theme pub. He saw no free agent worth bidding on, no trade worth pulling the trigger on, and went home without even visiting the Villages, in a quest for some golf cart sex. And here we are, on the other side of what used to be winter's most defining week, having accomplished... well... a big fat nothing. 

The Orioles, Redsocks, Blue Jays and Dodgers all improved. The latter seem dangerously close to landing Skubal and making 2026 irrelevant. The Mets still sit atop the biggest pile of money aside from the one in Elon Musk's dirty conscience, and the Yankees keep waiting... 

The good news? We haven't done anything stupid. The bad news? We seem to have no agenda. We wait for somebody to break the logjam - to sign Kyle Tucker, Cody Bellinger or Tatsuya Imai. We wait for a big fish to graze and move on. We talk like the Yankees of old, but it's just muscle memory. If we were really all-in on Bellinger, as we claim to be, we could have taken him off the board with an offer. But we didn't.   

The Yankees are waiting and watching. If not for the Rule 5 draft - their first pick in 14 years, in which they selected a 25-year-old RH bullpen widget - there would have been no reason to hang around Thursday. Today, they're probably already home. 

Weird winter, thus far. Earthquake in Alaska. Flooding in Washington State. Twenty-four inches, already on the ground, in Syracuse. A long, cold one is coming. And for now, a big, fat nothing.  

Music to our ears

 “I haven’t accomplished anything,” Cashman said Wednesday.

He just lost Edwin Diaz. Will Steve Cohen take it out on the Yankees?

Yesterday, the unstoppable Dodgers - baseball's version of Covid - strengthened their stranglehold on America, signing the best closer on the market, right out from under the burst corpuscle nose of their richest competitor. 

The Mets - and zillionaire owner Stevie Cohen - were left with the door prize known as Devon Williams, whose career achievement has been to break the Yankee Beard Ban. (Note to Met fans: He's all yours!)

That leaves Cohen and his aircraft carriers full of money looking for someone to accept his cash and make him whole again. Surely, he will follow the playbook of all schoolyard bullies: Beat up the nearest wimp. 

That's us.

What better way to showcase his Hegsethian manhood than by outbidding the Yankees in some suddenly manufactured, existential auction? That could mean signing Cody Bellinger - because he can - or the Japanese starter, Tatsuya Imai, or Alex Bregman, or Dopy Dildox. Doesn't matter. The Dodgers just punked him with the Whoopie Cushion, and Cohen - in the manner of narcissists everywhere - needs to re-exert himself as NYC's Big Chief Lug Nut.  

Amid the signings of Diaz and Kyle Schwarber (by the Phillies), the Yankees yesterday did - what's the word? - Schmegma? Lymph? Bupkis? They did nothing. You could say that Cooperstown Cashman is lying in wait, preparing to pounce. You could say that the front office is fully armed, ready to charge. Hell, you could say anything. What you can't say is the Yankees have yet to reveal a strategy to improve their chances in 2026. They are waiting to see what the Mets, Dodgers, Redsocks and Blue Jays do. Then, I assume, they'll make adjustments. 

Last year, after Juan Soto went to the Mets, the Yankee reactionary strategy seemed to work. While the Mets were realizing how dreadfully they had overpaid for Soto, the Yankees quickly signed Max Fried and traded for Bellinger. In the end, the Orioles and Rays fell apart, Boston's youth movement proved to be a year away, but the Blue Jays ate our lunches. 

It's hard to imagine the Yankees improving in 2026 without at least one major addition to the pitching staff. The question now: Will they have to beat Cohen, and his newly bloodied nose? The last thing Food Stamps Hal seems to want is a bidding war. It looks as though that's what he's going to get.

This week, the Yankees could face a knockout blow

It's coming, straight at us...

I'm not talking about 3I/Atlas, the "comet" that is obviously an alien probe to phone home about whether intelligent life exists on Earth. 

I'm not talking about the KC Chiefs, who dominated pro football and pop music culture through the first half of the 2020s, and who now look old and tired.

I'm not talking about the looming recession, or Trump's gilded Walmart ballroom, or even the Golden Globes' snub of Sydney Sweeney's big punching bags in her boxing movie. 

Nope, what's coming is Big Stevie Cohen, large as a Macy's parade balloon, and his infinite checkbook. It has so intimidated Hal Steinbrenner that the Yankees already sound like also-rans in the upcoming bidding war for Tatsuya Imai.

Yes, Tatsuya Imai - the lone top Japanese free agent in this decade to NOT want to join the Dodgers. Every dime in Hal's hope chest should go into signing Imai - fortifying the pitching staff and standing up to Big Stevie. 

But here's the rub: It might not be enough. 

The Yankees painted themselves into a corner - actually, a centerfield - when they offered Trent Grisham $22 million to stay a year. Of course, he was gonna take it. As a result, to sign Cody Bellinger or Kyle Tucker will force a massive domino-drop of secondary trades, most likely involving Jasson Dominguez and/or Spencer Jones, and they still might not save the pitching staff. 

The Yankees need Imai more than Trump needs compression socks. But the problem is Cohen, the modern day Boss. Last year, he kicked poor Hal's ass in the bidding war for Juan Soto, (even if it left the Mets in tatters during the regular season.) This week, he can do it again in a straight up auction for Imai.

It's coming - that moment in the movie when Hal either stands up to the bully or accepts the Yankees' fate in the second half of the decade. 

It might happen today: Somebody signs Tucker, which leaves everyone chasing Bellinger, which causes his value to spike, which leaves the Yankees out in the cold, which makes Imai the biggest fish in the pond, which means... well... God knows what? Big Stevie's knockout punch? 

We don't know what's coming. 

What we know is that it might be really bad.

For the first time since we began counting, the Yankees could lose the Tabloid Covers Race in NY

Forty covers left, give or take. 

Too close to call.

Today, as they launch the '25 Winter Meetings, the Yankees cling to a supermodel-thin, six-page lead in the annual IT IS HIGH Tabloids Back Pages Race, the covers we have covered since 2019.

With three weeks left, it's a photo finish between the Yankees and the Knicks - the closest in IIHIIFIIc history. For the first,  time ever, another organization could dethrone the Bombers as NYC's premier sports team, in terms of free ink.

Hal Steinbrenner ought to take notice. The Winter Meetings offer a chance to sign a big free agent, clinch their seventh covers title, and secure their place atop Gotham's pecking order. But if they fail, we could be witnessing a sea change in New York - a long time coming, and maybe a long time before it returns.

Three years ago, the Yankees won with a mere 150 covers, beating the Jets by 14 pages. (That was the year of Aaron Rodgers.) Until now, 2023 loomed as the closest the Yankees have come to losing NY. 

Since 2019, when we began counting, the Yankees have never been challenged, as the way they will be this month. Even if they do hold on, their margin will be perilously thin. 

Consider the records...

2025: 176.5 (1st, Knicks 2nd at 170.6) 6 covers.
2024: 215 (1st, Mets at 160) 55 covers.
2023: 150 (1st, Jets at 136) 14 covers.
2022: 210 (1st, Mets at 147) 63 covers.
2021: 207 (1st, Mets at 156) 51 covers.
2020: 152 (1st, Mets at 132) 20 covers.
2019: 211 (1st, Mets at 190) 21 covers.

It will go down to the wire, perhaps decided by a spoiler. The awful Giants are chasing the NFL's top draft pick. St. John's basketball is 5-3 on the season. Who knows what the last three weeks will bring?

Today, the Post runs with the Knicks, while the Daily News reaches back into history to grieve over Don Mattingly's Hall of Fame snub. In another universe, that would have been a Yankee back page. But Mattingly is too far removed from his old team for them to claim him. Sad. 

So, the Winter Meetings are here. Will the Mets outgun us? Will the Knicks keep winning? Three weeks left. Forty covers. It's gonna be close. 

On Winter Meetings Eve, scattered thoughts...

1. If Toronto had won it, the 2025 world series would have gone down as the most exciting in history. It had everything - close plays, heroic blasts, a miraculous stuck fly ball, A-Rod's analysis - everything. One problem: The wrong team won. It could have been Canada, showing up Trump's ridiculous taunts. It could have been Max Scherzer, the return of Bo Bichette and Junior. Instead, it was the Dodgers, buying another championship, as we knew they would, and as they probably will in 2026. So close.

2. I've got Anthony Volpe Derangement Syndrome. It's been three lousy years, and '25 was the worst. Volpe's .212 BA ranked 24th of 24 qualifying shortstops. Worst in baseball. In OPS, he ranked 21st of 24. They say he played hurt? That doesn't exonerate him. The Yankees finished one tie-breaker game behind Toronto, and a halfway decent SS could have made the difference. I keep reading that the Yankees will seek an OF, a RH catcher and pitching. Damn, we need a decent SS, which Volpe is not. 

3. I wonder if Hal Steinbrenner is getting tired. Based on his recent interviews - whining about rent, luxury taxes and payrolls - has owning the Yankees become a drag? This is a world of impending trillionaires, and $300 million is chump change for those who will party in the solid gold ballroom. I wonder if Hal sees another year of the lost family heritage, hearing bombastic words from people like me, and secretly hopes that Elon Musk or Larry Ellison would buy this albatross. When you see Netflix buying Warner Brothers, like its a carton of cigs at a corner Mom & Pop, you have to wonder what's coming after the looming shutdown in 2027,  Could there be worse owners out there than Hal? 

4. Yes, I sound like a pathetic prospect hugger, but I hope the Yankees stick with both The Martian and Spencer Jones. Give them a shot in spring training. Play the one who performs best. The Yankees need pitching, pitching, pitching, and they can fill the ranks with free agents. The final four teams this year had one thing in common: They played youngsters. The Yankees need to see what their farm system can produce. Even if they fail, it will be fun to watch Dominguez and Jones. And who knows? 

Look Deep Into The Eyes of HAL – Managing General Partner and Grand Poobah of The New York Yankees

 

Strap in, everyone: The Winter Meetings are upon us.

Imagine a convergence of Juggalos, Trekkies, Hells Angels and Joe Pesci impersonators, squeezed into a hotel backlot like those street gangs in the movie The Warriors,  but summoned not by Cyrus - the visionary leader of the Gramercy Riffs - but by the reanimated corpse of Bud Selig, whose body has been taken over by Scott Boras.

That's baseball's Winter Meetings.  

Strap in, everyone - because throughout the years, for better or worse, this is when the Yankees reinvent themselves.

Last year, during these meetings, they signed Max Fried and traded for Cody Bellinger. The year before, they exchanged the farm system for one season of Juan Soto. 

In other Decembers, they landed Gerrit Cole, CC Sabathia, Giancarlo Stanton, Alex Verdugo, Curtis Granderson - all winter meeting babes. The list goes on, too painful to revisit. Every year, the first full week of December begets the future of the Yankees. 

This is the super-moon, the meteor shower, the impending visit from that interstellar "comet," 3I/Atlas, where an alien Bones McCoy is surely taunting Scotty, as they watch the YES Channel. 

For seven years we've suckled at the P.T. Barnum hype teat of Jasson Dominguez. By this time next week, he might be a California Angel. 

Since being drafted in 2019, Anthony Volpe has served as a Jeterian stand-in for "the future of the Yankees." By this time next week, he could be a Brewer.

Already, Internet watering holes are filling with rumors. The Yankees will enter this pageant of prudence in desperate search of pitching, pitching, pitching...

God knows what they will look like next Saturday.

Get ready, everybody. It's coming.